Sourcebooks MediaFusion and Naxos proudly present this fascinating biography of composer Gustav Mahler.

Among other astonishing compositions, Mahler completed nine symphonies of tremendous emot...

Chapter 1
Three Times Homeless

I am three times homeless: a native of Bohemia in Austria; an Austrian among Germans; a Jew throughout the world.

Of all the remarks attributed to Gustav Mahler, this one is perhaps the most famous. From a geographical and ethnic perspective it is, of course, completely accurate. Throughout his life, Mahler was conscious of being an outsider, never quite ‘at home’. However, the saying also contains an important spiritual truth. Here Mahler clearly identifies himself with the archetypal romantic figure of ‘The Wanderer’, celebrated in the titles of three songs by his beloved Schubert, as well as in the same composer’s famous ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy for Piano and great song cycle Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’). Mahler may also have had a much older figure at the back of his mind: the legendary ‘Wandering Jew’, according to tradition punished for mocking Christ as he carried his cross by being condemned to wander over the face of the earth until Judgement Day. In the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Austrian Empire, anti-Semitism was, as we would now say, ‘institutionalised’. The Church still taught that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the death of Christ, and that their dispersal throughout the world (the so-called ‘diaspora’) was their divinely ordained punishment. Wherever he went, and no matter how much success he achieved as an artist, Mahler continued to run up against anti-Jewish attitudes – expressed sometimes in the form of mild, unthinking prejudice (routine ‘Jewish jokes’) and at other times as pure, virulent hostility.

Early in his career, Gustav Mahler wrote lengthy program notes for listeners struggling to comprehend his first two symphonies. Later Mahler gave up on such notes. But with this penetrating biography, Johnson shows that the notes a Mahler listener actually needs are those that recount the composer’s own life. In analyses mercifully free from musicological jargon, Johnson establishes that much of the Austrian composer’s music converts the vagaries of his own life into the universality of art. Readers thus learn that the curious fanfares in the First and Second Symphonies recall the melodies once played by a military band as a fascinated young boy trailed along behind with a toy accordion. They learn likewise to recognize in brooding passages of the Fifth Symphony the aftereffects of a hemorrhage that almost took the composer in his prime. Readers can independently assess Johnson’s arguments by listening to the music that a tech-savvy publisher has provided in two CDs correlated to the text and on a dedicated website. A valuable resource for understanding a musical revolutionary.