Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue
Charles Youmans
A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame.
Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.
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About Charles Youmans
Reviews for Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Mahler and Strauss is an important and engaging study that will speak volumes not just to admirers of two consummate artists, but to anyone interested in Austro-German culture around 1900 and its aftermath.
Austrian Studies
Mahler and Strauss takes us on a journey that traverses the broader historical and cultural climate of German-speaking Europe at the turn of the twentieth century (with a brief excursion to America along the way). And throughout this journey we are offered a succession of fresh and imaginative readings of the source material that provide us with new ways of understanding the fundamental importance of a profoundly meaningful friendship between two remarkable musicians.
Nineteenth-Century Music Review
Thanks to Youmans's lucid style and easy mastery of often dense material, it works well, and the high aesthetic stakes involved are established early.
The Musical Times
A fascinating volume . . . It's also an impressive achievement in terms of its scholarship and casts a great deal of light on these two composers, both individually and together.
Grammophone
"Along the way, Mahler and Strauss in Dialogue tells a compelling story of the unexpected ways that their worlds overlapped. In so doing, it provides a model for comparative analysis that enriches our understanding of a relationship that indelibly shaped the musical world of their time and continues to fascinate us today."
German Studies Review