Following the earlier volumes in the Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure series, Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a study of origins of one of Mahler's most popular and accessible works. James Zychowicz examines how the composition evolved from the earliest ideas to the finished score, and in doing so sheds new light on Mahler's working process.

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.

'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.

"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.

Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's famous study of the composer's early life and music, revised and updated in 1980, includes a new introduction by the author, and supplementary addenda, which bring this classic work once again to the forefront of Mahler studies. Tracing Mahler's life from his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, to his early works (many now lost) Gustav Mabler: The Early Years forms an indispensable prelude to the period during which the cycle of great symphonies was to evolve. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and personality had their beginnings in his childhood and youth. Without understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years. Book jacket.

Essays by the noted authority on nineteenth-century music, the topics ranging from Beethoven and Schubert to comic opera to Scriabin and Janácek. In Beethoven's Century: Essays on Composers and Themes, world-renowned musicologist Hugh Macdonald draws together many of his richest essays on music from Beethoven's time into the early twentieth century. The essays are here revised and updated, and some are printed in English for the first time. Beethoven's Century addresses perennial questions of what music meant to the composer and his audiences, how it was intended to be played, andhow today's audiences can usefully approach it. Opening with a revealing analysis of Beethoven's not always generous regard for his listeners, the essays probe aspects of Schubert's musical personality, the brief friendshipbetween Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt's abilities as a conductor, and Viennese views of Wagner as expressed by Hugo Wolf. Essays on comic opera and trends in French opera libretti in the late nineteenth century reflect the author's long-standing sympathy for French music, and strikingly eccentric personalities in the world of music, such as Paganini, Alkan, Skryabin, and Janácek, are brought to life. Beethoven's Century concludes with a wrylook at some startling developments in early twentieth-century music that have often been overlooked. Hugh Macdonald has taught music at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Glasgow, and since 1987 has been Avis H. Blewett Distinguished Professor of Music at Washington University, St. Louis. He has written books on Skryabin and Berlioz, and is a regular pre-concert speaker for the Boston and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras.

Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

(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.

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.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.