Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Mahler and His World.

Article Excerpt
Edited by Karen Painter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. [xiii, 393 p. ISBN 0-691-09243-5. $55.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Mahler and His World, edited by Karen Painter, constitutes the latest installment of single-volume composer studies published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival. A successful endeavor, this series has sought to place the composers' lives and works under a broader light of social, cultural, political, and other interconnections--and the current volume is no exception. Only the first two parts of the book's four parts include original contributions, while parts three and four form an anthology of source readings and reviews, some presented in English translations for the first time.

The five essays that open the book, subtitled "Contexts and Ideologies," establish an uneven hut nevertheless uniform effort to interpret Mahler and his legacy within a critical, sociological, religious, and political context. Leon Botstein's "Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History" provides a critical reappraisal of the composer's reception, from the polemics of fin-de-siecle Vienna to the late twentieth century's fascination with his music that led to his canonization as a composer and often to a...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!