Product Description

Gustav Mahler was one of the supremely gifted musicians of his generation. His contemporaries came to know him as a composer of startling originality whose greatest successes with the public never failed to provoke controversy among the critics. As a conductor, his relentless pursuit of perfection was sometimes viewed as tyrannical by the singers and musicians who came under his baton. Professor Henry-Louis de La Grange has devoted over thirty years of painstaking research to this study of Mahler's life and works. His biography, ultimately to be completed in four volumes, is drawn from a vast archive of documents, autographs, and pictures, assembled by La Grange at the Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav Mahler, Paris. In his fourth volume on the life and works of Gustav Mahler, Professor Henry-Louis de La Grange covers the years 1907-1911 when, following the setbacks and tragic events in both his private and professional life in Vienna, Mahler sees a new life in New York as the opportunity to realise his dreams. Against the background of the rivalries within the theatres of the great New York families Mahler achieves his goal of establishing a truly professional orchestra worthy of that name, the new New York Philharmonic. Throughout this period Mahler continued with European tours including France where he finally met Fauré, Dukas, Debussy, and Rodin. In September 1910 his eighth symphony was enthusiasticlly received in Munich. Alma however, remained dissatisfied with this new life and its successes. Her affair with Walter Gropius revealed to Mahler the extent of the decline of their life together. Returning to Vienna in 1911 and approaching his 51st birthday, Mahler died, leaving unfinished his 10th symphony. For more than 50 years following his death, Mahler's work was consigned to the wilderness until, revived by interest and performance, it took its rightful place in the repertoire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248772 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1072 pages

Review
So much of it is new, or newly re-explored, or freshly and radically re-interpreted... But this is not just a biography: it is more of a Mahler-Lexicon, almost a history of the age... [it] will be seen as one of the outstanding musical biographies of the past century. (Hugh Wood, Times Literary Supplement )

this is a revelatory achievement...it is hard to see that any further Mahler biography on this scale will ever be required...de la Grange's Mahler will go on for ever. (Bayan Northcott, BBC Music Magazine )

A gargantuan enterprise... La Grange has a sharp eye for revelatory nuances in the thousands of documents from which he has pieced together his Mahler portrait... He wields immense authority. (Arnold Whittal, Musical Times )

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mahler is in here, somewhere... No-one who loves Mahler can deny the debt the world owes to his inexhaustible French biographer, the Boswell of the eighth arrondissement. (Norman Lebrecht. Evening Standard. )

Customer Reviews

Mahler obsessives need not read this - just buy it. Others, do read on...
1758 pages, covering three and a half years! This monster tome, three inches thick and five pounds in weight, tells you everything you could possibly want to know (and a lot you probably don't need to) about the final months of Mahler's life.

Does the subject deserve such in-depth treatment? Of course he does - and la Grange is the man to do it. This will be THE essential work of reference for every Mahler scholar in the future.

Whether it's the ideal work for the average music lover (whoever that may be...). I doubt; there are far shorter and more readable treatments elsewhere. Also the sections of musical analysis manage to be both over-elaborate and simplistic at the same time. La Grange is a compiler and a quantifier, not an interpreter, so his analyses are not really analyses at all, but lists of things that happen. So go elsewhere to find out how the music works (for all his near-unreadability at times, Adorno is peerless in getting under the skin of this profound and complex music).

Every tiny documentary scrap of Mahler's life is gathered into La Grange's study, from the fullest possible documentary account of the Munich premiere of the 8th Symphony in 1910, to details of Mahler's diet (he seemed to live mainly on butter - and died of heart disease). And sometimes the sheer wealth of information is overwhelming: from the moment Mahler decides to consult Sigmund Freud (p.883) it takes ten pages and forty-six footnotes to get to the meeting itself. In between, there is a biography of Freud, a history of the Dutch town of Leiden where they met and a full account of the 'interminable train journey' Mahler undertook to get there (we eventually know how he must have felt). The detail is incredibly rich, but finding out what you want to find out is sometimes incredibly frustrating.

There is also a sheer physical problem in reading the book. It is enormous: impossible to prop up, makes your legs go to sleep if you rest it in your lap for a long time and is so thick that it is sometimes hard to read the text close to the spine. It would have been kinder to have published it as two volumes, perhaps in a slip-case. If it ever comes out in paperback the spine won't last five minutes.

All this seems rather negative - the propective buyer needs to be aware of these drawbacks before shelling out all that money - but this does not detract from the staggering scholarly achievement. The sheer single-minded dedication of the author to his huge task is simply mind-boggling and it is hard to think of a comparable achievement in the history of musical biography. I don't think even Wagner has received this kind of treatment.

If you're new to Mahler and want to get a clear idea of his life and music, this may not be the volume for you. If you are a Mahler obsessive, you probably haven't even bothered to read this review; you already know you need this book. It's a masterpiece. Despite the problems, a rating of less than five stars would be an impertinence.

Note well the title!
To the reviewer above I would point out that Mahler's "heart disease" was nothing to do with eating butter, but the then deadly condition of subacute bacterial endocarditis,caused by a streptococcal infection attacking valves of the heart. Mahler had had since birth such a malformation of the heart and the condition was discovered in 1907 after the tragic death of his elder daughter, which has led many commentators to conclude that he was a doomed man from then on. The significance of the title of my review and , I say, this book, is that the author does not subscribe to this thesis and in the huge number of pages that cover the four years and five months of Mahler's life he undertakes a substantial amount of "myth busting" of the misconceptions which he alleges were spread by Alma Mahler and others. The problem is that Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony obviously confront, to say the least, problems of human mortality in a way that might be unusual for an artist who was at the peak of his health. DeLaGrange comments on these aspects in long appendices which deal with these works. I think that he is right to debunk the myths that have surrounded his last years, which have led to Mahler being considered more a tragic hero than a great genius and utterly fascinating intellectual figure, who was full of vitality and originality and whose view of the world was so influenced by the transcendental. It seems to me though that the author so idolises his subject that the book borders at time on hagiography, and for his saint he has sadly a partner with feet of clay, namely Alma, who receives highly critical treatment and a disdainful appendix of a chronology of her life after 1911. Nevertheless the work achieves everything it sets out to to achieve, namely a complete history of Mahler as man, composer and performer, and a full critique of his works. When the first volume is republished one will be able to read a chronology of the life of this great man almost as if watching a comprehensive documentary film that could not be made but it also has great value as a full work of reference. Do not be put off by the price; it is worth every penny, but do not try to read it in an armchair or in bed, it is too cumbersome. Highly recommended