The life of Mahler

by Peter Franklin

As a leading European conductor, and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Maher (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned to counter biased criticism of him in which German-nationalist, hide-bound traditionalist or antisemitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography, Peter Franklin re-confronts the myth of Mahler the misunderstood hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends: the profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, the dictatorial conductor and husband, the iconoclast, the traditionalist. Mahler's life and works emerge as battle-grounds for some of the major conflicting currents and impulses of his period, in which Empires and ideals struggled with the spectre of their own destruction.