The Last Movement

An intimate portrait of genius, love, and betrayal at the end of Gustav Mahler’s life. 

New York, 1911. Gustav Mahler’s recent tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic has been an extraordinary success and a time of feverish artistic defiance. He is arguably the most celebrated musician alive. In America, however, his compositions have turned more inward-looking, for he knows, or suspects, that death is near.

This slim, swift “triumph” of a novel finds him crossing the Atlantic, wrapped in blankets on the deck of the Amerika, bound for Vienna. Gazing over the ocean, Mahler reflects on music, marriage, loss, faith, regret, and the meaning of a life devoted to art. His body is failing; his wife Alma has fallen in love with another man—the young architect Walter Gropius. Mahler has begged, humiliated himself, tried everything to keep her love. Nothing has worked, but in the awareness of his approaching demise, Alma has stayed, tending to him with care, perhaps to ease his final passage.

A finalist for the German Book Prize and one of the most acclaimed German novels of recent years, The Last Movement is a tender, unforgettable book about music, life, death, and love.