I'm gonna keep this short and sweet. Mahler's 8th is the best symphony ever written. This score while in small type, shows you how Mahler put it all together and does it very clearly. The text translations are given but not much else. There isn't any sort of analysis or in depth commentary, just the music. This is an excellent deal for such an amazing piece. Great for theory students and college musicians wanting to learn a thing or two about composition.

As a music student, this score was a great score to own: the large print make it very easy to read the numerous lines of instrumentation; the low cost is a must for a starving college student.

This is an EXTREMELY difficult work to study, even if there is a recording. The work is so immense and at the same time complex. Just looking at the first page is tiring.

I reccommend this score highly for music students and music lovers alike so that they may enjoy Mahler's monumental Symphony of a Thousand.

This symphony is so big, that if one has any chance to read the score while listening to it, do it! The score has revealed so many details about this great work that my opinion about it has changed totally! At first when I heard this, all I could hear was the song, and it didn't tell me anything, but now with the score in hand, I can see the different melodies used with the cross-references all over, and I can follow the progress of the sonata form in the first movement, which is so ingeniously developed that one can barely trace it, but it still follows a very logical consistency. All this I could only see when I read the score! Now this is one of my very favourite works of music!

The symphonies of Gustav Mahler can be listened to on more than one level. As complex and forward-looking as they are, they nonetheless can connect at an elemental, "visceral" level for many listeners.

However, for a fuller appreciation of both the details and the profundity which are in these works, as well as for insight into Mahler's creative processes, some outside help is required, and this help is usually not forthcoming from the liner or booklet notes that accompany recordings, or from the program notes that accompany performances. This is precisely where this excellent book by Constantin Floros fits in.

First, a few words on what this book is not, and does not purport to be. It is not a comparative discography of available performances; in fact, it neither lists nor recommends recordings. Second, it is not a critical biography of Mahler; the interested reader is referred to the outstanding (but much more expensive) volumes by Henry-Louis de la Grange, available elsewhere at Amazon.com. Third, it is not a psychological study of Mahler, relating, as such a study might, such connections between the man and the music; an excellent small volume by Theodor Adorno, "Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy" covers that territory very well, and is also available elsewhere at Amazon.com. Fourth, and finally, it is not a set of musical scores of the symphonies; those as well, published by Dover in inexpensive paperback editions, can be found at Amazon.com

So, just what is this Floros book? It is the perfect companion for the serious Mahlerite in understanding the genesis and the thematic, harmonic and interpretational details of each of Mahler's ten symphonies, and the interrelationships and comparisons among them. It has just enough of the material covered in the references noted above, along with detailed analyses of the symphonies, for each of them to be better understood and placed in historical and musical context by the listener. Its greatest insight into these symphonies comes largely from Floros' remarkable scholarship in tracking down all of the score notes that Mahler provided in his sketches, short scores and long scores, his correspondences with his wife, friends and interpreters, and their comments and observations as well. By piecing all of this research together, relying particularly heavily on Mahler's own notes, Floros has come up with a near-definitive look into Mahler's creative and interpretational processes (a term for such a look based on scholarship that Floros describes as "hermeneutics").

The book's publication date (1985 in the original German) means that it is the beneficiary of a series of events in the 1960's that opened the door to greatly improved accuracy in the study of this complex man and his equally complex music. First was the passage into the public domain of much of Mahler's own private writings, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Second was the agreement on the part of his widow, Alma Mahler-Werfel, to release other materials, particularly related to his unfinished 10th Symphony, for public scrutiny. Third was the availability of this material to the Englishman Deryck Cooke, and others, who provided performing versions of this final 10th Symphony so that the public at large could better judge the direction in which Mahler had been heading when his work was cut short by premature death. Floros pays great respect to, and provides excellent insight into, the work of Cooke in his (Floros') plan to describe the full symphonic output of Mahler.

This book is very liberally annotated, with briefly-scored examples as reference marks for understanding the interrelationships among the various musical themes, as well as end notes for each symphony and a detailed bibliography for further reading. While it helps to be able to read these brief bars of music, even those who cannot will benefit immensely from Floros' scholarship and fine, but nonetheless dense, writing in providing extramusical background and values for a better understanding of these remarkable symphonies which moves so many of us.

Without question, the single most valuable reference source for a fuller understanding of the Mahler symphonies. And a compact and inexpensive companion for the Mahlerite.

If you want to know how a Mahler symphony is put together and why it works, this is the only book that does it. Reading it with a score at hand is useful, but not necessary. Technical but worth it.

The book was translated very well. It broke each symphony down by movement and gave its history, as well as a breif analysis. I definite must for Mahler fans!

Musicologist and critic Deryck Cooke had that rare ability to communicate his enthusiasm for music and literature that would appeal to both the specialist and the layman. His tastes were vast and he could write about such diverse subjects as Delius' Violin Concerto, the works of the Brontes and the songs of Lennon and McCartney. He is perhaps best remembered for his (in his words) "performing version of the sketches of Mahler's 10th Symphony". He always made that distinction as he made it quite clear that only Mahler could complete the symphony. That he could even perform such a feat is a clear indication of his knowledge and love of Mahler's music. This present volume of his written as an introduction to Mahler's music has become a classic that still retains its freshness after 25 years. His clear writing style skillfully guides the listener through even the most thorniest aspects of Mahler's music. A book that should be on the shelf of any lover of Mahler's music or those approaching him afresh who want a sure and knowledgeable guide.

Cooke has an insight into the works and personality of Mahler as the 'completer' of his Tenth Symphony. This book is a brief guide of the life and works of the composer. Interesting biographical detail is interspersed with information about each symphony. The inclusion of the text of the songs is a helpful addition as are the words of Mahler's earliest symphonic composition 'Das Klagende Lied.' Certainly a work that can be read and re-read with pleasure.

This biography is an excellent introduction into the life of the composer Gustav Mahler. The creative process of his symphonies and his relationship with his wife, the free-spirited Alma, is revealed in great detail, and Franklin avoids any declaration of opinion, forming assumptions through thorough research. And the research comes from reliable resources (Alma's diaries, Mahler's letters, Bauer-Lechner's accounts), and Franklin is clear when the resource may not be all-together reliable.

I particularly appreciated the way he handled the hot topic of the detrimental relationship between Mahler and Alma. He claims that the uneasy marriage is due to the fault of both. Mahler wanted Alma to be an ideal wife, but she desired to be free. Some could say that she was an early feminist, but Franklin doesn't make that assertion. The reader is left to form his own opinion.

The storytelling is often very lucid simply by the careful arrangement of primary accounts, be they newspaper articles, memoirs, letters or diary entries.

The book is not a threatening size, but the content is not something that can be absorbed all in one sitting. Two-hundred pages probably isn't enough to explain all of Mahler's life, but I believe everything of general import is mentioned in this book and analysis is thorough and journalistically sound.

The first glance of this biography told me that what I was about to read was an incredabley detailed and devoted branch of modern, biographical literature (warning, have some prior basic knowledge of Mahler before reading!) Dr. Franklin has certainly shined in this exploration, which cerculates the success of a once dreamy, inspirational child, who became a more practical intellectual both as a composer and conducter. The relationships between Mahler's life and his music are forefronted amongst a variety of primrary and secondary sources, including people most close to the impatient, hot-tempered perfectionist, contrasted with those who simply try to interperate his ideas. The course of development is fine-tuned, also, with several illustrated sources, indicating the places where Mahler had worked and their significances. Within this course embodies the causes and effects of his ideas. Austria-Hungary was riddled with anti-semites, which affected Mahler in more ways than one. Vienna, deaths, modernists, religion, nature, nationalism, and other aspects are explored due to their effect, making this exceptional innovator the eclectic, liberal idealist he would increasingly become. These aspects are brought to us honestly and without bias, which is one of Franklins' great assests. The biography is backed up extensively by quotes, especially from the accounts of de La Grange and auxiliary versions. An introduction prepares the reader with Franklin's task throughout the book, accompanied by the usual notes and useful aids, especially for readers wishing to pursue their interests towards other texts.
The special aspect of theis book is the story being told as it was, with the relationships between Mahler and his wife, the people he worked with, friends, family, and even counter-examinations, where no bias lies. The criticisms are presented to us as well as more valuable accounts recording Mahler's abnormal personality in a way in which we can truely get to grips with this man's philosophy, stringing his ideas in juxtaposition and calculating his aims and methods of going about them. If you like song, dance, long and flowing melodies and richly expressive harmonies, then you will certainly take to the nine symphonies of Mahler. Mahler's sense of colour ranks with the great masters of orchestration, and the spirit of song permeates his art, taking inspirations from cultures of countries like China, with the poems of Li Po. You can learn much more about his sources of inspiration, the times in which he composed, and how those times affected Mahler throughout this biography. Franklin brings forthe descriptions and induces two-way notions to get the reader thinking about these sources, as well as picturing Vienna at the turn of the century and the changing, post-romantic era.
Mahler's life is remarkable, and Peter Franklin has clearly gone to trouble not to offend the person that he was and became, acknowledging the borders that shield wrongs lines of thought. For example, Mahler's wife (Alma) insists "a person should remain a 'person' and not be frozen into a legend, turned into an insufferable plaster-bust". Although we tend to think of composers as slightly odd, abnormal and completely different to ourselves, we must remember that they're still human beings. Franklin injects other points which back this up, touching on Mahler's love for nature and spirit, as well as art, love and religion. I have presented enough of the core elements of the biography, and so what is left is to declare the book as an excellent portrayal, using a variety of techniques in order to capture Mahler the Musician, and the real Mahler, whom always questioned the relationship of his life and his music. The book tends to display thoughts of irony, especially about Mahler's death, and would suit any musicain wishing to broaden thier philosophical answers to why we, and issues like those in Mahler's competitive life, exist. Indeed, any philosopher with enough scape to facilitate a focussed examination of a famous composer would find this biography useful. The book, however, does tend to be slightly uneasy about its purpose (in relation to two major preoccupations which are induced by two statements highlighted in the introduction). Franklin acknowledges this, and says there lies a knot of wide "interrelated issues concerning notions about 'art' and 'genious' and the ways in which they were mediated in the individual experience and in public creative activity in nineteenth-century Europe". That does not mean, though, that one can't interperat Franklins' notions; I found that the concepts of the string of issues formed neater towards the end by re-examining the two statements previously mentioned. That way, synoptically, one can focuss and understand the purpose of the accounts and methods in which the author put them to us, so that we may assemble the notions to acheive the resolution which every reader desires. If you are intellectual enough to percept the outcomes of this intelligent journey, simply jump on board!

Published last year (2002) were two significant resources on Gustav Mahler. One of these - a paperback edition of Donald Mitchell's "The Mahler Companion" - has already been appraised by me, and found to be a superb "companion." The other is this Festschrift volume, edited by Karen Painter, the "published" part of the 2002 Bard Music Festival celebrating Mahler.

The Mitchell and Painter books are similar in some respects, in that both contain essays by expert Mahlerians incorporating good historical/musicological research. But there are also differences, making the books complementary. Where the Mitchell book is broad, with chapters covering all of Mahler's works, the Painter book is more tightly focused, with fewer essays on a narrower range of topics. Part of the appeal of this Painter book is the inclusion of reprints of a vast array of historic criticism that provides an understanding of how Mahler was perceived and received during his lifetime.

Painter's book is worth having for Leon Botstein's lead-off essay ("Whose Gustav Mahler?") alone. A virtuosic work, it earns separate commentary later. But first, briefer comments about some of the book's other strong points.

The first section (CONTEXT AND IDEOLOGIES) contains two fascinating essays that are closely related: Charles S. Maier's "Mahler's Theater: The Performative and the Political in Central Europe, 1890-1910" and Karen Painter's "The Aesthetics of Mass Culture: Mahler's Eighth Symphony and Its Legacy." The thrust of the Maier essay leads naturally into the Painter one.

Working backwards, there are two well-known facts regarding Mahler's Eighth Symphony. The first is that his Eighth Symphony doesn't fit into any convenient scheme for allocating his symphonies by style and content; the Eighth Symphony is a "sui generis" work, powerful in its effect but somewhat baffling in terms of its rightful place in his symphonic canon. The second is that the premiere of the work, in Munich in 1910, was a highly-promoted event, one of the most significant and certainly one of the best documented musical events of the 20th century.

Maier sets the cultural stage that made such a work not only possible but perhaps inevitable as well. It is a fact that music and drama became stages for the "politicization of culture" in the late Habsburg Empire of Mahler's time. This was an empire on the imminent verge of collapse; a manifestation of this imminency was that political parties of every stripe seized upon culture (including music) for their individualistic ends.

Mahler was, inevitably, swept up into this politico-cultural maelstrom, both as conductor and as composer. What he performed at the Vienna Court Opera, and when and why, helps to understand both his political leanings (mildly leftist-Socialist) and, at least in part, his possible motivations for composing hia Eighth Symphony: As a gift to the Austrian people so that they could participate, to his way of thinking, in this "political elevation" of "music as mass culture." And participate they did: Not only was the Munich premiere a cultural phenomenon for its (or any) time, but the work, as political culture, was, for a period, co-opted by both the left and the right. Had Mahler not been Jewish, one can only shudder at how National Socialists might have co-opted the work for their own political ends, a fearsome thought left dangling in Painter's essay.

The final section (MAHLER'S GERMAN-LANGUAGE CRITICS) contains many gems translated into English for the first time. Covering his career as composer and conductor, from sources both friendly and hostile, we get a fuller glimpse of how Mahler was assessed in his own time. The reviews (and obituaries as well) come from all four points of the critical compass: favorable and informed, uncritically favorable and thus critically useless, hostile and critically off-target, and hostile but with an informed understanding. This is as evenly balanced as such an anthology could be.

The fourth category brings us full circle, to Botstein's bravura (but challenging) essay. He posits that hostile but informed commentary was the "jumping-off" point for Theodor Adorno's writings on Mahler. To borrow from Botstein, Mahler might best be understood through the lens of his most dedicated critics; "informed hostility can reveal more acutely than deferential praise the character and virtues of the music."

Botstein's own jumping-off point is a search for an explanation for the enduring interest in Mahler's music. The initial upsurge in interest that began, largely, with Leonard Bernstein very publically championing Mahler, today, nearly a half-century later, shows no sign of slowing, and is in fact increasing, with no obvious end in sight. How, then, to explain the phenomenon?

A key Botstein point is that the 1960s brought us more than Bernstein and a renaissance of performances and and a flood of recordings; it also marked the emergence of Adorno's contributions to "Mahlerology" with the publication of his "Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy." By using "negation" (his cramped "negative dialectics") to "invert" the arguments of Mahler's harshest critics, Adorno found not only "fault lines" in their analyses but totally fresh, if idiosyncratic, insights into characterizing Mahler's music.

A uniquely Adorno insight (in fact, a chapter in his book) was that Mahler was to composing what Flaubert was to writing, with "Madame Bovary" as an exemplary case. Botstein takes this further by suggesting that the novel as perfected by Flaubert served as a written vessel into which the reader could pour himself proactively, as if a protagonist, and that there are clear parallels to this proactivity when listening to Mahler's music.

This is a provocative thought: The listener as active participant. But in a way it was preordained when Mahler eschewed descriptive programs while writing music of some "vernacularity" and ambiguity about that vernacularity. This leaves open the door to our "individuating" our responses to Mahler's music (something which, as Botstein makes clear, is not possible for the programmatic music of Richard Strauss, an obvious counterexample).

A thoughtful and challenging essay, and a very worthwhile book.

This excellent volume was prepared in conjunction with the Bard College's recent Mahler week as part of its Music Festival. It is quite simply a treasure trove of articles for those interested in Mahler's music. Not just the music but cultural , religious , political and social aspects of Mahler's period and how they affected each other are covered. The articles are in depth but not too overly technical so the novice should have no problem enjoying them.
One of the books most fascinatiting aspects is its later half where contemporary reviews of Mahler's music from America and Germany are reprinted. Most of the German reviews appear in translation for the first time. All combine to give a fuller picture of Mahler's world and how it influenced him both as a composer and a person as well as the effects of his music on future generations. We tend to see Mahler's influence as coming some 50 years after his death when recordings made his music more widely available. Several of the writers offer a corrective and show that from the period of his own lifetime Mahler's aristic influences were already spreading and taking hold. With 408 well filled pages the volume really is a bargin in every way.

The subject of this classic of musical analysis is the complicated phenomenon of Mahler's music and our response to it. The treatment is philosophical/psychological/analytic and the abstractness and complexity of the prose is typical of what one would find in a doctoral thesis, except that it is beautifully written (and Jephcott's translation is itself a work of art).

To introduce the subject let me start with an experience of my own, which is no doubt typical. My introduction to Mahler's music was through the Ninth and Tenth symphonies, which is like starting a mountain climb already at the top of the mountain. I was 22 and naturally quite bowled over. Imagine my chagrin then at hearing the Fourth for the first time -- what is this Haydnesque genre piece that ends with a naive song? How could it have been written by the same composer? As always, though, Mahler's music works on one's subconscious and a few days later I felt compelled to listen again, and what a revelation this was! The first movement, in particular, is absolutely extraordinary. It starts with a curious repeated figure, four flutes in unison playing fifths plus a grace note, accompanied by bells; this leads directly into the deceptively classical-sounding main theme and reappears throughout the first movement (and also in the last) as a kind of magic talisman with multiple meanings. The main theme is followed by a striking sunny interlude in A, with bases rocking pizzicato in fifths, a scurrying violin figure, and violas trilling like insects singing in a meadow. I had the impression of an adult and child walking through a field on a summer day. There's a brief change to the minor, then some high sustained notes in the flutes. These are repeated more emphatically by high clarinets, heralding an ominous change, as if the bucolic scene were being overrun by scudding clouds. Things are not what they seemed, and we don't know where we are! Somehow, we've gotten lost in a forest inhabited by goblins, spooky though not actually menacing. There's a swirling sensation accompanied by dark intimations in the bass, chromatic muted trumpets, and repeated sustained high chords in the flutes; the effect is weirdly haunting. After a while a commotion in C develops, drums crescendo, and then suddenly pure terror -- a high trumpet playing fortissimo. By some process of pure magic, the music suddenly recovers its former equanimity and adult and child (who turn out to be one and the same) find themselves back in the sunny meadow. What sublime irony, and how true to human nature -- when we see something uncanny that disturbs us, we try to put it behind us, forget it. Mahler alone is capable of evoking such feelings. Only a magician could have written the Fourth, and Mahler's achievement here is just as great as in the very different late works, not to mention the middle symphonies.

I could cite other personal examples, as could any Mahlerian. We might disagree about particulars, but each of us carries away something essential from Mahler's music and is enriched by it. And we are quite confident that the experience is qualitatively the same from listener to listener.

Adorno approaches the subject of our response to Mahler's music and what it means through his own experiences of it. But what a listener! It's as if a very learned friend with a doctorate in Mahler stopped by to discuss the subject over tea and ended up staying all week. A gifted writer and philosopher, as well as a professionally trained composer who studied with Berg, Adorno discusses all the symphonies except the Tenth and is always interesting even when you disagree with him. Musicological jargon is mostly avoided, although philosophical-rhetorical terms abound (he loves the word "aporia").

Two caveats. First, the treatment is vulnerable to the charge of "over-intellectualization". One recalls Mahler's reply to William Ritter, an early admirer:"... I find myself much less complicated than your image of me, which could almost throw me into a state of panic." It seems that we, and particularly Adorno, are the complicated ones. We project our feelings onto the music, which seems to invite them to an extent that would surprise even the composer. The mystery of why this is so, and the multifariousness of Mahler, the capacity of his music to be offensive, highly questionable, fascinating, and sublime all at the same time, form the subject of the book.

Second, and more seriously, he disparages Mahler's "ominous positivity" and thereby underestimates the Eighth Symphony at least (readers may agree that the finale of the Seventh is problematic; he does not discuss the extraordinary Tenth, which achieves a wholly serene, positive conclusion). But the positive in Mahler is an essential part of his dynamic disequilibrium; without it, there would be no aporia and the music would degenerate into mere cynicism. Most of the symphonies follow a pattern -- conflict, followed by attempted reconciliation and reconstruction. This process is entirely sincere, and if it fails even in Mahler's hands, it's because he's attempting to do the impossible. Even in the Sixth, the most "tragic" and "despairing" of the symphonies, a good performance will reveal powerful updrafts. To deny the positive in Mahler is to chop him in two. That Adorno's book is nonetheless required reading is testimony to the value of his other observations.

Who then is this book for? It is best for Mahlerians of long standing, those who are well past the first flush of discovery and have regained their musical equilibrium so to speak, and who want to put Mahler in perspective, or even just "share" opinions with an uncommonly intelligent and sensitive critic.

If you know anything about Theodor Adorno, you might well be familiar with the entire edifice of western cultural and philosophic thought; Kant,Hegel,Kierkegaard,and Marx,the history of art,literature,painting and music. Less film,a realm Adorno never got to know. Here in Mahler,we have a concise profile of this one time neglected composer, long misunderstood,even today. I recall a rehearsal with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic who couldn't quite understand Bernstein's raving from the heart,for clarity yet passion. Adorno knew Mahler's art much better than Mahler ever did for we learn this from Adorno, that Mahler simply abandoned himself to his own intuition to resolve his creative problems. Each chapter in this masterwork in miniature is self-sustaining. In the chapter "Tone" Adorno reveals the basic music materials of Mahler his orchestral pallete. The high positioned violins,in uncomfortable registers where they loose their souls to a menanced, shrill, thin timbre. The string section for Mahler is creatively undisciplined to begin with, each playing differing roles, each contributing its own independence, as in the opening of Mahler's "Ninth" Symphony, the melody tossed between the violins, tremoli in the violas, and the contrbass above or equal in register to all with harmonics. Mahler's progressiveness was in pure content,he was not one to pursue "tangible innovations" but secured his tenuous position with the diatonic mode,familiar scales and harmonic surfaces. A chiaroscuro of means (schatten) the shadows he creates with reliefs of foreground and background. Tonality is not so much renewed as an unheard voice enters the stage, Mahler's voice cracks,is overstrethched, the various woodwind passages like in the "Scherzo" of his "Seventh" Symphony. The forced tone is itself an expressive innovation of his own making a premonition of the darker legubrious brooding up the road in the orchestral works of Arnold Schoenberg. In fact we find ev! ery bit of these darker pages in Mahler before the horrors which await the citizens of Eastern Europe,even up to Bosnia. Adorno's focus is always how Mahler creates meaning within familiar confines,the roads that lead to simple harmonies. He disrupts the stability of rhythm,of gesture that once was, the familiar in Mahler's orchestral context becomes something quite different, no longer can the romantic symphony depend on redemption. Bruckner could depend on this, for he already found his spirituality, whereas Mahler spent his life in pursuit of it . Adorno in the chapter "Novel" reveals the non-progressive side of Mahler.He needed to depend on some stability so his musical characters come and go untarnished at times, the lowlife natural trombone,to the intimate/elegant solo violin, and the cracking horn moments in Mahler. This is where we find "Stufenreichtum" the richness of texture,the musical thread running from the full orchestral (tutti) everyone's voice heard, to the single voice the solos. This is Mahler's context from the distance "in sehr weiter entfernung" to the immediate. It is this expressive immediacy, he learned from Beethoven that gives way to developed chaos as his life wears away. The overblown vacuous "Eighth Symphony" resolved nothing for his real creativity, and the "Ninth" the ideas begin toward the irrational,Mahler is serious even in the "Rondo-Burleske" from the "Ninth",the almost improvised gesture reminded me of Charles Ives,who was writing just about the same time. Adorno's chapter "Variant-Form" we learn Mahler's technique progressed away from what an academic would consider "good" Mahler needn't be as glib as Richard Strauss,nor as consummate as Wagner. He learned music in another way and pointed toward a profound goal. A goal in which his music simply breaks its own voice "Durchbruch" as Adorno mentions where there was no comfort in traditional moments. Adorno opens thi! s expressive vault of Mahler and we can see Mahler again. As recently as Pierre Boulez in his ongoing recordings with The Chicago Symphony we find a Mahler quite as a turning point to the 20th century. Well Boulez brings Mahler into our century whether we want him there or not. Boulez brings a sublime ugliness at times to Mahler's simplicity, the functional predictable movements of harmony creates a kind of timbral dirt. Mahler wanted this. No we are not done with his marvelous "Symphonies" we can contemplate them for some time.

This is a must for those wishing to study and understand Mahler's Immense third symphony. The print is very large and readable. Though I wish there were more translations for the German text, there is enough in the parts themselves to take a guess. Mahler's 4th is a charming piece. I love it for it's sincerity and modesty. Being the shortest and "simplestic" orchestration, it makes a great introductory Mahler symphony.

The score is very durable and is large and easy to read. The price is wonderful -- for the starving music student, particularly!

I highly reccommend this score to professionals and those adventurous listers out there.

Listening to Mahler's 3rd symphony is an inexorable experience. Reading the score while listening is ecstatic. It adds a lot to the enjoyment of the music if you have a copy of the score in hand. You can relate another sensory organ to the music, elevating the experience to greater heights.

Before I had the score, all I knew was there were several French horns playing the opening call in the 3rd (M3) but I know now that there are exactly 8 horns playing in unison. Like Aaron Copland said in his book 'What to Listen for in Music', "If there exists a more noble sound than eight horns singing a melody fortissimo in unison, I have never heard it". I think he's referring to M3's opening horn call. Magnificent! And now with the score in hand, I know exactly how the music was put on the score by Mahler, it's notation, expressive remarks, etc.

In some books that I read or even in the liner books that comes with the CDs, there is often reference to the measures in the music. Without the score, you will never know which measure that they are talking about. If you're really a Mahler fan, or for that matter, if you are really into a certain piece of music, buy the score. Believe me, it will add to your enjoyment.

However, some of you may think that it's a waste of time since you do not know how to read music. Yes, knowing how to read music will help a lot buy hey! reading music is not difficult to learn. All you need is to have the passion for music inside you and the passion to explore the music. If you have this, there's nothing that can be in your way.

The Dover series of scores are mostly reliable. Commercially, they are the best there is.

This book is fantastic-an excellent documentation of one of the greatest composers of all time (if not THE greatest).

This collection of essays, by a wide range of contributors, adds considerably to our collective knowledge of Gustav Mahler, his life and times and the cultural milieu in which he worked as composer and conductor, and of course his music.

The editors, as they note in the Introduction, provided very loose guidelines to the contributing essayists: Beyond refereeing the broad topics for inclusion, the editors largely gave carte blanche to the contributors regarding style and content. This "looseness of control" has resulted in a volume of both very considerable strengths (some of which I highlight here) and a few perplexing weaknesses and oversights which I allude to at the end of my comments.

The "logical bookends" of this volume are an opening essay by Leon Botstein, titled "Gustav Mahler's Vienna," and a closing essay by Wilfrid Mellers, titled "Mahler and the Great Tradition: Then and Now." The former sets the cultural, socio-political and philosophical stage of fin-de-siècle Vienna onto which Mahler entered, and the latter nicely summarizes how Mahler might fit into a continuum of musical composition and practice that preceded and succeeded him. (This new paperback edition also includes. at the end, two new essays, not present in the hardback edition, covering recollections of his daughter, Anna, and recently discovered Mahler "juvenilia" in the form early chamber music and songs.) In between these bookends, all of Mahler's music, and much about his life and times, and how he and his music were accepted (or not accepted) inside and outside Vienna, are covered.

The essays regarding Mahler's music are largely - and splendidly - informative, and provide alternative insights into the music not necessarily covered by the well-known analyses of Theodor Adorno, Constantin Floros and Henry-Louis de La Grange. (Interestingly, many of the music-analysis contributors reference Adorno's "Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy." Perhaps Adorno's time has come as well, some 40 years after his writing this difficult-but-epiphanic work.) But at least three of them are (to me, anyway) frustratingly idiosyncratic. Peter Franklin's essay on the Third Symphony ("A Stranger's Story: Programmes, Politics, and Mahler's Third Symphony") is heavy on largely-irrelevant minutiae and very light on certain matters of true import, such as the significance of the final Adagio of the work. David Matthews' "The Sixth Symphony," by his choice, largely limits his comments to the two well-known areas of conjecture/dispute: the ordering of the two inner (Scherzo, Andante) movements and the matter of whether the final movement should have two hammer blows or three. (I am personally in agreement with both of his choices, but that is largely beside the point.) And Colin Matthews' "The Tenth Symphony" is largely a technical analysis of the available raw materials of the work left by Mahler for realization by others but very little about what interests most Mahlerites regarding this final work: A detailed comparison of the various "performing versions" or "realizations" that exist.

Among the many personal "resonances" for me are the following: A finely-crafted analysis of Mahler's "Opus 1," his "Das klagende Lied" (but absent the fact that a splendid recording of the 1997-discovered Ur-text score has been made by Kent Nagano); (finally) a musicological connection between Mahler and Hector Berlioz, by way of how the widely-separated octaves (of trombone pedal tones and high flutes) in the "Hostias" of the Berlioz Requiem might have influenced Mahler when he was composing the first "Nachtmusik" movement of his Seventh Symphony; and a fascinating footnote to the analysis of the final Adagio of the Ninth Symphony, where some apparently reliable documentation is provided for Mahler's awareness of the famous hymn, "Abide with Me," the tune that always comes to mind every time I listen to this gorgeous hymn-like passage.

Elsewhere (and scattered throughout various essays) are frequent allusions to certain parallels between Mahler and Charles Ives. (They both wrote "music about music," incorporated "vernacular" music in their works, were almost-simultaneous "polytonalists" and of course contemporaries. The matter of whether Mahler had been aware of the music of Ives is put more in the affirmative than I've seen heretofore; hopefully this is the result of recent research about which there is more to follow.) Similarly, there are frequent parallels drawn between Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich; the case for Shostakovich being the logical (and most significant by far) successor to Mahler is well-drawn without overlooking the obvious differences between them.

There is an intriguing chapter on some not-so-obvious parallels between Mahler and Debussy (although the overt pentatonicism of "late" Mahler is made elsewhere, most obviously in the essay on "Das Lied von der Erde"). And, for me, one of the best contributions is by Edward R. Reilly, in his essay on "Mahler in America."

The volume is exceedingly well-annotated, with liberal footnotes (many, such as the "Abide with Me" one, of considerable length), and, at the back, a full bibliography of source materials, a detailed index of works, and a general index as well. Clearly, a lot of work (both scholarship and "routine editorial") has gone into the preparation of this valuable resource.

The book is not perfect in all respects, at least from my own personal point of view. Biographical details are not its strength, but there are the volumes by La Grange and Blaukopf & Blaukopf to compensate. (Nonetheless, I would have liked to have seen a contribution by Herta Blaukopf, who is as knowledgeable about Mahler's Vienna Conservatory period as any.) But, as I noted at the outset, its very considerable strengths greatly outweigh its relatively minor weaknesses. If you consider yourself a Mahlerite, this book belongs in your library, alongside your copies of Adorno, Blaukopf, Floros and La Grange.

Gustav Mahler is one of the last truely great symphony writers. His orchestrations are vast and his use of tone shows his true mastery of composition. This edition is the perfect book for any music lover, especially Mahler fans. It is small enough to slip easily into a purse or jacket pocket for use in the concert hall or in a bookbag or backpack for school. It is ideal for the professional conductor and compsoer as well as the music fan who wishes to own a written copy of the greatest symphony ever written. Also, its wide margins are perfect for note taking or analysis. This is truely the perfect score for the music lover. I own about 5 and plan on adding to my collection very shortly. Other great Dover items include the miniature scores for Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies, which are among the standard literature for every major orchestra worldwide, and the miniature score of Mozart's powerful Requiem Mass in D minor.