Mahler and His World (The Bard Music Festival 49)

From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's life and work. But they have focused on analysis internal to the compositions, along with their programmatic contexts. In this volume, musicologists and historians turn outward to examine the broader political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music. Peter Franklin takes up questions of gender, Talia Pecker Berio examines the composer's Jewish identity, and Thomas Peattie, Charles S. Maier, and Karen Painter consider, respectively, contemporary theories of memory, the theatricality of Mahler's art and fin-de-siècle politics, and the impinging confrontation with mass society. The private world of Gustav Mahler, in his songs and late works, is explored by leading Austrian musicologist Peter Revers and a German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling. Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival. Pt. 1. Context and ideologies. Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, interpretation, and history / Leon Botstein Mahler's theater: the performative and the political in central Europe, 1890-1910 / Charles S. Maier Mahler's Jewish parable / Talia Pecker Berio A soldier's sweetheart's mother's tale? Mahler's gendered musical discourse / Peter Franklin The aesthetics of mass culture: Mahler's eighth symphony and its legacy / Karen Painter pt. 2. Analysis and aesthetics. Musical lyricism as self-exploration: reflection on Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" / Camilla Bork ; translated by Irene Zedlacher "...the heart wrenching sound of farewell": Mahler, Rückert, and the Kindertotenlieder / Peter Revers ; translated by Irene Zedlacher In search of lost time: memory and Mahler's broken pastoral / Thomas Peattie Aspects of Mahler's late style / Stephen E. Hefling pt. 3. Mahler's American debut: the reception of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, 1904-1906 / edited by Zoë Lang. Introduction Mahler's Fourth Symphony in New York The American premier of Mahler's Fifth Symphony Boston Symphony Orchestra East coast tour pt. 4. Mahler's German-language critics / edited and translated by Karen Painter and Bettina Varwin Introduction Mahler as conductor The First Symphony The Fifth Symphony The Seventh Symphony Das Lied von der Erde Obituaries The Mahler Amsterdam Festival, 1920. If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what I think he ought to have done with his talent.