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How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World
Pantheon
October 2010
On Sale: October 12, 2010
366 pages
ISBN: 0375423818
EAN: 9780375423819
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and
New York, the music that he wrote was condemned during his
lifetime and for many years after his death in 1911. “Pages
of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor.
Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has
displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique
influence on both popular music and film scores.
Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as
Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino
Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music
in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series
of waves that established Mahler not just as a great
composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for
every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings
of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for
young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel.
Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does?
Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read
cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with
Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from
birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking
to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new
portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside
his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein,
Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world.
“Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes
Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict,
relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the
limitations of medical knowledge.” Why Mahler? is a book
that shows how music can change our lives.
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