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

Perspectives on Gustav Mahler.

Article Excerpt
Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Edited by Jeremy Barham. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. [xxx, 595 p. ISBN 0-754-60709-7. $134.95.] Bibliographical references, index.

The essays collected in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler represent the broad spectrum of current Mahler scholarship, and they contain something for everyone with an interest in Mahler: scholars and students of music and interdisciplinary fields, performers and their audiences, and the general public. Although some essays are works-in-progress, the collection as a whole fills gaps and dispels myths. If there is a theme to the collection, it is that of reconciling contradictions and controversies in Mahler's reception history and proving that Mahler defies labels.

Perspectives on Gustav Mahler is organized into five sections: "Nature, Culture, Aesthetic," "Reception: The Jewish and Eastern European Questions," "Analytic Approaches," "Mahler in Performance," and "Sketches, Editions and 'Performing Versions.'" The first section provides background for recurring issues. In the opening essay, "Vocal Music in the Symphonic Context," Zoltan Roman shows how the duality of Mahler as innovator and synthesizer has given him his unique place in music history. Roman illustrates how Mahler's First Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde mark the endpoints of a continuous development central to his oeuvre and characterized by an innovative expansion of "vocal music" (both with and without words) in the symphonic context, through which he synthesized symphonic trends at the end of the nineteenth century. Julian Johnson's essay...

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