Gustav Mahler: New Insights into His Life, Times and Work (review)

The lore surrounding the reception of the music of Gustav Mahler generally places the revival of interest in it around 1960, that is, the Mahler-Renaissance that coincided with the centenary of the composer's birth. While various investigations of the composer's music had appeared in the decades after Mahler's death, including the book-length studies by Paul Stefan (Gustav Mahler: eine Studie über Persönlichkeit und Werk [Munich: R. Piper, 1910, 1912]), Richard Specht (Gustav Mahler [Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913]), and Paul Bekker (Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien [Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921]), extended biographical studies were limited to the reminiscences of Mahler's wife Alma and the Eckermann-like conversations that his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner published in Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1923). It was also rare to find a study that examined both the composer's life and work. In a book intended to be published in July 1945, eighty-five years after Mahler's birth, the Austrian émigré Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (1897–1948) conceived a promising two-volume study of the composer's life and work, a project left unfinished at his death and preserved among the papers of his colleague the pianist Edith Vogel (1912–1992). Unfinished, unpublished and, at some point, presumed lost, Mathis-Rosenzweig's study is now available in a critical English-language edition prepared by Jeremy Barham.

More than half a century after Mathis-Rosenzweig's death, the subtitle on the first title page "Neuen Erkenntnise zu seinem Leben, seiner Zeit, seinem Werk" alludes to the innovative nature of the study, a position that differs from the more prosaic description on the second title page, "Sein Leben—Seine Zeit—Sein Werk" and which connotes a more straightforward investigation. Moreover, in the context of the time Mathis-Rosenzweig undertook it, near the end of World War II, the prospect of such an extended study seems novel, since Mahler's works were proscribed in Germany and Austria during the Third Reich but still performed, albeit relatively infrequently, elsewhere. Not only did a scholar like Mathis-Rosenzweig find refuge in England, but Mahler's publisher had also moved to that country. Even after World War II, the musical culture at Nullpunkt in Germany took up serialism instead of reviving interest in the music of Mahler and his generation—the world of yesterday, as Stefan Zweig called it in one of his finest books, had been left to memory and not revival. From a distance, both temporal and psychological, it was possible to gain a perspective on the modernism that influenced the first decades of the twentieth century.

Thus, in taking up Mahler's life and work, Mathis-Rosenzweig placed it within the musical culture in which the composer was trained. While not ignoring the proscription of Mahler and other Jewish composers and the dictates of the Nazi regime (pp. 27–30, 67–68), Mathis-Rosenzweig did not resort to polemics against the Third Reich. Rather, he built his study on the larger perspectives of the musical culture of his day to assess the broader legacy of Mahler's music by acknowledging its connections to that of Arnold Schoenberg and his generation. As Mathis-Rosenzweig states relatively early in the study:

It will therefore be the task of this biography to highlight the far-reaching historical significance of the Mahler-Schoenberg relationship and its effects on Viennese musical culture, which attained a new universality in the twentieth century through Schoenberg and his school.

(p. 67)

In the surviving chapters, Mathis-Rosenzweig had yet to explore the profound connections that a scholar like Dika Newlin would take up several years later in her groundbreaking study Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York: King's Crown Press, 1947; 2d ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Yet in the extant chapters, Mathis...