Gustav Mahler--Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888-1911 - Softcover

Mahler, Gustav; Strauss, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226057682 ISBN 13: 9780226057682

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss came to know one another as young conductors in Leipzig in 1887. From then until Mahler's death in 1911—the year of the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier—they kept in touch. Mahler himself described their relationship as that of two miners tunneling from opposite directions with the hope of eventually meeting.

This first publication of their correspondence, which includes twenty-five previously unknown Strauss letters, offers a portrait of two men who were as antithetical in their musical means and goals as in their temperaments and personalities, but who exercised a strong fascination for one another. These sixty-three letters show both composers advancing in their careers as they battled against adverse conditions in the musical world at the turn of the century. They present Mahler's energetic support of Strauss's Symphonia Domestica, which Mahler conducted in 1904 and, in turn, Strauss's championing of Mahler's music, especially the Second and Third Symphonies.

The correspondence is fully annotated and is supplemented with a major essay by Herta Blaukopf.

"Unfailingly absorbing. . . . An indispensable addition to the literature on these composers."—Norman Del Mar, Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0226057682
• ISBN 13: 9780226057682
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 172
• Editor: Blaukopf Herta