“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

"[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

"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

"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

“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