Stuart Feder - Böcker

"A sound of a distant hornO'er shadowed lake is borne—my father's song."—Charles Ives Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book—the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer—examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives’s work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles’s creative life that Ives’s music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George’s mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives’s creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles’s musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George’s teaching and storytelling on Charles’s years as a composer. Ives’s later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives’s music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.

Crises in the life of Gustav Mahler inspired some of his greatest works—but eventually led to an early deathThe 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 Mahler’s 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 composer’s 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 Mahler’s life, in particular Alma’s betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911.At once a sophisticated consideration of Mahler’s 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.

Charles Ives grew up in the nineteenth century and composed chiefly in the twentieth. His nostalgia for a simpler life in the New England country town of his youth is revealed in his frequent musical quotation of songs of that earlier time: parlor and patriot songs, hymns and gospel music. He had learned these songs early in his life through his father, a village bandmaster, who remained the most important influence in his life and music. Ives absorbed these influences within an innovative and modern musical style of composition. Stuart Feder's account of Ives's life clarifies the complexities of the man and his music, while his straightforward discussion of this uniquely autobiographical music in turn illuminates the narrative.