Gustav Mahler

Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (1897-1948), a Viennese musicologist and critic, embarked on producing a large-scale study of Mahler in 1933, but left an unfinished manuscript at the time of his death. Here Jeremy Barham prepares the first published edition of this important work, his annotations and commentary adding invaluable material to the translation. Biographical material is used as a loose framework and platform for Mathis-Rosenzweig's profound examination of the environment within which Mahler's earlier music was embedded--an environment in which Wagner, Bruckner and Wolf feature prominently, and in which Mahler's music is viewed from the wider perspective of nineteenth-century German cultural domination and the subsequent rise of political extremism in the form of Hitlerite fascism.