The Life of Mahler

As a leading European conductor and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends concerned with countering biased criticism of him in which German-nationalist hide-bound traditionalist or anti-Semitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography Peter Franklin reconfronts the myth of Mahler-the-misunderstood-hero and attempts to find the person or persons behind the legends. His illuminating biography shows Mahler to be a profoundly sensitive thinker and composer a dictatorial conductor and husband an iconoclast and paradoxically a traditionalist.