“Deploying a brilliant range of literary and philosophical sources in tandem with innovative analyses of all that is most striking in Mahler’s symphonic world, Karol Berger grants the composer his greatest reach as a cultural force during a time when the once reassuring foundations of reason were rapidly giving way to the existential alarms of modernity. The book’s creatively designed structure stems from the imaginative supposition that Mahler composed one ideal symphony, emanating from resonant features shared by the movement types of his real symphonies.”

Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Berger’s book provides important suggestions for a new reading of Mahler’s compositional world. By analyzing his symphonies not work by work but rather through comparisons of individual movements of the same kind, Berger clearly brings into focus their role in either fulfilling the Viennese symphonic norms, expanding them, or altogether exploding them. This immensely insightful treatise opens up challenging new perspectives that will be of great importance for future research—not only into the dimensions of Mahler’s symphonic oeuvre but also in the multifaceted history of symphony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Peter Revers, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz