The Life of Mahler

'... a person should remain a 'person' and not be frozen into a legend' (Alma Mahler). As a leading European conductor, and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) inspired mythologisers 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 anti-semitic elements were often mixed. In this 1997 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 work emerge as a battle-ground 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.