Mahler’s Symphonic World: Music for the Age of Uncertainty

A new analysis of Mahler’s symphonies, placing each within the context of his musical way of being in and experiencing the world.

Between 1888 and 1909 Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies; the tenth was left incomplete at his death in 1911. Mahler’s Symphonic World makes a radical claim: that over his lifetime, the composer pursued a single vision, a single ideal symphony, striving to capture in his music a philosophical outlook on human existence. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Mahler found himself in a spiritual situation in which all trust in firm foundations had evaporated. In Karol Berger’s analysis, each of Mahler’s symphonies reflects his preoccupation with human suffering and transience and his search for sources of possible consolation. Through detailed analysis of individual symphonies, Berger traces how the same images and plots appear in different works and how the borderlines between symphonies can become porous. Mahler’s Symphonic World uncovers the single ideal symphony that Berger asserts the composer was pursuing all his life, locates Mahler’s music within the matrix of intellectual currents that defined his epoch, and offers a revelatory picture of his musical way of being in the world.

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus in the Department of Music at Stanford University. He is an award-winning author of a number of books, most recently Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity and Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche.