Rethinking Mahler

Rethinking Mahler PDF

Author: Jeremy Barham

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0199316090

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As one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large. Editor Jeremy Barham brings together leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore Mahler's relationship with music, media, and ideas past and present, addressing issues in structural analysis, performance, genres of stage, screen and literature, cultural movements, aesthetics, history/historiography and temporal experience. Rethinking Mahler counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions and preferences that configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. Over the course of 17 chapters drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book pursues ideas of nostalgia, historicism and 'pastness' in relation to an emergent modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments, yielding a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of Mahler's works, their historical reception and understanding, and their resounding impact within diverse cultural contexts. Rethinking Mahler will be an essential resource for scholars and students of Mahler and late Romantic era music more generally, and will also find an audience among the many devotees of Mahler's music.

Mahler's Nietzsche

Mahler's Nietzsche PDF

Author: Leah Batstone

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1837650012

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Examines how Nietzschean ideas influenced the composition of Mahler's first four, so-called Wunderhorn, symphonies. Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Nietzsche both exercised a tremendous influence over the twentieth century. All the more fascinating, then, is Mahler's intellectual engagement with the writings of Nietzsche. Given the limited and frequently cryptic nature of the composer's own comments on Nietzsche, Mahler's specific understanding of the elusive thinker is achieved through the examination of Nietzsche's reception amongst the people who introduced composer to philosopher: members of the Pernerstorfer Circle at the University of Vienna. Mahler's Nietzsche draws on a variety of primary sources to answer two key questions. The first is hermeneutic: what do Mahler's allusions to Nietzsche mean? The second is creative: how can Mahler's own characterization of Nietzsche as an "epoch-making influence" be identified in his compositional techniques? By answering these two questions, the book paints a more accurate picture of the intersections of the arts, philosophy and politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Mahler's Nietzsche will be required reading for scholars and students of nineteenth and early twentieth century German music and philosophy.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony

Mahler's Seventh Symphony PDF

Author: Anna Stoll Knecht

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190050578

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Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. Throughout its performance history, it has often been heard as "existing in the shadow" of the Sixth Symphony or as "too reminiscent" of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Anna Stoll Knecht's Mahler's Seventh Symphony offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler's compositional materials and a close reading of the finished work. With a focus on sketches previously considered as "discarded," Stoll Knecht exposes unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger, confirming that Mahler's compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past. This referential aspect acts as an important interpretive key to the work, enabling the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, and shedding light on its complex compositional history. Considering each movement of the symphony through a double perspective, genetic and analytic, Stoll Knecht demonstrates how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. Mahler's Seventh Symphony exposes new facets of Mahler's musical humor and leads us to rethink much-debated issues concerning the composer's cultural identity, revealing the Seventh's pivotal role within his output.

Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas

Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas PDF

Author: Seth Monahan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-03-16

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0199303479

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Why would Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), modernist titan and so-called prophet of the New Music, commit himself time and again to the venerable sonata-allegro form of Mozart and Beethoven? How could so gifted a symphonic storyteller be drawn to a framework that many have dismissed as antiquated and dramatically inert? Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas offers a striking new take on this old dilemma. Indeed, it poses these questions seriously for the first time. Rather than downplaying Mahler's sonata designs as distracting anachronisms or innocuous groundplans, author Seth Monahan argues that for much of his career, Mahler used the inner, goal-directed dynamics of sonata form as the basis for some of his most gripping symphonic stories. Laying bare the deeper narrative/processual grammar of Mahler's evolving sonata corpus, Monahan pays particular attention to its recycling of large-scale rhetorical devices and its consistent linkage of tonal plot and affect. He then sets forth an interpretive framework that combines the visionary insights of Theodor W. Adorno-whose Mahler writings are examined here lucidly and at length-with elements of Hepokoski and Darcy's renowned Sonata Theory. What emerges is a tensely dialectical image of Mahler's sonata forms, one that hears the genre's compulsion for tonal/rhetorical closure in full collision with the spontaneous narrative needs of the surrounding music and of the overarching symphonic totality. It is a practice that calls forth sonata form not as a rigid mold, but as a dynamic process-rich with historical resonances and subject to a vast range of complications, curtailments, and catastrophes. With its expert balance of riveting analytical narration and thoughtful methodological reflection, Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas promises to be a landmark text of Mahler reception, and one that will reward scholars and students of the late-Romantic symphony for years to come.

Mahler's Voices

Mahler's Voices PDF

Author: Julian Johnson

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2009-04-17

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0195372395

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Johnson considers how Mahler's body of music foregrounds the idea of artifice, construction and musical convention while also presenting itself as act of authentic expression and disclosure. This study of brings together a close reading of the renowned composer's music with wide-ranging cultural and historical interpretation.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler PDF

Author: Stuart Feder

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780300103403

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"The final crisis of Mahler's career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony reveal his troubled state. It was a four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, that restored the composer's equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahler's life, in particular Alma's betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911."--BOOK JACKET.

Experiencing Mahler

Experiencing Mahler PDF

Author: Arved Ashby

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1538104873

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Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

Gustav Mahler: Volume 3. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907)

Gustav Mahler: Volume 3. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907) PDF

Author: Henry-Louis de La Grange

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 1056

ISBN-13: 9780193151604

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When the second volume of de La Grange's monumental study of Mahler appeared, it was hailed in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications as an indispensable portrait of the great composer. Here at last is the third volume of this magisterial work. Ranging from 1904 to 1907, it explores Mahler's final years as administrator, producer, and conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was a time of intense inner struggle, with Mahler's energy and creative powers drained by the competing demands of running the Hofoper and struggling for recognition as a composer. And they were tragic years as well, especially 1907, Mahler's last year in Vienna, when the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of heart disease forced him to leave the Opera. Throughout the book, de La Grange offers true-to-life portraits of Mahler the human being, the family man, and the composer, and he weaves in innumerable testimonies and anecdotes that throw new light on the great composer's complex personality. The product of forty years of research, here is the definitive study of a musical giant. It is, as The Wall Street Journal said of volume two, "a work of the first importance, one that nobody seriously interested in Mahler can possibly afford to skip."

Perspectives on Gustav Mahler

Perspectives on Gustav Mahler PDF

Author: Jeremy Barham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1351554409

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Gustav Mahler's music continues to enjoy global prominence, both in live or recorded performance and within broader ranges of critical perception and cultural sensibility. In recognition of such a profile, this volume brings together a unique collection of essays exploring the diverse methods and topics characteristic of recent advances in Mahler scholarship. The book's international group of contributors is actively involved not only in bringing fresh approaches to Mahler research in areas such as analysis, sketch studies and reception history, but also in examining hitherto neglected issues of cultural and biographical interpretation, performance practice and compositional aesthetic, thereby illustrating the developing vitality and scope of this field. Engaging with its subject from reconstructive, documentary, theoretical, analytical, discursive and interpretative viewpoints, this volume provides a wide spectrum of contexts in which continuing debate about Mahler's life and works can flourish. Its varied themes and strategies nevertheless collectively recognize and negotiate the shifting space both between the composer's life and his artistic creativity, and between the musical results of that creativity and the critical-analytical process. The essays in this book accordingly fill certain gaps in the scholarly understanding of the composer, and re-orientate Mahler studies towards some of the central concerns of contemporary musicological thinking.

Mahler

Mahler PDF

Author: Theodor W. Adorno

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 022607630X

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Theodor W. Adorno goes beyond conventional thematic analysis to gain a more complete understanding of Mahler's music through his character, his social and philosophical background, and his moment in musical history. Adorno examines the composer's works as a continuous and unified development that began with his childhood response to the marches and folk tunes of his native Bohemia. Since its appearance in 1960 in German, Mahler has established itself as a classic of musical interpretation. Now available in English, the work is presented here in a translation that captures the stylistic brilliance of the original. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), one of the foremost members of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, studied with Alban Berg in Vienna during the late twenties, and was later the director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death. His works include Aesthectic Theory, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, The Jargon of Authenticity, Prism, and Philosophy of Modern Music.