Mahler in Context

Description

Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

Charles Youmans, Professor of Musicology at Penn State University, is the author of Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (2005) and Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue (2016). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss (2010), and has written nine chapters on Strauss's tone poems for the Richard Strauss-Handbuch (Metzler/Barenreiter).

'... a gold mine for those interested in all aspects of Central European culture from around 1900. Highly recommended.' M. Dineen, Choice