Volume 20, Number 19 · November 29, 1973
Mahler the Modern
By Robert Craft
Mahler
by Henry-Louis de La Grange
Doubleday, 982 pp., $17.50
Mahler
by Kurt Blaukopf
Praeger, 272 pp., $10.00
The two books entitled Mahler, by Henry-Louis de La Grange[1] and Kurt Blaukopf[2] respectively, represent decades of research. One question, then, in the minds of those who read both, is how it can be possible for so much dedicated scholarship to yield so many conflicting facts. According to Blaukopf, the composer was one of twelve children, five of whom died in infancy, while a sixth committed suicide at the age of twenty-five. But La Grange provides vital statistics for fourteen children, showing that seven of them died in infancy and that the suicide was in his twenty-first year. Blaukopf further states that the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen were inspired by 'an actress,' although La Grange positively identifies the woman as the singer Johanna Richter. And where Blaukopf accepts a merely approximate dating for Mahler's discovery of the Knaben Wunderhorn anthology, La Grange verifies both the year, 1887, and the circumstances, the home of Carl Maria von Weber's grandson, during the period of Mahler's infatuation with that gentleman's wife.
Review, 3991 words
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