The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York
About this ebook
Joseph Horowitz writes: “Every Mahler biography known to me is written through European eyes and recapitulates Mahler’s own ignorance of the New World – of the teeming musical life of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Marriage is partly conceived as a corrective. It is in fact the first book-length treatment of Mahler in New York ever written.”
Fortified by decades of scholarship, Horowitz’s novel is set in a fin-de-siècle world music capital teeming with fabled personalities: Arturo Toscanini, whose Italian juggernaut displaced Mahler at the Met; Olive Fremstad, the Maria Callas of her day; James Gibbons Huneker, described by his protégé H. L. Mencken as a “veritable geyser of unfamiliar names, shocking epigrams in strange tongues, and unearthly philosophies”; the dapper Otto Kahn, an anomalous Jew among the Metropolitan Opera boxholders, who played cards with Enrico Caruso and pursued the company’s most fetching sopranos.
As The Marriage illuminates, there are things to be learned about Gustav and Alma that cannot as readily be observed in Vienna or Budapest as in Manhattan. Horowitz writes: “Mahler was a great personality and, when circumstances permitted, a great man. He arrived in America weakened and fatigued. His energy and idealism were aroused by the New World, but fitfully . . . he remained a chronic outsider. Gustav Mahler was not really cut out to be music director of an American orchestra, sensitive to the needs of a cultural community, its scribes, audiences, and benefactors. He had bigger things to do.”
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About the author
Joseph Horowitz’s eleven previous books mainly deal with the history of classical music in the United States. Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987) was named one of the year’s best books by the New York Book Critics Circle. Wagner Nights: An American History (1994) was named best-of-the-year by the Society of American Music. Both Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005) and Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (2008) made The Economist’s year’s-best-books list.
In tandem with his Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2021), Horowitz produced six “Dvořák’s Prophecy” films for Naxos. His current “More than Music” radio documentaries for National Public Radio, heard bi-montly via the daily newsmagazine “1A,” are an outgrowth of this activity. His forthcoming book, The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and the Cultural Cold Warrior, will deal with the cultural Cold War. The larger topic of all these activities is the role of the arts (today embattled) in American history and society.
Horowitz’s website is www.josephhorowitz.com. His blog is www.artsjournal.com/uq.
The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York is his first novel, published in April 2023.
