The Life of Mahler

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1. Mahler's world;
2. Becoming a musician in Vienna;
3. Playing the artist - the beginnings of a career;
4. The 'devil' in the wings;
5. Imperial and royal (nature and the city);
6. Alma's Mahler;
7. On the heights;
8. 'What I leave behind me ...'.

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'... 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.

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Peter Franklin has achieved the difficult feat in 203 pages of text of covering the familiar ground of Mahler's life from a new perspective and making telling and perceptive comments on the music. There are no music examples, and Franklin's style is refreshingly free from academic jargon

The Life of Mahler has some extremely pertinent comments to make on a complex and not entirely sympathetic personality ... Franklin makes one think afresh about the works he describes

a convincing account of Mahler as an insistent, ambitious individual, informing convention, convinced of his own superiority

Franklin is deft in his characterisation of Mahler's key works and in relating them to their context

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