Without an understanding of the conflicts of Mahler's youth one cannot
truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song
cycles of his later years.
Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's
famous study of the composer's early life and music was greeted as a
major advance on its first appearance in 1958. Revised and updated in
the early 1980s, thispaperback edition includes a new introduction by
the author to bring this classic work once again to the forefront of
Mahler studies.
From his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian
empire, to a surveyof his early works, many now lost, Gustav Mahler: The
Early Years forms an indispensable prelude to the period of the great
compositions. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and
personality had their beginningsin his childhood and youth. Without
understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this
time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major
symphonies and song cycles of his later years.
DONALD MITCHELL was born in 1925. Two composers have been central to his
writings on music, Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten. His three studies
of Mahler, The Early Years (1958), The Wunderhorn Years (1975), and
Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985), are among the enduring
monuments of postwar Mahler literature. He was founder Professor of
Music at the University of Sussex (1971-76), was visiting Professor
atKing's College, London, and is currently a visiting Professor at the
Universities of Sussex and York.
