Rethinking Mahler

As one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large. Editor Jeremy Barham brings together leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore Mahler's relationship with music, media, and ideas past and present, addressing issues in structural analysis, performance, genres of stage, screen and literature, cultural movements, aesthetics, history/historiography and temporal experience. Rethinking Mahler counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions and preferences that configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. Over the course of 17 chapters drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book pursues ideas of nostalgia, historicism and 'pastness' in relation to an emergent modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments, yielding a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of Mahler's works, their historical reception and understanding, and their resounding impact within diverse cultural contexts. Rethinking Mahler will be an essential resource for scholars and students of Mahler and late Romantic era music more generally, and will also find an audience among the many devotees of Mahler's music.

Jeremy Barham is Reader in Music at the University of Surrey. His academic interests lie in the areas of Mahler, 19th- and 20th-century Austro-German music and culture, screen music, and jazz. He has undertaken periods of archival research in Vienna, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, and Wiesbaden, and convened three international conferences, on Mahler (2011), early film music (2014) and the music and legacy of Miles Davis and John Coltrane (2016).

Contents List of Figures and Tables List of Music Examples List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Mahler's Times Jeremy Barham PART I Repertoires and Structures of the Past 1. Fantasy, Denial and Virtual Reality in Mahler's Fourth Symphony Benjamin K. Davies 2. Mining the Past for New Expressions: Song Form as Narrative Device In Mahler's Ballads from Das Knaben Wunderhorn Molly M. Breckling 3. The Earliness of Mahler's Late Romanticism: The poetics of the 'Deceptive Perfect Cadence' in the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde Mark Summerfield 4. 'Pedester ist der Musikstoff, sublim der Vortrag.' Mahler's Scherzos as Impulses for the Evolution of Musical Language Mathieu Schneider 5. Forming Form through Force: Bruckner, Mahler, and the Structural Function of Highpoints Alessandro Cecchi 6. Die Meistersinger in Mahler's Seventh Symphony Anna Stoll-Knecht 7. Idyllic Masks of Death: References to Orphée aux Enfers in 'Das himmlische Leben' Lóránt Péteri PART II Stage, Screen and Popular Cultures 8. Mahler and the Myth of the Total Symphony James Buhler 9. On the British Reception of Ken Russell's Mahler Eftychia Papanikolaou, 10. Popular Music and the Colloquial Tone in the Posthorn Solos of Mahler's Third Symphony Timothy Freeze 11. Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony and Max Reinhardt's Concept of Massenregie Peter Revers PART III Varieties of Historical and Aesthetic Experience 12. The Particularity of the Moment Julian Johnson 13. Gustav Mahler and the Aesthetics of De-Identification Federico Celestini, 14. Decadent Transitions: Mahler, Modernism, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle Zoltan Roman 15. Justine Mahler's Faust Notebook: an Introduction Stephen E. Hefling 16. Abridging Mahler's Symphonies: a Historical Perspective Matthew Mugmon 17. Mahler and the Game of History Jeremy Barham Bibliography Index