The definitive biography of the celebrated composer, published in English to coincide with the centenary of his death A best seller when first published in Germany in 2003, Jens Malte Fischer's Gustav Mahler has been lauded by scholars as a landmark work. He draws on important primary resources-some unavailable to previous biographers-and sets in narrative context the extensive correspondence between Mahler and his wife, Alma; Alma Mahler's diaries; and the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler, whose private journals provide insight into the composer's personal and professional lives and his creative process. Fischer explores Mahler's early life, his relationship to literature, his achievements as a conductor in Vienna and New York, his unhappy marriage, and his work with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in his later years. He also illustrates why Mahler is a prime example of artistic idealism worn down by Austrian anti-Semitism and American commercialism. Gustav Mahler is the best-sourced and most balanced biography available about the composer, a nuanced and intriguing portrait of his dramatic life set against the backdrop of early 20th century America and fin de siecle Europe.

Collected volume of studies on the stage representation of Jews in European theatre between 1830 and 1940. The way in which Jews are represented on the stage stretches between the poles of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism on the one side and Jewish renaissance and Zionism on the other. The individual studies all consider the boundary conditions given by cultural and mental history. This volume is the first attempt to view both the spoken word and musical theatre from this point of view.