Discovering Mahler is Donald Mitchell's fourth and final volume on Gustav Mahler – the Austrian post-Romantic composer and conductor. His earlier volumes are The Early Years, The Wunderhorn Years, and Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death.
Why did you call the final volume Discovering Mahler?
DM – "The essays represent in detail the history of my own personal discovering of Mahler and also the history of the evolution of comprehending Mahler and his music in cultures, and the UK in particular, which had been so long delayed.
When your first volume, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, was published in 1958, his music was a specialized taste – now it's popular. Why did it take so long?
DM - Two factors, I believe, were crucial. The tragic interruption of the World War II and the fact of an obstructive British musical culture which for decades was antipathetic to the culture that gave birth to Mahler.
Mahler supposedly told Bruno Walter, who was admiring the view from the railway station near the composer's summer home, "Don't bother with that – it's all in my music!" Do you find Mahler's music "pictorial" in this way, or was he pointing to something more elemental in the music?
DM - On this occasion, it is probable that it was the view itself, which is not to suggest that Mahler was a 'descriptive' composer or uninfluenced by the landscapes, sights and sounds, which were part of his daily experience.
In Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death, you demonstrated how the composer's early sketches shed important light on the reading of works such as "Das Lied von der Erde". What approach to the middle and last symphonies have you adopted in Discovering Mahler?
DM - I concentrate on the forms of Mahler's symphonies, and especially those from his middle and final periods. There is nothing quite comparable elsewhere in the history of the symphony. While I explore each symphony as a discrete work, running through this collection of essays is an implied overview of the oeuvre as a whole, of Mahler's startling and wide-ranging creative journey.
Find Discovering Mahler |
