Mahler Re-Composed

Mahler Re-Composed
Author: George M. Cummins III
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2011-02-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1450289797

In 2010, the composer Gustav Mahler celebrates his one hundred fiftieth birthday. In Mahler Re-Composed, linguist George Cummins shares a collection of six interrelated essays that provide a fresh perspective on difficult questions familiar to Mahler lovers. Cummins, a teacher of Russian and Czech at Tulane University, brings a uniquely Czech perspective to the study of Mahlers personality and work. In his careful examination of the composers life and work, Cummins begins with an introduction that provides a glimpse into Mahler the Czech and continues with an account of Mahlers conversion from Judaism to Catholicism while making his way to the Vienna Hofoper directorship. Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahlertwo of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.

Mahler and Strauss

Mahler and Strauss
Author: Charles Youmans
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-09-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253021669

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.

Forbidden Music

Forbidden Music
Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0300154313

DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div

Why Mahler?

Why Mahler?
Author: Norman Lebrecht
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 140009657X

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.

The Leonard Bernstein Letters

The Leonard Bernstein Letters
Author: Leonard Bernstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 903
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300186541

“With their intellectual brilliance, humor and wonderful eye for detail, Leonard Bernstein’s letters blow all biographies out of the water.”—The Economist (2013 Book of the Year) Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic and versatile musician—a brilliant conductor who attained international superstar status, and a gifted composer of Broadway musicals (West Side Story), symphonies (Age of Anxiety), choral works (Chichester Psalms), film scores (On the Waterfront), and much more. Bernstein was also an enthusiastic letter writer, and this book is the first to present a wide-ranging selection of his correspondence. The letters have been selected for the insights they offer into the passions of his life—musical and personal—and the extravagant scope of his musical and extra-musical activities. Bernstein’s letters tell much about this complex man, his collaborators, his mentors, and others close to him. His galaxy of correspondents encompassed, among others, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, Thornton Wilder, Boris Pasternak, Bette Davis, Adolph Green, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and family members including his wife Felicia and his sister Shirley. The majority of these letters have never been published before. They have been carefully chosen to demonstrate the breadth of Bernstein’s musical interests, his constant struggle to find the time to compose, his turbulent and complex sexuality, his political activities, and his endless capacity for hard work. Beyond all this, these writings provide a glimpse of the man behind the legends: his humanity, warmth, volatility, intellectual brilliance, wonderful eye for descriptive detail, and humor. “The correspondence from and to the remarkable conductor is full of pleasure and insights.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Exhaustive, thrilling [and] indispensable.”—USA Today (starred review)

The Mahler Symphonies

The Mahler Symphonies
Author: David Hurwitz
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2004
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781574670998

"Hurwitz describes the emotional extravagance that lies at the root of Mahler's popularity, the consistency of his symphonic thinking, and his dazzling and revolutionary use of orchestral instruments to create an expressive musical language that is varied in content and immediate in impact."--BOOK JACKET.

Liszt Recomposed

Liszt Recomposed
Author: Nicolás Puyané
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1837650470

Explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision as the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces. Franz Liszt (1811-86) is mostly known for his virtuosic piano works, but his compositional achievements in the genre of song have so far been neglected. Many of Liszt's Lieder exist in multiple versions, sometimes radically altered, and many with equal claims to 'authenticity'. This has sometimes been viewed as a barrier to performance and a hindrance to scholarly scrutiny. Nicolás Puyané now redresses this imbalance and draws attention to this rich and varied corpus of works. Liszt's songs contain a myriad of intertextual links, not just with the songs of other composers, but also with Liszt's own works in other genres and his own revisions. By focusing on the multi-version songs, the book uncovers how these intertextual relationships have evolved over time. Introducing the concept of "textual fluidity", the book explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision, interpreting the work as being the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces: for instance, the contemporaneous reception of Liszt's early Lieder, or the change in Liszt's performing and compositional environments from his virtuoso to his Weimar years. The book then offers close readings of selected songs, including the Goethe and Schiller Lieder, by applying the concept of textual fluidity. Its findings will impact the way in which we see Urtext editions, arguing instead for an online fluid-text edition as an ideal resource with which to study Liszt's multi-version compositions.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler
Author: Constantin Floros
Publisher: Amadeus Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2003-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1574672657

(Amadeus). Mahler's 10 symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde are intensely personal statements that have touched wide audiences. This survey examines each of the works, revealing their programmatic and personal aspects, as well as Mahler's musical techniques.

The Eighth

The Eighth
Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022674096X

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 Mahler Companion

The Mahler Companion
Author: Donald Mitchell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2002
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780199249657

'the one-stop guide to Mahler -- a volume of essays covering the widest range of Mahlerian topics, designed both for the academic and serious amateur music-lover... The core of the compendium is its coverage of all the main works, carrying recent research, with plentiful musical examples and other illustrations.' -Andrew Green, Classical Music 08/11/1999'beautifully produced volume... a tribute that surveys the familiar with affectionate new insights... all the articles on Mahler's reception outside Austria, both during his life and after, make for fascinating reading.' -David Nice, BBC Music Magazine October 1999'The Mahler Companion constitutes a distinguished and fitting monument to Mitchell's lifelong devotion to Mahler, and, in mustering so much talent in one volume, there is no doubt that it will deservedly take its place among the most significant publications on the composer.' -Jeremy Barham, Music andamp; LettersA brilliant gathering of international Mahler specialists write about Mahler's music from a variety of standpoints. The global spread of the authors is matched by a series of chapters that document the global spread of the composer's own symphonies and song cycles, while hitherto unexplored areas of research receive attention, both places (such as London and Prague) and people (Mahler's only surviving and highly talented daughter--a sculptor--Anna. In short, a volume that draws on the best resources and most up-to-date information about the composer and will undoubtedly act as the authoritative guide for Mahler enthusiasts for years to come.