Inside Mahler's Second Symphony: A Listener's Guide

Lawrence F. Bernstein

• Offers a holistic presentation of Mahler's Second Symphony, which approaches the work from many vantage points besides its central focus on the music itself: the composer's biography, his avant-garde leanings, his use of musical quotation for symbolic purposes, and his personal eschatology
• Features audio exemplification: 185 short examples, in addition to full movements
• Taps into the rich font of experiential knowledge concertgoers bring to their encounters with music, using examples meant to prod this latent store of musical awareness and move it closer to the level of intellectual consciousness
• Includes a glossary that explains technical terms clearly, avoiding cluttering the text with such explanations

  This guide introduces concertgoers, serious listeners, and music students to Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, one of the composer's most popular and most powerful works. It examines the symphony from several perspectives: Mahler's struggle to create what he called the New Symphony; his innovative approaches to traditional musical form; how he addressed the daunting challenges of writing music on a monumental scale; and how he dealt with the ineluctable force of Beethoven's symphonic precedent, especially that of the Ninth Symphony.
  
  The central focus of Inside Mahler's Second Symphony is on the music itself: how it works, how it works its magic on the listener, how it translates the earnest existential concerns that motivate the symphony into powerful and highly expressive music. Beyond this, the book ushers the Listener's Guide into the digital age with 185 dedicated audio examples. They are brief, accessible, and arranged to flow from one to another to simulate how the symphony might be presented in a classroom discussion. Each movement is also presented uninterrupted, accompanied by light annotations to remind the reader of what they learned about the movement. Each musical event in the uninterrupted presentation is keyed to its location in the orchestral score to accommodate readers who may wish to refer to one.
  
  An innovative combination of in-depth analysis and multimedia exploration, Inside Mahler's Second Symphony is a remarkable introduction to a masterpiece of the symphonic repertoire.