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Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World
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Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World Hardcover - 2010

by Norman Lebrecht


From the publisher

Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and New York, the music that he wrote was condemned during his lifetime and for many years after his death in 1911. "Pages of dreary emptiness," sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores.
Mahler's coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein's boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti's film "Death in Venice, " which used Mahler's music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel. 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. Pacing out his 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. "Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize," writes Lebrecht, "with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge." "Why Mahler? "is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

Details

  • Title Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World
  • Author Norman Lebrecht
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 326
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Pantheon Books, NY,NY
  • Date 2010-10-12
  • ISBN 9780375423819 / 0375423818
  • Weight 1.35 lbs (0.61 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.4 x 6.52 x 1.25 in (23.88 x 16.56 x 3.18 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Mahler, Gustav, Composers - Austria
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2010006034
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Excerpt

The Vienna of Freud, Mahler, Mach, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Herzl, Trotsky, and the young Hitler forged the world we know today. It was a meeting point of individualism and collectivism, egotism and idealism, the erotic and the ascetic, the elevated and the debased. At its center whirled Gustav Mahler . . . The man and his music are central to our understanding of the course of civilization and the nature of human relationships.
 
Art that is both high and low, original and derived, breathtaking and banal, Mahler’s music resists textbook analysis. It is an open-ended mind game of intellectual and ironic discourse, a voyage of discovery that combines self-revelation, consolation, and renewal . . . Each symphony is a search engine for inner truths. To know Mahler is ultimately to know ourselves.

Media reviews

“Very enjoyable to read, gossipy as well as learned, and it makes the man come to life.”
—The Economist

About the author

Norman Lebrecht has written several best-selling works of nonfiction, including "The Maestro Myth" and "Who Killed Classical Music?" He is also the award-winning author of the novels "The Song of Names" and "The Game of Opposites." He writes regularly for Bloomberg.com and "The Wall Street Journal, " and he presents "The Lebrecht Interview" series on BBC Radio 3 and "The Record Doctor" on WNYC. He lives in London.

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