Gustav Mahler: Volume 2: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904)

De la Grange is the world's most eminent Mahler scholar and the present volume, the second installment of a four-volume biography, is the most expansive treatment we are likely to see of the career of the composer-conductor who has really only entered the musical mainstream in the past 25 years. With painstaking detail and a truly incredible depth of scholarship, de la Grange takes the reader through Mahler's first tempestuous years as director of the Vienna Opera-an exacting role in which he not only conducted but hired the singers (a double cast, in case of trouble), supervised the productions, oversaw the scenery and directed-and also quickly took on the double role as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, then Europe's premier orchestra. His all-too-rare vacations, which he guarded desperately, were saved for writing the compositions for which he is now chiefly known-as covered in this volume, some of the greatest orchestral lieder, his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies, and early performances of his First, Second and Third. Contemporary critics were largely unkind, audiences (except in anti-Semitic Vienna) largely ecstatic. In this volume, Mahler also meets and marries Alma-which de la Grange's wealth of contemporary documentation and letters shows was an ill-starred union, though it provided much solace to both from time to time. No praise can be too high for the care that has gone into de la Grange's work, and obsessive Mahlerians (are there any other kind?) will find a wealth of absorbing material. Illustrations (not seen by PW) plus extensive musical analyses. (Jan.)