Norman Lebrecht has been tweeting the virtues of his book on Mahler so vigorously in the past month that I was unusually keen to trash it. I also had something of a personal score to settle. In 2002 we were both in Vienna to hear millionaire Mahler fanatic Gilbert Kaplan record the Second Symphony – Kaplan is obsessed by this work – with the Vienna Philharmonic. Lebrecht gave me a lift in his taxi back to the airport after the recording session, and even paid the fare. What he didn't tell me, this immensely civilised but sharp-elbowed music journalist, was that he'd already filed his article, beating me hollow.
For all that, I find I can't do it. This is a most peculiar enterprise which mixes biography, travelogue, CD guide and rather too much autobiography (I came to dread the words "the situation is personally familiar"), yet the sheer exuberance of the writing makes you forgive the lack of organisation and the decision to write the book in the present tense, which Lebrecht justifies on the grounds that Mahler is "a man of my own time".
He has been labouring over this extended love letter for four decades, becoming close friends with the composer's daughter Anna, treating the great man as his artistic talisman, in awe of Mahler's determination to expose life in all its rawness in his music. At times Lebrecht's adoration becomes ludicrous. "To know Mahler is, ultimately, to know ourselves," he writes in his overwrought introduction. "Mahler's resilience is a source of courage in my times of adversity and hope in my depressions," he says in his equally overheated conclusion. But, in between, the narrative hums along, breathless, information-packed, aspiring perhaps to the pulse of music rather than the plod of prose.
Lebrecht offers excellent broadbrush readings of the 10 symphonies, gives a full (at times too full) account of Mahler's career as a conductor – if he had never composed a note, his place in musical history would have been secure for this alone – and explores his unsettled private life as the child of a loveless marriage whose own young wife Alma then cuckolded him. Lebrecht also shows how Mahler's Jewishness contributed both to his driven personality and to his perception of himself as an outsider. Whereas all the other giants of Austro-German music are buried in Vienna's central cemetery, Mahler's grave is on the outskirts at Grinzing, chosen because it was close to the house where he had wooed Alma, was near the open country he adored and lay outside Vienna, which Lebrecht labels a "nostalgia factory".
Mahler's importance is that he straddles two musical worlds: he was born, in 1860, in the age of high romanticism but was at his most productive in the first decade of the 20th century at a time of artistic revolution; he expanded both the scale and range of the symphony. "The symphony is like the world, it must encompass everything," he told Sibelius, a formalist who didn't buy his argument at all.
On the whole, I would side with the Finn, preferring Sibelian structure to Mahlerian messiness, but it is testimony to the energetic advocacy of this collection that it makes me urgently want to give Mahler another go.
Harvey Sachs's book about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is also something of a hybrid, again with rather too much about the author's personal musical odyssey, and without the stylistic sparkiness that encourages the reader to forgive such digressions. Faber have given it a duller cover and smaller type than Lebrecht, and after the leaden opening chapter covering Beethoven's life – the traditional image of deaf, cantankerous, money-obsessed genius who in his final decade ushers in a brave new soundworld emerges – I was all for tossing it out of the nearest window. But happily things improve once Sachs's purpose becomes clear: this is not primarily a book about Beethoven's Choral Symphony, but about 1824, the year it was premiered, and the point at which artists began to stand up to – or at least issue pointed commentaries on – Europe's repressive governments.
Sachs provides mini-biogs of Byron (who died fighting to liberate Greece in 1824), Pushkin, Stendhal, Heine and others from an artistic generation which was, in his words, learning to "internalise revolution". None of the analysis is especially profound and the writing is at best workmanlike, but the point is well made: as diplomats developed their deadening "Concert of Europe", artists were striving for a different conception of the future, embodied above all in Beethoven's hymn to universal brotherhood. As he warms to his theme of art's war with stupidity and self-interest, Sachs indulges in some Lebrechtian ecstasy. "Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion," he writes, "the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue." I'm not sure this is hugely helpful in understanding Beethoven's music, but one must admit it is a rather inspiring sentiment.
