Mahler Remembered

by Norman Lebrecht

Book Overview

No composer has had a greater influence on the music of the twentieth century than Gustav Mahler. And in Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht, an acknowledged authority on the life and work of the seminal composer, compiles a unique volume that the Birmingham Post called "breathtakingly interesting, a collection of what [Mahler's] friends, rivals and enemies said about the inspired . . . man . . . whose symphonies are now played more often than Tchaikovsky's"...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393025721
• ISBN13: 9780393025729
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Not curmudgeonly. Not in the slightest.

Norman Lebrecht, for those unfamiliar with him, is an institution in the field of music commentary and criticism, and culture in general. He has his own BBC radio show ("Lebrecht Live") , as well as a weekly syndicated newspaper column (now in the London Evening Standard, formerly in the London Daily Telegraph), and is the author of a number of books besides this one. More often than not, Lebrecht can be a curmudgeon with the best of them (but always with the thought in mind of provoking one to think more deeply than usual), and seems to be one of the surviving few these days who can write in the style of the feuilleton (a humorous, often sarcastic, style of arts essay once common in Paris during Berlioz's time, and then brought to even higher heights in fin-de-siècle Vienna when Heinrich Heine "imported" the genre from Paris). But there is nothing curmudgeonly about "Mahler Remembered," Lebrecht's anthologizing of reminiscences by people who knew Gustav Mahler. Instead, this is a chronological capturing of these reminiscences - many of them appearing in print for the first time - to provide a portrait of Mahler hard to find elsewhere, at least not in any single volume such as this. (The closest book, in terms of recording of reminiscences, is likely "Mahler: His Life, Work and World" by Kurt and Herta Blaukopf. There is some overlap, but Lebrecht's quotations seem fuller, and several in Lebrecht do not appear in Blaukopf.) Among the highlights are an extended essay by Alfred Roller (Mahler's stage director at the Vienna Court Opera), describing Mahler's physical attributes from an artist's perspective (and giving the lie to any thought that Mahler was less than a fine physical specimen), a humorous tribute by Leo Slezak (a fine Wagnerian tenor in Mahler's troupe) who was not always highly motivated but who, in retrospect, realized that Mahler brought out the best in him, and tributes by his many acolytes, most particularly Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, as well as famous musicians still remembered today, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ferrucio Busoni and Fritz Kreisler. Of these, Busoni's is perhaps the most moving: It was at Mahler's very last concert, in New York, that he had premiered Busoni's "Berceuse élégaique," and it was Busoni who traveled in the company of Mahler on his final journey home from New York to Vienna by way of Cherbourg. But the book goes well beyond these few names, and these brief highlights. Lebrecht seems to have found something from everyone of significance whose life or career intersected Mahler's, and quite a few from people of no particular historical significance at all save that they knew him and wrote something that is now part of posterity. What emerges is as full a personal portrait of Mahler as one is likely to find without collating bits and pieces from multiple sources and volumes. I could manage to find only two unfavorable reminiscences, both of them "expected" (and quite well-know