San Antonio College Library

A best seller when first published in Germany in 2003, Jens Malte Fischer's Gustav Mahler has been lauded by scholars as a landmark work. He draws on important primary resources -- some unavailable to previous biographers -- and sets in narrative context the extensive correspondence between Mahler and his wife, Alma; Alma Mahler's diaries; and the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler, whose private journals provide...

This work focuses on several aspects of Webern's life: his youthful instability, his often embarrassing dependence on Schoenberg, his naive nationalism and his absolute belief in the value of the brief moments of music he produced.

From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless...

Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, modern composers living in Vienna near the turn of the 20th century, are examined in a broad artistic context illustrating how their works grew from earlier Viennese musical developments. Presenting a coherent analysis of a central school of modern musical composition, the essays compare the artists' music to that in the nonmusical arts in Vienna at the time. A prominent musical phenomenon during the period, the Second...