Brenda Maddox
In A Word: My Wife
Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife
By Henry-Louis de La Grange, Günter Weiss, Knud Martner (edd) Antony Beaumont (Trans)
Faber & Faber 431pp £25 order from our bookshop
ARE COLLECTED LETTERS a superior form of biography? When as numerous and meticulously edited as these of Gustav Mahler, when they provide a time-capsule ride back to the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the answer must be a resounding yes.
Mahler's peripatetic profession is partly responsible. As an acclaimed conductor (much in demand for Mozart and Wagner, but also for his own work), he shuttled back and forth across fin-de-siècle Europe - Helsinki, Cologne, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam - in the first-class or sleeping compartments of railway carriages. At station stops
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