2011, ISBN: 38c3026deb40256f707b1ed743334be1

[PU: Yale University Press, New Haven CT,], WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC BIOGRAPHY 207014, Second impression: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 766pp., with monochrome plates. Minor … Mehr…

[PU: Yale University Press, New Haven CT,], WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC BIOGRAPHY 207014, Second impression: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titling; 766pp., with monochrome plates. Minor wear; spotting to the text block edges and one or two small marks to the endpapers. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. A best-seller when first published in Germany in 2003, Jens Malte Fischer's Gustav Mahler has been lauded by scholars as a landmark work. He draws on important primary resources - some unavailable to previous biographers - and sets in narrative context the extensive correspondence between Mahler and his wife, Alma; Alma Mahler's diaries; and the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler, whose private journals provide insight into the composer's personal and professional lives and his creative process. Fischer explores Mahler's early life, his relationship to literature, his achievements as a conductor in Vienna and New York, his unhappy marriage, and his work with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in his later years. He also illustrates why Mahler is a prime example of artistic idealism worn down by Austrian anti-Semitism and American commercialism. Gustav Mahler is the best-sourced and most balanced biography available about the composer, a nuanced and intriguing portrait of his dramatic life set against the backdrop of early 20th century America and fin de siecle Europe.<