Revelge gustav mahler biography book

This is a very comprehensive and extremely fascinating portrait of one of my favourite composers: Gustav Mahler – or, as Debussy dismissively and purposefully mispronounced it, Gustav Mahleur.

At the very start of the book there is a quote from Goethe, about the “chief goal of biography”, which “appears to be this:”

To present the subject in his temporal circumstances, to show how these both hinder and help him, how he uses them to construct his view of man and the world, and how he, providing he is an artist, poet, or author, mirrors them again for others.

This is precisely what Fischer attempts to do in this quite enormous tome of a biography – it is just over pages long. It begins with an attempt at a description of the man himself: he moved at an “allegro furioso”; others having big problems keeping up with the stout and energised man, his “chin protruding like a battering ram and his head thrown back” – for those with interest in the topic this wi