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The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 Kindle Edition

by Stephen Johnson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 102 ratings
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This “thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8 . . . makes a strong case for its quality . . . we shall never listen to it in the same way again” (Guardian, UK).

On September 12, 1910, Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony had its world premiere at Munich’s new Musik Festhalle. It was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. An array of royals and stars from the musical and literary world were in attendance, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius.

In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships.

Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.
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  1. Print length
    311 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
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  4. Publisher
    The University of Chicago Press
  5. Publication date
    October 20, 2020
  6. File size
    1199 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A new and different kind of book about Mahler. . . . This is a book ‘about’ the Eighth, rather than ‘on’ the Eighth, with this work as the focal point, rather than the subject, of this fascinating account. The piece and its premiere serve a center of gravity for an exceptionally engaging and wide-ranging exploration of Mahler’s late music, his fraught relationship with his wife, his engagement with philosophy, his place in one of the richest moments in cultural history, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and much more."  ― Kenneth Woods, artistic director of Colorado MahlerFest

"[A] thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8. . . . Johnson makes a strong case for its quality, musically and philosophically, in this magnificent, strongly argued and yet wonderfully subtle study. Whatever our final judgment may be on the Eighth, having read Johnson, we shall never listen to it in the same way again." -- John Banville ― Guardian

“Johnson has written an engaging and enthusiastic account of the Eighth. . . .  Johnson puts the symphony squarely in the context of Mahler’s musical career, and is happy to share his passionate keenness for the music.”

― Spectator

"Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is an extraordinary creature, vast in its ambitions and almost megalomaniacal in its demands. In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson leads us through all the complexities of the work with skill and sensitivity. It’s clearly a piece that he reveres. In its embrace of joy and spiritual uplift, it has been the most controversial of Mahler’s symphonies in our own day, lacking that juxtaposition of sublimity and the banal that makes the composer such a postmodern pin-up. Johnson’s defense involves not only a journey through the piece itself, underlining the subtlety and complexity that defy the overkill; but also a look at the world from which it sprang and the extraordinary and tangled personal story which somehow, despite all that objective joy, it still embodies." ― Financial Times

“In a new book, The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, the British composer and critic Stephen Johnson frames the symphony around the relationship between Mahler and his amorous wife, Alma, whom he feared losing. Much of Mahler’s music is death haunted. The Eighth stands out for its utter excess of love, the force beyond comprehension.” -- Mark Swed ― Los Angeles Times

"There have been many books on [Mahler] but Stephen Johnson's new volume is unique, concentrating on the composer's mighty Eighth Symphony (the 'Symphony of a Thousand'), setting the piece and Mahler's work in general within the context of the world and society he lived in. This is a book written with both passion and scholarship that will send listeners to the composer afresh." -- Barry Forshaw ― Classical CD Choice

“Johnson writes vividly and personally about Mahler’s gigantic Eighth Symphony and its extravagant 1910 Munich premiere while also refusing to turn a blind eye to the excesses and chicaneries of the age. . . . This is a tale of the sordid and the sublime told by an enthusiastic and perceptive critic, who in the end leaves the reader in no doubt about the glories of the Eighth—a towering choral masterpiece presented on the cusp of a disastrous decade.”

― John Deathridge, King’s College London

"Sometimes, through the expanse of time, classical music can appear like a placid ocean. But underneath there is always tremendous activity. Stephen Johnson, in his book The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, shows us how active things were with Gustav Mahler while composing and conducting his titanic choral Eighth Symphony." ― The Classical Station

About the Author

Stephen Johnson is a writer and composer, as well as a regular broadcaster for BBC Radio. He is the author of Bruckner Remembered and How Shostakovich Changed My Mind. He writes for the Independent, Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, and Gramophone.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08BG74GRT
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of Chicago Press; First edition (October 20, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 20, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1199 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 311 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 102 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
102 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Frank Charles Blackburn
5.0 out of 5 stars In depth understanding of Mahler and Thomas Mann.
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2021
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Very interesting. It gives incite to what Austria was like just before WW 1.
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Sam Kellington
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully told story of great music and an amazing life!
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2020
This is a skillfully presented account of the premiere and ideas behind the Symphony No. 8 by Gustav Mahler. The book reads like a novel at times offering compelling perspectives on virtually every aspect of this great choral symphony from the time of composition through the rehearsal, premiere and even beyond to Mahler’s work that followed. Stephen Johnson takes us through the symphony with an emphasis on how the texts are set to tone. Surrounding that analysis is biographical material that makes personal this astonishingly cosmic music. It is true that, as mentioned in other reviews, there is a good deal of speculation provided by the author, but this is smart speculation that helps us consider possibilities that add to the richness of the subject. Highly recommended!
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Sgt. Orville King
1.0 out of 5 stars A TOTAL waste of time and money!
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2020
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If you already own the de la Grange biography of Mahler, Alma Mahler's memoirs of her husband, or Bruno Walter's memoirs of his friend Mahler, you will learn virtually nothing new from this worthless book. In fact, it seems as if the author read all three and simply paraphrased what was in them concerning Mahler's 8th Symphony and Mahler in general - just like a lazy 9th grade student would do with Cliff's Notes. I would have thought that with all the biographies of Mahler now available, that the author would have sought out letters or remembrances from people who participated in the premiere performance. After all, there were more than 1,000 performers on the stage. But only the few descriptions by people at the premiere that are already mentioned in every book about Mahler are included. The author didn't uncover a single new bit of information about the first performance in Munich. Instead we are subjected to the author's meaningless speculation about events in Mahler's life. Yawn... Who cares? I truly regret buying this and am going to donate it to my local library. If I could give this zero stars I would. Please save your money and buy one of the other books I mentioned.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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rafa
3.0 out of 5 stars Aporta pocu
Reviewed in Spain on September 7, 2022
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Foi un regalu a un fan de Gustav Mahler. Topolu enteteníu y prestosu de lleer, pero parez que, pal expertu, nun aporta nada relevante.
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avid reader
5.0 out of 5 stars if you wish to study Mahler and his music, this is the book for you
Reviewed in France on June 29, 2021
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parfait
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Reader/listener
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent study of Mahler and the 8th Symphony
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2020
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I couldn’t agree more fully or warmly with the writer of the first review here: Stephen Johnson’s new book is a triumph.

It’s not surprising, because Johnson always writes so well. One of BBC Radio 3’s finest broadcasters, you can almost ‘hear’ his voice in the prose here – intelligent, measured, informed, but above all full of passion and enthusiasm for the subject, supremely accessible.

Four features of this book strike me as especially noteworthy.

First, whereas many commentators apply preconceived ideas about Mahler to his music, seeing how well particular works respond to tick-boxes, Johnson explores Mahler’s evolving mindset and sound-world from the ground up. He explores the sequence of works written from the 8th Symphony until his death, looking (above all in the case of that seminal 8th) closely at the musical and textual evidence first and reaching conclusions only later. This is surprisingly rare in writing about music for a wide audience, but it credits readers with intelligence, and is surely a model of writing engagingly and meaningfully for readers who care about music but may not be able to follow its technicalities fully.

Secondly, it locates the 8th Symphony within the working pattern of Mahler’s life, composing and revising in the summer break but otherwise busy as an internationally celebrated conductor as the ‘day job’. This brings the most fascinating juxtaposition between the often gloriously affirmative content of the 8th Symphony, written in 1906, and the circumstances of its premiere in Munich four years later. By that point Mahler was a troubled man, one of Freud’s clients, in declining health, and composing music of a very different character. Johnson modestly notes in the foreword that ‘if I have related [the story of Mahler’s fortunes in 1910] half as well as it deserves, the reader’s time will not be completely wasted.’ He has done – the tale is extraordinary.

Thirdly, Johnson has a sure command of historical context, and an almost novelistic ability to evoke (via visual art such as that of Klimt and the work of writers such as Zweig) the time and place of the 8th Symphony’s premiere. There is an excellent chapter exploring the various ways in which the work might be seen – as a German composer’s work, as a Viennese composer’s work, and as a Jewish outsider’s work. As he makes plain, the truth is more complex than any one pigeon-hole would merit. Mahler would have approved of this humanistic breaking down of categories, surely; one of the most chilling insights in this chapter is that the young Hitler came to Vienna in 1907, while Mahler was just about to leave the city to take up a post in New York. ‘It is possible that Mahler saw Hitler’, Johnson writes, ‘selling his watercolours of the city sights, on one of his walks along the Ringstrasse.’ This makes Johnson’s book part of a thoughtful, non-partisan endeavour to re-examine the nature of national identity at a time when non-partisanship and an awareness of complexity could hardly be more humanly important.

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, this loving case-study of the 8th Symphony has the intellectual and emotional honesty, and the admiration, not to suggest definitive answers. It leaves the work, and Maher’s music generally, both clearer in the reader’s mind and inviting even more urgent questions than before.

What could be a greater tribute than that? A book to be recommended with the greatest enthusiasm.
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graham worden
5.0 out of 5 stars After 50 years of listening to it, and performing in it, the eighth now makes perfect sense.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 4, 2021
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For a quick comparison I reread Deryck cooke’s description of the eighth in his Introduction to the music of Mahler (Faber). He fails to account for the (at least to this Anglo Saxon) sheer ODDITY of part 2... the Goethe... in contrast to the first part (veni, veni) which is so much easier to “get” as a universal statement. I have never found it easy to reconcile the first part with the second. All that Latin abstraction, but then all that German scene-painting. They have always seemed like chalk and cheese. I have often had the sensation, when part 2 begins, of having moved out of a cathedral and into a cinema. But Stephen Johnson has solved the puzzle for me. Plato’s symposium! On page 44 of the paperback, Johnson quotes from this, and neatly skewers the connecting impulse: “ desire itself...is the ladder on which we climb from the physical to the spiritual”. Goethe’s ideal that draws us on is simply platonic. Just as the first part is - where although the text is Latin and quasi-Christian the prayer is to the logos, rather than to some anthropos, and is platonic. The whole scheme of the eighth, if it has any philosophical base, is platonic, with Eros in charge. The first part is like an invocation of the ideal light, and just that.. ecstatic prayer. the second part is the necessarily cinematic narrative of us all FINALLY getting out into the light at last, through effort and sheer desire. It is like being led, emblematic scene by scene, from the shadow-play at the back of plato’s Cave and out into the dazzling REAL light. Another key to connecting part one with part two, effective for myself, was johnson’s Pointing out that the English translation of Thomas Mann’s “death in Venice” - thanks to the translator’s peculiar omission - misses a crucial final element at the moment of aschenbach’s death - that aschenbach “gets up to follow” tadzio. Which puts Eros back into the very last moment of aschenbach’s life.

I still don’t think you can QUITE resolve the emotional plummet after the overwhelming first part of the eighth, but thanks to this brilliant book I can now completely see a possible seamlessness, which is Eros drawing us through every aspect of the symphony towards the eternal (platonic) ideal.

I have been a more or less fanatical Mahler listener since the early nineteen seventies - seeing Klemperer conduct Mahler 2 as a lad - and a choir singer in the eighth on one thrilling occasion, and only now does the whole of the eighth symphony make proper emotional and intellectual sense. I didn’t think anything was going to radically enhance my lifelong devotion to Mahler’s music, but this book did. Tremendous!
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ISV
4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough in depth appraisal with useful personal details of the composer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2020
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This is a very detailed, in depth study of this symphony along with extracts and relevant personal experiences of the composer, particularly at the time of composing the symphony. I can only admire the knowledge of the author and the comprehensive nature of the appraisal. The insight into Mahler's setting of Veni, Creator Spiritu and the final scene of Goethe's Faust was very helpful in appreciating the work However I personally found the book a bit overpowering and various analyses of the different parts difficult to follow as I listened to my recording of the symphony. I kept getting lost! I do prefer Mahler's non-choral works but this is no reflection on what is an excellent book.
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