Peter Franklin

As a leading European conductor and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Mahler inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned with countering biased criticism of him in which German nationalist, hidebound traditionalist or anti-Semitic elements were often mixed.

In this new biography, Peter Franklin confronts the myth of Mahler the misunderstood hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends. His illuminating biography shows Mahler to be a profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, a dictatorial conductor and husband, an iconoclast, and paradoxically, a traditionalist.