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Gustav Mahler: New Insights into His Life, Times and Work.

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Gustav Mahler: New Insights into His Life, Times and Work. By Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig. Translation, annotation and commentary by Jeremy Barham. (Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Research Studies, 5.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2007. (vii, 255p. ISBN-10: 0754659536; ISBN-13: 978075465350. $49.95.) Illustrations, index.

The lore surrounding the reception of the music of Gustav Mahler generally places the revival of interest in it around 1960, that is, the Mahler-Renaissance that coincided with the centenary of the composer's birth. While various investigations of the composer's music had appeared in the decades after Mahler's death, including the book-length studies by Paul Stefan (Gustav Mahler: eine Studie uber Personlichkeit und Werk [Munich: R. Piper, 1910, 1912]), Richard Specht (Gustav Mahler [Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913]), and Paul Bekker (Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien [Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921]), extended biographical studies were limited to the reminiscences of Mahler's wife Alma and the Eckermann-like conversations that his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner published in Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1923). It was also rare to find a study that examined both the composer's life and work. In a book intended to be published in July 1945, eighty-five years after Mahler's birth, the Austrian emigre Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (1897-1948) conceived a promising two-volume study of the composer's life and work, a project left unfinished at his death and preserved among the papers of his colleague the pianist Edith Vogel (1912-1992). Unfinished, unpublished and, at some point, presumed...