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Reviewed by: Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis Aleksandar Dimitrijevic Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Stuart Feder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. viii + 353 pp. $36.50. I cannot but wholeheartedly welcome Stuart Feder's book on Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Not only does psychoanalytic musicology suffer from a shortage of fundamental and insightful works, but Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis represents a definitive contribution to the rapidly developing field of Mahler studies. The book gives an unsurpassed portrait of Mahler and the influence of three deep emotional crises on his music. The last of these led Mahler to consult with Freud. For a lay audience, this book should provoke wide interest because it deals with the meeting of two creative giants. It pivots on a reconstruction of a four-hour walk that one of the most innovative composers and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century took together in Leiden, Holland, in August 1910. All this and more is revealed in Feder's book with stylistic clarity, psychoanalytic acumen, and extensive historical investigation. No one could have been better prepared for the task of writing this book than was Feder, who, besides his training in medicine and psychoanalysis, held an M.A. in music from Harvard. Feder was the principal editor of two volumes on psychoanalysis and music (Feder, Karmel, and Pollock 1990; 1993) that are still a basic source of reference, and he wrote two volumes on American composer Charles Ives (1992; 1999). Feder's first paper on Mahler was published in 1978, followed by others in 1980, 1981, and 1997, which means that he spent three decades in researching Mahler's life and music, with his own education enabling him to overcome what Martin Nass (1981, 165) considers to be the basic reason for the dearth of creative psychoanalytic works on music: a focus on content instead of on style and form. Feder's book weaves together three strands of exegesis, each with a different level of elaboration: historiography, psychoanalysis, and musicology. Although historiography is not one [End Page 109] of Feder's primary vocations, his work nonetheless strikes me as excellent in this respect. He has visited many of the places important to Mahler, found revealing material in libraries and archives, and interviewed persons who witnessed the end of Mahler's life. In short, Feder seems to have consulted every possible source about Mahler's famous 1910 walk with Freud. His book summarizes all that was previously known about their conversation, adds new information, and dispels numerous misconceptions. Freud's account of his encounter with Mahler was given in two paragraphs of a 1935 letter to Theodor Reik, who reprinted them in The Haunting Melody (1953).1 Alma Mahler's book of reminiscences and correspondence also makes a brief reference to this conversation (1940, 175). However, the first to discuss the circumstances, causes, and consequences of this meeting was the distinguished Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell. After learning that Mahler had consulted Freud, Mitchell inquired of Ernest Jones whether he could provide more details. Jones then delved into the matter—reporting his findings in the second volume of his Freud biography (1955, 88–89)—and put them at the disposal of Mitchell, who gave an extended radio talk on the topic in 1955 (see Mitchell 1995). An especially important source of information proved to be Princess Marie Bonaparte's notes about her analytic sessions with Freud, since on one occasion in 1925 he recounted the conversation with Mahler to her. Feder had access to Bonaparte's unpublished diaries, as well as to the diaries of Alma Mahler, which added more pieces to the puzzle. Using all these sources, Feder provides us with a full Mahler biography in little more than three hundred pages. The largest part of the book is devoted to his second strand of analysis—that concerned with Mahler's personality. With psychoanalytic tact, Feder deals with Mahler's unconscious and emotional life better than any previous writer, providing an important supplement to the multivolume biography by Henri-Louis de la Grange (1974; 1995; 1999). Concentrating on Mahler, Feder does not write extensively about Freud's personality. On the...
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