Gustav Mahler

by Stephen Downes

Gustav Mahler’s status as an icon of fin-de-siècle Viennese music is assured, with his works now staples of the concert repertoire. His life story has been told in numerous biographies, films and novels, yet he remains an ambiguous, provocative figure. Mahler was a composer who challenged musical form and style but identified with German Enlightenment and Romantic culture, disliking many contemporary artistic trends. He was a Jewish conductor who reached the pinnacle of his profession in antisemitic Vienna. He was supposedly haunted by death, embroiled in a torrid marriage, and his brief meeting with Freud has spurred posthumous psychoanalytical speculations. This book, reflecting the latest research, constructs a fresh interpretation of Mahler’s music in relation to his life.

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[Nikolas Mavreas]

Leonard Bernstein pronounced, in his famous Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, that three deaths were prophesied by Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: the composer’s own, that of musical tonality, and that of society. Tonality remains alive and well while society continues to hang on, but even the first prophecy has been meaningfully broken, largely due to Bernstein’s success in reviving interest in Mahler’s music after decades of comparative neglect. The composer is now more popular than ever, especially among conductors, who find in his unwieldy, strenuously instructive scores the opportunity to showcase their technical abilities and to simulate the Bernsteinian moment of ecstasy: mouth agape, arms stretched wide apart, stick-waving homo musicalis in communion with the heavens.

For not unconnected reasons, Mahler also attracts the interest of biographers and commentators, who see in his life those sought-after characteristics of the valid artist: intensely expressed inner turmoil, a minimum of external tragedy, a lack of contemporary recognition, and a level of explainable coherence between the life and the work. The extensive Mahler literature is brought to bear with impressive command by musicologist Stephen Downes, in a concise and discursive survey of the composer’s life and the corpus of writing it has inspired.

You can read the rest of my review on Open Letters: https://openlettersreview.com/posts/g...

[Dominic H · Rating 5 out of 5]

To date a satisfactory biography of Mahler hasn't really been written. You can argue all you like about de la Grange, Michael Kennedy and many others but the fact is they are flawed for different reasons and we tolerate them as better than nothing. We top up with volumes of reminiscences and/or other material (e.g. Norman Lebrecht, Donald Mitchell etc) but it's still, well, unsatisfying. Stephen Downes has done us the service of reading everything there is, including the above, and synthesising it brilliantly and presenting it to us in a set of loosely biographical themed chapters, e.g. Mahler's reading, Mahler as a conductor, Mahler and Alma. It's a concise, well written introduction to a daunting individual and set of topics. In fact it's now the essential selection of biogrpahical writing on Mahler, becasuse when I talked of synthesis, I didn't mean to imply Downes doesn't have his own perspectives. He does and they are always interesting. And he's up to date and not afraid to go outside the standard reading lists. I was nodding in complete agreement for example with what he had to say about the film Tár. This now has to be the book anyone interested in Mahler reads first.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mahler is a Viennese classical music composer that experts in classical music see as the greatest composer. He was a multifaceted person who combined classical and popular music into his pieces, as having a strong sense of humor. He was Jewish when antisemitism was popular, and was still held in great respect for his talents. Physically he was a slight fit figure with a large forehead and a wall of hair similar to the filmmaker David Lynch. I thought initially I knew nothing about his music but it is often used for soundtracks in films. Mahler’s music can be heard in the films Birth of a Nation, Death in Venice and Harry Potter to name a few. He expanded the size of the symphony to create a greater sound and was an influence on many young composers.