Gustav Mahler: Volume 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907)

In this latest installment of a four-volume biography, de La Grange describes, in his usual voluminous but seldom tedious detail, four crucial years in the life of the great composer/conductor: the last four of his rule at the head of the Vienna State Opera, embracing great triumphs but also a mounting resistance to his often autocratic and undiplomatic ways. This was also the period when the Third and Fourth Symphonies began to make their way in the world, the Fifth was premiered and the Sixth, Seventh and highly unorthodox Eighth were written. The death in childhood of Mahler's beloved elder daughter, Putzi, and the first murmurings of the heart problems that would eventually kill the composer a few years later, were the hammer blows that erased Mahler's wish to continue at the Opera and set the stage for the departure for America and his final years at the New York Philharmonic. The scale of de La Grange's research is phenomenal: no fewer than 20 densely packed pages, for instance, are devoted to Mahler's trailblazing performance of Beethoven's Fidelio. There is more here than anyone but the most devoted Mahlerian would need to know, but de La Grange's work stands as a highly accessible monument to a certain kind of scholarship. Illustrations, music examples and detailed analyses of Symphonies Six, Seven and Eight. (Jan.)