Gustav Mahler and the Symphony of the 19th Century

Gustav Mahler and the Symphony of the 19th Century PDF Author: Constantin Floros
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631626894
Category : Symphony
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the semantics of symphonic music from Beethoven to Mahler. Of fundamental importance is the realization that this music is imbued with non-musical, literary, philosophical and religious ideas. It is also clear that not only Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner were crucial role models for Mahler, but also the musical dramatist Wagner and the programmatic symphony composers Berlioz and Liszt. At the same time a semantic musical analysis of their works reveals for the first time the actual inherent (poetic) quintessence of numerous orchestral works of the 19th Century.

Gustav Mahler and the Symphony of the 19th Century

Gustav Mahler and the Symphony of the 19th Century PDF Author: Constantin Floros
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631626894
Category : Symphony
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the semantics of symphonic music from Beethoven to Mahler. Of fundamental importance is the realization that this music is imbued with non-musical, literary, philosophical and religious ideas. It is also clear that not only Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner were crucial role models for Mahler, but also the musical dramatist Wagner and the programmatic symphony composers Berlioz and Liszt. At the same time a semantic musical analysis of their works reveals for the first time the actual inherent (poetic) quintessence of numerous orchestral works of the 19th Century.

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes PDF Author: Thomas Peattie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702708X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.

Mahler in Context

Mahler in Context PDF Author: Charles Youmans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108540147
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book 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.

Mahler and Strauss

Mahler and Strauss PDF Author: Charles Youmans
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253021669
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

Why Mahler?

Why Mahler? PDF Author: Norman Lebrecht
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 140009657X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
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. Following Mahler’s 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. Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

The Mahler Symphonies

The Mahler Symphonies PDF Author: David Hurwitz
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781574670998
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
"Hurwitz describes the emotional extravagance that lies at the root of Mahler's popularity, the consistency of his symphonic thinking, and his dazzling and revolutionary use of orchestral instruments to create an expressive musical language that is varied in content and immediate in impact."--BOOK JACKET.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony

Mahler's Seventh Symphony PDF Author: Anna Stoll Knecht
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190491124
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. Throughout its performance history, it has often been heard as "existing in the shadow" of the Sixth Symphony or as "too reminiscent" of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Anna Stoll Knecht's Mahler's Seventh Symphony offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler's compositional materials and a close reading of the finished work. With a focus on sketches previously considered as "discarded," Stoll Knecht exposes unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger, confirming that Mahler's compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past. This referential aspect acts as an important interpretive key to the work, enabling the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, and shedding light on its complex compositional history. Considering each movement of the symphony through a double perspective, genetic and analytic, Stoll Knecht demonstrates how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. Mahler's Seventh Symphony exposes new facets of Mahler's musical humor and leads us to rethink much-debated issues concerning the composer's cultural identity, revealing the Seventh's pivotal role within his output.

Inside Mahler's Second Symphony

Inside Mahler's Second Symphony PDF Author: Lawrence F. Bernstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197575641
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This guide introduces concertgoers, serious listeners, and music students to Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, one of the composer's most popular and most powerful works. It examines the symphony from several perspectives: Mahler's struggle to create what he called the New Symphony; his innovative approaches to traditional musical form; how he addressed the daunting challenges of writing music on a monumental scale; and how he dealt with the ineluctable force of Beethoven's symphonic precedent, especially that of the Ninth Symphony. The central focus of Inside Mahler's Second Symphony is on the music itself: how it works, how it works its magic on the listener, how it translates the earnest existential concerns that motivate the symphony into powerful and highly expressive music. Beyond this, the book ushers the Listener's Guide into the digital age with 185 dedicated audio examples. They are brief, accessible, and arranged to flow from one to another to simulate how the symphony might be presented in a classroom discussion. Each movement is also presented uninterrupted, accompanied by light annotations to remind the reader of what they learned about the movement. Each musical event in the uninterrupted presentation is keyed to its location in the orchestral score to accommodate readers who may wish to refer to one. An innovative combination of in-depth analysis and multimedia exploration, Inside Mahler's Second Symphony is a remarkable introduction to a masterpiece of the symphonic repertoire.

Mahler and His World

Mahler and His World PDF Author: Karen Painter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218358
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's life and work. But they have focused on analysis internal to the compositions, along with their programmatic contexts. In this volume, musicologists and historians turn outward to examine the broader political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music. Peter Franklin takes up questions of gender, Talia Pecker Berio examines the composer's Jewish identity, and Thomas Peattie, Charles S. Maier, and Karen Painter consider, respectively, contemporary theories of memory, the theatricality of Mahler's art and fin-de-siècle politics, and the impinging confrontation with mass society. The private world of Gustav Mahler, in his songs and late works, is explored by leading Austrian musicologist Peter Revers and a German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling. Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival.

Mahler's Symphonic World

Mahler's Symphonic World PDF Author: Karol Berger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226836037
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A new analysis of Mahler’s symphonies, placing each within the context of his musical way of being in and experiencing the world. Between 1888 and 1909 Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies and the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde; his tenth symphony was left incomplete at his death in 1911. Mahler’s Symphonic World provocatively suggests that over his lifetime, the composer pursued a single vision and a single, ideal symphony that strived to capture his personal outlook on human existence. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, when all trust in firm philosophical and spiritual foundations had evaporated, Mahler’s music reflected a deep preoccupation with human suffering and transience and a search for sources of possible consolation. In Karol Berger’s reading, each of the symphonies follows a similar trajectory, with an opening quest leading to the final unveiling of a transcendent, consolatory vision. By juxtaposing single movements—the opening Allegros, the middle movements, the Finales—across different works, Berger traces recurring plotlines and imagery and discloses the works’ multiple interrelationships as well as their cohesiveness around a central idea. Ultimately, Mahler’s Symphonic World locates Mahler’s music within the matrix of intellectual currents that defined his epoch and offers a revelatory picture of his musical way of being in the world.