Synopses & Reviews
The life of the brilliant composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was punctuated by crisis. His parents both died in 1889, leaving him the reluctant head of a household of siblings. He himself endured a nearly fatal medical ordeal in 1901. A beloved daughter died in 1907 and that same year, under pressure, Mahler resigned from the directorship of the Vienna Opera. In each case Mahler more than mastered the trauma; he triumphed in the creation of new major musical works.
The final crisis of Mahlers career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony revealed his troubled state. A four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, restored the composers equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahlers life, in particular Almas betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911.
At once a sophisticated consideration of Mahlers work and a psychologically acute portrait of the life events that shaped it, this book extends our thinking about one of the great masters of modern music.
Review
"No one but Feder has sorted out all that can be known about what went on during Mahler's famous session with Freud. This is an important book by an author well qualified to write it."—Stephen E. Hefling, Case Western Reserve University
Review
"Of all the psychoanalysts who have written about Gustav Mahler, Stuart Feder is to my mind the most lucid and the most convincing. It is impossible today to write about Mahler without taking his earlier writings into account. Thus I eagerly await his new book about Mahler's last and crucial moments, when the famous meeting with Sigmund Freud took place.”—Henry-Louis de La Grange, author of Gustav Mahler [four-volume biography from OUP]
About the Author
Stuart Feder is clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and attending psychiatrist at Beth Israel Hospital in New York. He is also on the faculties of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and The Juilliard School in New York.