The Eighth

The Eighth PDF Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674096X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This “thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8 . . . makes a strong case for its quality . . . we shall never listen to it in the same way again” (Guardian, UK). On September 12, 1910, Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony had its world premiere at Munich’s new Musik Festhalle. It was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. An array of royals and stars from the musical and literary world were in attendance, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships. Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.

The Eighth

The Eighth PDF Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674096X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book

Book Description
This “thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8 . . . makes a strong case for its quality . . . we shall never listen to it in the same way again” (Guardian, UK). On September 12, 1910, Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony had its world premiere at Munich’s new Musik Festhalle. It was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. An array of royals and stars from the musical and literary world were in attendance, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships. Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler PDF Author: Bruno Walter
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486492176
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Recollections of Mahler written in 1936 by the composer's assistant conductor in Hamburg and at the Vienna Opera, plus Ernst Krenek's biographical sketch of Mahler and a new Introduction.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler PDF Author: Stuart Feder
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300103403
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
"The final crisis of Mahler's career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony reveal his troubled state. It was a four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, that restored the composer's equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahler's life, in particular Alma's betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911."--BOOK JACKET.

Mahler

Mahler PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607630X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Theodor W. Adorno goes beyond conventional thematic analysis to gain a more complete understanding of Mahler's music through his character, his social and philosophical background, and his moment in musical history. Adorno examines the composer's works as a continuous and unified development that began with his childhood response to the marches and folk tunes of his native Bohemia. Since its appearance in 1960 in German, Mahler has established itself as a classic of musical interpretation. Now available in English, the work is presented here in a translation that captures the stylistic brilliance of the original. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), one of the foremost members of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, studied with Alban Berg in Vienna during the late twenties, and was later the director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death. His works include Aesthectic Theory, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, The Jargon of Authenticity, Prism, and Philosophy of Modern Music.

Mahler Remembered

Mahler Remembered PDF Author: Norman Lebrecht
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571272835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Gustav Mahler is the most influential symphonist of the twentieth century. In this pioneering study, Norman Lebrecht reveals the man and musician through the words of his contemporaries. Using many previously unpublished documents, he constructs a profile of Mahler even more complex and compelling than that familiar from his letters and the often unreliable memoirs of his widow, Alma. Compassionate or callous, idealistic or pragmatic, Mahler aroused violently contrasting impressions and emotions in those who lived and worked with him. Accounts of the composer include the artist Alfred Roller's description of Mahler's naked body, a Nazi-era reappraisal by one of his closest relatives, Natalie Bauer-Lechner's unpublished jottings of Mahler's childhood, and Stefan Zweig's report of his final voyage. Together, they form a remarkable and deeply illuminating image of a formidable personality. 'The effect is cumulative, sometimes contradictory and vivid - like a written version of a radio or film portrait.' Classical Music 'Norman Lebrecht's Mahler Remembered is quite breathtakingly interesting.' Birmingham Post

The Mahler Album

The Mahler Album PDF Author: Gilbert Kaplan
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810998339
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Mahler Album is the definitive collection of all known photographs of the legendary composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Selected and edited by Gilbert Kaplan, a renowned authority on Mahler, the images are enhanced by photographs of Mahler's family, his homes and the opera houses in which he worked and by a rich selection of drawings, paintings and sculpture. The images, many of which are published here for the first time, document Mahler's life from his childhood and student days through his early years as a conductor and to his success in Budapest, Hamburg and, ultimately, Vienna, where he reigned for a decade at the helm of the Court Opera. They also record his years at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and his final post as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Informative captions accompany the illustrations, and revealing commentary provides the historical background. This expanded edition, published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth (and the 100th anniversary of his death), presents newly discovered photographs and works of art, and a selection of colorful postage stamps featuring Mahler. Informative captions and revealing commentary provide historical background.

Mahler and Strauss

Mahler and Strauss PDF Author: Charles Youmans
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253021669
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes PDF Author: Thomas Peattie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702708X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.

Why Mahler?

Why Mahler? PDF Author: Norman Lebrecht
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 140009657X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Following Mahler’s every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world. Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler PDF Author: Jens Malte Fischer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300134444
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 778

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Book Description
Translation of: Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute.