Why Mahler?
How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World
-
-
2.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £7.49
-
- £7.49
Publisher Description
A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death-obsessed, Mahler is more alive in the 21st century than ever before.
Why Mahler? Why does a Jewish musician from a land without a name capture the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society? Is it the music, it is the man, or is it the affinity we feel with his productive peak - a decade when Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Joyce and Mahler reconfigured the ways we understand life on earth?
In this highly original account of Mahler's life and work, Norman Lebrecht - renowned writer, critic and cultural commentator - explores the Mahler Effect, a phenomenon that reaches deep into unsuspecting lives, altering the self-perceptions of world leaders, finance chiefs and working musicians. Why Mahler? is a multi-layered exploration of the role that music plays as a soundtrack to our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since the early 1970s, culture commentator Lebrecht (Who Killed Classical Music?) has pursued all things Gustav Mahler: his music, his genius, his problems (from depression to racism). More comprehensive than his 1987 work, Mahler Remembered, this second look at the Austrian composer and conductor adds memoir and meditation to musical analysis for a compelling, opinionated, sometimes overwrought narrative. Noting Mahler's wide-ranging influence today (examples include Leonard Bernstein, a Harry Potter movie, and even Pink Floyd), Lebrecht finds in Mahler "a maker of music that interacts with what musicians and listeners are feeling in a fast-changing often threatening world." Throughout, Lebrecht interrupts the text with personal commentary, while being careful to connect the dots linking events in Mahler's life to his musical oeuvre and its realization. In chapters entitled "Whose Mahler?" and "How to Mahler" Lebrecht not only tells readers what to listen to, but why. Occasionally, such fervent admiration leads to fevered prose, as when Lebrecht writes that "the music pulses from him like blood from a severed artery." With more to appreciate than abhor, Lebrecht's affectionate study, like its subject, is laborious but engaging.
