Norman Lebrecht: Why Not Mahler?

Norman Lebrecht is  the English culture buff and blogger, author of Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World. He’s made a lively career stalking the life inside the man’s music – and he still speaks of Gustav Mahler in the present tense, as a living force in the culture. I asked him in a conversation over Skype – about Mahler’s 9th Symphony which comes right at that “modern moment” around 1910, when everything changed, including human character. That was a century ago. I was thinking of the F. Scott Fitzgerald line that there are no second acts in American lives. I put it to Norman Lebrecht: is there a second century in Mahler’s life? The not entirely comforting answer turned out to be ‘yes.”