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Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife.

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Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife. Edited by Henry-Louis de la Grange and Gunter Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner. First complete edition revised and translated by Antony Beaumont. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, 2004. [xxvii, 431 p. ISBN 0-8014-4340-7. $40.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes.

The relationship between Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma remains a fascinating part of the composer's biography for the insights it gives to his works. Mahler dedicated his Eighth Symphony to his wife, and supposedly attempted to depict her in one of the themes of his Sixth Symphony. For these and other reasons, Alma was a force in Gustav's life, and he wrote to her often throughout their marriage. The publication of the complete extant letters of Gustav Mahler to Alma makes available one side of the correspondence that went on for over a decade, from their first meeting in 1901 through the composer's death in 1911.

These letters are not entirely unknown, since Alma Mahler published a selection of them in Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), translated in English as Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, 3d ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975). Yet Alma was selective in compiling her collection and either edited the letters she included or entirely omitted others. This new book is based on the German-language collection Ein Gluck ohne Ruh', edited by the Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange and Gunther Weiss (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1995), which had previously been available only in German.

In their edition, La Grange and Weiss assembled almost twice the amount of material found in Alma's edition, with approximately 188 letters first published in their edition. The present English translation includes all the letters, including the introductory material...

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