Stephen E. Hefling – författare

Mahler Studies comprises ten innovative essays on topics spanning the range of Mahler research. Blaukopf's inquiry into critical influences on Mahler's student years provides background for Reilly's reassessment of sources for 'Opus 1', Das klagende Lied. McClatchie introduces Mahler's previously inaccessible correspondence with family members, while Feder presents insightful psychoanalytic perspectives on Mahler's relationships to his sister Justine and other women in his life before Alma. Mitchell and La Grange explore the complex issue of quotation and allusion in Mahler's oeuvre. The long-restricted Seventh Symphony sketchbook provides detailed glimpses of that Mahlerian 'world' emerging in its earliest stages, as documented by Hefling. Issues of tonal structure and coherence are addressed by Agawu and Williamson, while Franklin on Adorno's Mahler provides a clear explication of that author's dialectic engagement with the composer.

Mahler Studies comprises ten innovative essays on topics spanning the range of Mahler research. Blaukopf's inquiry into critical influences on Mahler's student years provides background for Reilly's reassessment of sources for 'Opus 1', Das klagende Lied. McClatchie introduces Mahler's previously inaccessible correspondence with family members, while Feder presents insightful psychoanalytic perspectives on Mahler's relationships to his sister Justine and other women in his life before Alma. Mitchell and La Grange explore the complex issue of quotation and allusion in Mahler's oeuvre. The long-restricted Seventh Symphony sketchbook provides detailed glimpses of that Mahlerian 'world' emerging in its earliest stages, as documented by Hefling. Issues of tonal structure and coherence are addressed by Agawu and Williamson, while Franklin on Adorno's Mahler provides a clear explication of that author's dialectic engagement with the composer.

Since its première Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) has been widely regarded as his finest masterpiece - 'the most Mahleresque of his works', according to his friend and disciple, the conductor Bruno Walter. As Mahler himself wrote to Walter when the draft score was finished, 'I believe it is the most personal thing I have yet created.' Das Lied was written in the wake of three catastrophic events that shook the foundations of Mahler's life in 1907, and like all his earlier works, it is deeply influenced by the composer's personal and philosophical worldview. The opening chapter, 'Background: Mahler's Symphonic Worlds before 1908,' sets the stage for a study of the work's genesis, a summary of the most important critiques of the première, and a careful reading of this six-movement symphony for voices and orchestra.