Gustav Mahler [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION At first glance this small book is nothing more than a contribution to the genre of unqualified hagiography, now defunct except for obituaries in The Times and the annual newsletters of educational institutions. Bruno Walter, great conductor and ardent disciple of Mahler, celebrates in the unctuous idiom of his adopted home, Vienna, the artistic and human grandeur of the man who inspired his career and honoured him with his friendship. The chief shortcoming of this mode is that it tends to turn everyone into the same person: the only variables are the times and places, the specific vocation, the great names. Otherwise the material is identical: the hero had a difficult life, but rose to all its challenges and vanquished all the enemies, apart from the one that led to the writing of the memoir or obituary. He was, to the unsympathetic outsider, irascible, even cruel; demanding and ungrateful; petulant and temperamental. But the writer, granted the rare privilege of intimacy and confidences, was able to see how the tantrums were an inevitable outcome of the Faustian striving for perfection; that the rage was directed more by the genius at his own shortcomings than towards the external world; that at the behest of his exalted calling he was bound to behave in ways that would shock ordinary people. This particular specimen carries these features of the genre to the verge of self-parody. But in doing so, it also manifests another characteristic of the species to a startling degree: the self-glamorization of the writer as he ostensibly abases his own personality before that of the genius of whom he writes. For there would be no point in his contribution unless it presumed to have insights that were denied to less perceptive witnesses of the vii