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Discovering Mahler: Writings On Mahler 1955-2005.

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Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler 1955-2005. By Donald Mitchell. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2007. [1, 680 p. ISBN-10184383345X; ISBN-10 9781843833451, $80.] Illustrations, music examples, portraits, appendices, references, indexes.

Described by the publisher as "the fourth and final volume of Donald Mitchell's unique studies of Mahler and his music," Discovering Mahler would seem to belong lo the biographic ally oriented volumes that the author has published to date, namely Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958; subsequently revised, with the latest edition dating from 2003); Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; and revised several times, with the latest edition dating from 2005); and Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, rev. ed. 2002). Since the first two volumes take up Mahler's music through the composition of the Fourth Symphony, and the author discusses at length the settings of poetry by Friedrich Ruckert, the Eighth Symphony, and Das Lied von der Erde in the third, the expectation exists for a fourth volume devoted to the three instrumental symphonies in order to complete the kind of seeming gap that exists among the published volumes. This is not the case and, thus, the subtitle of Discovering Mahler reflects the nature of the volume more accurately, since it is a collection of various articles and short pieces about Mahler that Mitchell wrote during the half century between 1955 and 2005 and, in this sense resembles the author's Cradles of t he New: Writings on Music 1951-1991 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). The latter volume intersects Discovering Mahler through the inclusion of three articles on Mahler ("Mahler and Nature: Landscape into Music," "Mahler's Hungarian Glissando," and "Mahler's Abschied: A Wrong Note Righted") that are also found in the present collection. Apparently, no other full-length study is planned since, as Mitchell states in the...

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