(720) Norman Lebrecht e a sua biografia de Gustav Mahler
Autor: Semibreve | Publicado: 2014-02-24T13:59:00-03:00




Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)







Gustav Mahler
The agony and the ecstasy
A new biography presents the composer as superhero
Jul 8th 2010
 

Glorious stuff, written in spare moments
Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World. By Norman Lebrecht. Faber; 362 pages; £17.99.&nbsp; 


“MY TIME will come,” Gustav Mahler used to say when he felt unappreciated. In his early days the composer often was. He described himself as “three times homeless”: born to a Jewish family in a German-speaking enclave in Czech-speaking Bohemia, and not feeling properly at home anywhere. Being Jewish, at a time of widespread anti-Semitism, was his “chief mistake”, as he put it to a friend. But his musical talent was so evident that at 15 he found himself at the Vienna Conservatory of music and afterwards embarked on a career as a conductor. By the time he was 37, he was artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera—though not before he had converted to Catholicism. He was also enjoying increasing fame as a composer.
Mahler's life and his music were two sides of the same coin. His oeuvre was small: ten symphonies (the last one unfinished), a symphonic work for voices and orchestra (“Das Lied von der Erde”) and a number of songs. As a successful conductor he had little time to compose, fitting most of it in during long summer breaks spent by an Austrian lake. So one of his symphonies could be years in the making, but each of them packed a tremendous punch. For him, “the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” That meant childhood memories and sleighbells, folk songs and frustrated ambition, love and death.
Much of the raw material was autobiographical, and there was a lot of biography to draw on. Apart from his professional ups and downs, Mahler was part of a large and close family of 14 children (though many of his siblings died in infancy), which provided its own running soap opera. He also had plenty of opportunity to meet young singers and got entangled in various romances. But the defining passion of his life was Alma Schindler, the musical daughter of a well-to-do Viennese family. When they met, he was 41 and she 22. He wooed her ardently, they were soon married and she quickly bore him two daughters. But the relationship was stormy. He wanted her to stop composing. She reluctantly complied, but got her own back in other ways, mainly by having blatant affairs. She also took charge of managing his public image, sometimes boldly adjusting the record to suit her story.






In many ways, though, Mahler led a charmed life, mixing with the musical and artistic elite of his day—composers such as Brahms, Richard Strauss, Busoni, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg, Wolf, Berg, many famous musicians, and artists from the Vienna Secession such as Gustav Klimt. When Alma took a lover, he was not just anybody but a young architect called Walter Gropius who went on to set up the illustrious Bauhaus school of art and design. When Mahler needed advice on his marital troubles, he booked a long session with Sigmund Freud.
The couple experienced joint tragedy when their elder daughter died young—not long after Mahler had composed his Kindertotenlieder (songs on the death of children), which his wife had feared would be tempting fate. The composer himself was in poor health, made worse by stress and constant overwork. After a particularly taxing stint conducting in New York, his heart condition deteriorated and he went home to Vienna to die at 50.
Norman Lebrecht, a British commentator on music and cultural affairs, became obsessed with Mahler in his mid-20s and soon embarked on a quest to retrace his every step. In 1987 he published “Mahler Remembered”, a portrait of the composer through the eyes of those around him. But his fascination continued. “Why Mahler?”, part musical biography, part homage, is an attempt to convert the rest of the world to his belief that Mahler is the most influential symphonist of our age, dethroning Beethoven. It comes on cue for the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth this year and the 100th one of his death in 2011.
There have been a fair number of books about and biographies of Mahler, which Mr Lebrecht briefly reviews. But none of them, he says, tells the story from a 21st-century perspective. His claims for his hero are towering: “The man and his music are central to our understanding of the course of civilisation and the nature of human relationships.” He cites a number of people who have undergone damascene conversions while listening to Mahler's music. He himself has found each symphony “a search engine for inner truths” and “a fast track to deep-core emotion”. From Mahler the man, he says he has learnt lessons such as “the best is never good enough” and “dignity survives defeat”.
Mr Lebrecht's admiration for the composer is a wonderful thing, but he is trying too hard to proselytise: other people may feel the same way about Bach or Mozart or Wagner. His book is very enjoyable to read, gossipy as well as learned, and it makes the man come to life. It provides an idiosyncratic but useful review of the main recordings. It even offers advice to newcomers on getting into Mahler's music (go and hear the second symphony on your own CLIQUE AQUI PARA ASSISTIR, COM LEGENDAS EM INGLÊS).&nbsp; (Extraído DAQUI)



Books of The Times
Celebrating a Man With Many Acolytes
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
Published: November 29, 2010


Norman Lebrecht, in his new book, “Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World,” speaks of “Mahler’s capacity to pierce human defenses.” And it is certainly true that Mahler’s music can unhinge the susceptible.
Some three decades ago, as classical music editor of High Fidelity magazine, now defunct, I received a manuscript of a Mahler discography from a college professor: a bare catalog of recordings with a brief introduction. Though I recall little else of the introduction, I can still reconstruct its last three paragraphs almost verbatim:
“When the conductor Bruno Walter saw Mahler’s coffin lowered into a grave in Vienna, the sun broke through the clouds, and Walter wept. When I visited Mahler’s grave, the sun broke through the clouds, and I wept.
“That is why I have undertaken this task. It is the first installment of an impossible debt.
“Gustav Mahler, thou art God.”
Mr. Lebrecht, bless him, stops a few paces short of that professor’s idolatry. And he turned his fixation, which he dates to 1974, to excellent use with an earlier book, “Mahler Remembered” (W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 1987), consisting mostly of extended quotations from players in Mahler’s biography: fellow composers and conductors, singers, family members, acquaintances. But Mr. Lebrecht, too, has difficulty maintaining perspective and a tendency to inject himself into the story.
“Leaving home at 15 is a defining act,” he writes of Mahler in the new book. “I left at 16 to study in another country, a foreign language.”
“Like Mahler,” he adds, “I felt no homesickness, no regret at leaving tragedy and faith behind.”
Who, reading a biography of a historical personage, hasn’t occasionally identified in some way with the hero? But who does it out loud? A book about Mr. Lebrecht’s “search for Gustav Mahler,” as he calls his obsession, this is also a book about Mr. Lebrecht, a far less compelling subject.
In addition to the Mahler studies, Mr. Lebrecht has written a half-dozen books on music, including the gleefully apocalyptic “Who Killed Classical Music?” (Birch Lane Press, 1997). Despite the sensationalist title, there is enough life left in the classical music business (about the music itself, we needn’t worry) to keep Mr. Lebrecht busy documenting its further travails in “Slipped Disc,” his blog on artsjournal.com, and elsewhere.
In “Why Mahler?” Mr. Lebrecht travels much of the same ground he trod in “Mahler Remembered.” Mahler’s biography, dispatched there in an introduction, is here heavily laced with snippets of quotations from “Remembered” and elsewhere, and spun out in a breathless historical present as the main body of the book. Although the heavy emphasis on gossip and scandal grows tiresome (however much grist Mahler’s wife, Alma, and others may have provided), Mr. Lebrecht writes with flair, at times, and shows a good command of source material.
But to reach the biography, you have to get past a scene-setting chapter, “Some Frequently Asked Questions,” which stopped me in my tracks repeatedly. One question is especially revealing: “Am I related to Mahler?”
He makes a case for why he might be. Then he abandons the topic abruptly. “Does this make my great-nephew a Mahler?” he asks. “Let’s stop this right here.”
But some of the other answers are what really take the breath away. Mr. Lebrecht notes that Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Adagietto from the Fifth after that of Robert F. Kennedy. From this and little more, he concludes, “Along with Samuel Barber’s Adagio, itself a Mahlerian imitation, Mahler’s Second, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies were America’s music of lamentation.”
No matter that Bernstein trotted out the “Resurrection” for almost any occasion, including his 1,000th concert with the New York Philharmonic, or that if many Americans know the Adagietto at all, it is probably from its use in the Visconti film “Death in Venice” rather than from any occasion of mourning. And the Ninth?
Mr. Lebrecht is projecting his own proclivities here, as he reveals later: “In my occasional role as the Record Doctor on WNYC’s ‘Soundcheck’ show, I have prescribed the finale of the Ninth Symphony and the Adagietto of the Fifth for callers in situations of grief and loss.”
In his eagerness to establish irony as a defining quality of Mahler’s music, one that defines it in particular as being Jewish, Mr. Lebrecht, as he does so often, goes too far. “Music, before Mahler, had a lexicon of simple emotions: joy, sorrow, love, hate, uplift, downcast, beauty, ugliness and so on.” This discounts not only the Wagnerian leitmotif, a tool virtually made for irony, but also any number of poignant, bittersweet moments in Mozartean opera and so much other earlier music.
After flatly stating that Mahler, in his Third and Seventh Symphonies, “hinted at a future ecological disaster” and, in his Sixth, “warned of imminent world war,” Mr. Lebrecht backtracks. Some of the connections he makes “are open to debate,” he says with — for a change — considerable understatement.
“The opposite,” he adds, “as so often in Mahler, may also be true.”
What is important to Mr. Lebrecht, it seems, is to make a striking statement in the moment, even if it has to be canceled out a few pages later. In a chapter discussing recordings of Mahler’s music, he writes, “The first truth in Mahler interpretation is that there are no absolutes, no hard-and-fast rules.” Then, after blasting “conductors who obviate irony,” “those who deny emotion” and others, he adds: “There are many no-nos in Mahler: these are just a few of the worst.” Accordingly, he dismisses most Mahler recordings in a hard-and-fast word or two.
Mr. Lebrecht can turn a nice phrase at times, as when he speaks of Mahler’s plunging “into an oblivion of work.” And you never doubt, reading him, that he knows a lot, but he doesn’t know everything, as he would have you believe.
His chronic overstatement and striving for effect, a kind of forced informality (he calls Bernstein Lenny, Otto Klemperer Klemp) and a certain looseness in the handling of facts (in quick succession he implies a wrong year for the premiere of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and gives a wrong year for an important dinner party) make it hard to put much faith in any particular pronouncement.
Writing of Alma Mahler, he all but invites comparison with his own work: “Nothing she writes can be accepted without corroboration.” (Extraído DAQUI)






Paperback Questions &amp; Answers: Norman Lebrecht on Why Mahler?
The author explains how he came to abandon a conventional biography of the composer in favour of a 'club DJ' approach 'with lots of fast-forward and rewind'
How did you come to write Why Mahler?
I had been struggling with the question for most of my adult life. Why, I wondered, was a composer, derided when alive and discarded for decades, displacing Beethoven at the heart of symphonic culture?
Why Mahler? &nbsp;

Born 1860, died 1911, it struck me on first hearing his music in the 1970s that Gustav Mahler anticipated in his symphonies many issues we confront in our 21st-century lives: social exclusion, racism, broken relationships, the work-life balance, the health debate, how to die. It was no surprise to discover that Mahler struck an instant, mutual empathy with Sigmund Freud. Both worked along the same lines, converting incidents from their own lives into universal theory and catharsis. Mahler felt so much closer to our time than Debussy, Elgar or Richard Strauss. He was, with Einstein, Freud, Picasso, James Joyce and Kafka, one of the makers of the modern world. To write a composer's life – born, studied, struggled, triumphed, died - would not do him justice. So I wrote Why Mahler?
What was most difficult about it?
Breaking the mould. I was encouraged on several fronts to write a straight biography and for a while I got stuck in that Dewey groove. But this was a man whose success belonged to my lifetime, not his own. If I wrote about him in the present continuous, I could tell his story in the context of a future world that he helped shape, with lots of fast-forward and rewind, like a club DJ. I knew that some of the crustier publishers and critics would reject my approach. But once I found the right tense to use, I was able to write at high speed and confidence.
What did you most enjoy?
Revisiting the music in micro-detail, sourcing manuscripts, tilting at long-held truisms, retracing my own steps down Mahler's path, from a nondescript village (known as "Muddy Ditch") in a nameless part of Middle Europe to the summits he bestrode as music director, at the Vienna Opera and Carnegie Hall. I sat in the forest where he lurked as a boy, listening for the A note in the high pine-tops that opens his first symphony. I paced the corridors of the building where he died.
Fearful of error, I sent finished chapters to the world's most meticulous Mahler-checker. Knud Martner of Copenhagen is a man who can spend weeks studying the 1902 Vienna train timetables to demonstrate prejudicial lies in the widow Alma's account of her husband's life. An email from Knud informing me that I had revealed things about Mahler that he never knew before was one of the happiest pings of my life.
How long did it take?
Eighteen months. Sixteen to write, two to cut.
What has changed for you since it was first published?
A sense that the world's view of Mahler is moving my way. Ideas that sounded radical when I first presented them are becoming normative. Suggestions of mine are recycled (without attribution) in concert notes. Gustavo Dudamel has asked me to give a week of lectures at his Mahler cycle in Los Angeles. The University of Granada asked me to open its academic year. Why Mahler? has become a microbrand.
Who's your favourite writer?
In my teens, Graham Greene and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Journalism enabled me to spend time with them both and learn more than I can relate here. Technically, I am in awe of Philip Roth for his ability to hold the attention through a 250-word sentence. I will be first in line to buy the next Mark Haddon, Linda Grant, Simon Mawer.
What are your other inspirations?
All forms of music, a handful of languages, malt whisky, fierce polemical arguments with family and close friends.
Give us a writing tip
Always have two books on the go. That way, you never suffer writer's block.
What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?
Make it half as long again. No, in all seriousness, nothing at all – except obliterate the memory of the deadly-brown US hardback jacket.
What are you working on now?
I've just delivered my third novel, and started a fourth. (Extraído DAQUI)
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/04/qanda-norman-lebrecht-why-mahler


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Norman Lebrecht is a prolific cultural commentator and an award-winning novelist.
He has written 12 books about music, which have been translated into 17 languages. The latest is Why Mahler?, a radical reinterpretation of the most influential composer of modern times (see Books). Also back in print is Mahler Remembered (Faber, 1987), a ground-breaking biographical compilation.
Norman Lebrecht’s first novel The Song of Names won a Whitbread Award in 2003 and is presently being cast as a major feature film. His second novel, The Game of Opposites,was published in the US by Pantheon Books. A third is in preparation.



US: Anchor Books
A collection of Lebrecht columns was published in China in 2012, the first such anthology by any western cultural writer. A Lebrecht essay appears monthly in Standpoint, the cultural and intellectual magazine. Norman Lebrecht’s Album of the Week is featured on the Sinfini website.
Slipped Disc, Norman Lebrecht’s blog, has become the world’s most-read cultural news and views site in English, drawing well over one million readers every month.
Norman Lebrecht is a popular lecturer at cultural institutions and leading universities. Other works in progress include a stage play, a radio series and television documentaries.









Mahler, Sinfonia nº 2 em dó menor (ressurreição)

Eteri Gavazava (soprano)
Anna Larsson (mezzo soprano) 

Orquestra do&nbsp; Festival de Lucerna,Claudio Abbado (2004)