Over the course of nearly 24 years Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss developed an enduring bond rare among composers who were also prominent contemporaries. Given its significance for our broader understanding of Austro-German musical modernism, it is surprising that until now scholars have largely avoided any detailed discussion of this relationship. And if the reasons for this have yet to be completely untangled, we can be grateful to Charles Youmans, whose modestly titled monograph, Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue, provides us with the first book-length consideration of this unjustly neglected and often misunderstood topic. Indeed, the only other consideration of the relationship between these two composers appeared in 1980 in the form of an essay by Herta Blaukopf that was included in her edition of the surviving correspondence between Mahler and Strauss.Footnote ¹ For its time her essay was ground-breaking, though it was not without its critics, most prominently Carl Dahlhaus who, as Youmans reminds us, accused Blaukopf of ‘one-sidedly placing Mahler in the foreground’ (p. 2). The present volume contains no such imbalance, offering instead a richly detailed double portrait in which the two composers emerge side by side as colleagues, confidantes, admirers, and ultimately friends.

As to why it took more than three and half decades for someone to explore more fully the implications of Blaukopf’s essay, Youmans’s places the blame squarely on the atmosphere of ‘blatant partisanship’ that he suggests has long given rise to ardent defences of one composer over the other. While this claim undoubtedly contains an element of truth, the reader is left to wonder not only how this played out, but perhaps more importantly what this state of affairs has to tell us about the long-held perception that these two composers followed largely independent trajectories. And while Youmans remains true to his stated aim of discussing the relationship rather than its reception, one can’t help thinking that this constitutes something of a missed opportunity. For even if the ‘deplorable lack of curiosity’ in this relationship is the result of nothing more than ‘petty disputes’ among scholars, by not addressing the substance of these disputes Youmans deprives the reader of a crucial piece of the larger story that he otherwise so ably tells (pp. 1–2). On the whole, however, this study stands as a meticulously researched and pleasingly level-headed account of Mahler and Strauss, one that sheds new light not only on the details of their relationship itself, but perhaps more importantly on the musical works that in a very real sense helped sustain it.

The core documents on which Youmans draws are, by and large, the same as those to which Blaukopf had access in the late 1970s: 63 letters from Mahler to Strauss and 28 letters from Strauss to Mahler (curiously Youmans only makes direct mention of the 28 letters from Strauss to Mahler). These letters are supplemented by a range of seldom-discussed primary sources that include, among other items, Willi Schuh’s copy of Alma Mahler’s Memories and Letters (containing a number of eye-opening marginal annotations by Strauss), Strauss’s so-called Brown Diary (braunes Tagebuch), as well as the composer’s personal copies of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and the complete works of Goethe. And while this raw material provides the documentary foundation on which Youmans’s account rests, his fluid and highly readable prose ensures that it is effortlessly woven into the fabric of the individual chapters.

Each of the book’s 12 chapters revolves around a single topic or ‘context’ that provides the basic framework for a detailed comparison of Mahler and Strauss as children, conductors, husbands, Wagnerians, businessmen, literati, autobiographers, Programmusiker, imports, allusionists, ironists, metaphysicians, and finally (in the epilogue), individuals. Taken together these 13 contexts serve as essential sites that guide Youmans’s exploration of how these two figures ‘negotiated the relationship between individual and world’ (p. 36). But rather than giving rise to self-contained discussions, each context is framed and elaborated in a way that is meant to reveal a multiplicity of connections across chapters. This is manifested most clearly in Youmans’s practice of revisiting individual works over the course of the book. The works in question are largely drawn from the three periods during which contact between Mahler and Strauss was at its most intense: the early to mid-1890s (when they first began to behave ‘as confidantes, even intimates’) (p. 7); immediately after the turn of the century (when they both choose new compositional paths: for Mahler, a self-described ‘renunciation’ of programme music, and for Strauss, a turn away from the tone poem toward opera); and finally, the second half of the first decade of the twentieth century (when their prominence as the leading musical figures of their day offered them a new kind of shared experience in the face of widespread public attention).

The book’s introductory chapter (subtitled ‘Friends’) sets the stage for what follows, providing us with a compelling snapshot of Youmans’s imaginative methodology in which creative speculation is shaped by specific historical and cultural knowledge rooted in the available facts. By way of example, Youmans uses the occasion of the first meeting between Mahler and Strauss (12 October 1887 in Leipzig) to demonstrate that in spite of a dearth of ‘factual information’ about the meeting itself (we have only a few words from Strauss on the topic in a letter to Hans von Bülow), the wealth of historical knowledge now available to us concerning these two composers in the context of the history of early modernism allows us to ‘imagine reliably’ what might have been discussed (p. 3). Drawing on what we now know to be their shared interests, Youmans suggests that their conversation would have likely touched on such topics as the status of their latest compositions (in Mahler’s case a work on which he had just embarked – the First Symphony – and for Strauss perhaps his tone-poem-in-progress, Macbeth), their admiration for Hans von Bülow (especially his use of tempo modification), as well as the challenges associated with their dual careers as composers and conductors.

The opening pages also broach the crucial question of how best to characterize the relationship itself, which in spite of the inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings ‘had all the signs of a genuine friendship’ (p. 3). Yet elsewhere Youmans acknowledges, for example, that Mahler exhibited a ‘strong personal distaste for certain features of [Strauss’s] personality’ (p. 13) and that Strauss expressed significant reservations about Mahler, the most damning of which appeared to concern his music.Footnote ² And while Youmans carefully contextualizes their practice of addressing each other using the formal Sie, his observation that ‘a meaningful connection as colleagues, artists, and human beings was not irreconcilable with the formal mode of address’ is telling insofar as it omits any specific mention of friendship (p. 212, n. 5). Elsewhere, however, Youmans manages to build a persuasive case for the existence of a deep and lasting bond between these ‘kindred spirits’ (p. 40), pointing out that already by the mid-1890s they were taking ‘great pains to look after each other’s new compositions’ (with Strauss taking care of Mahler’s First Symphony and Mahler of Strauss’s Guntram) (p. 8). And even if such moments of empathy also reveal a relationship shaped by a range of practical considerations (most notably their emerging status as the two foremost musicians of their day), this pattern of care only intensified in later years.

Among the book’s most appealing features is that rather than following a conventional narrative, it instead offers the reader a broad constellation of distinct but interrelated topics. This explicitly non-linear approach affords Youmans considerable freedom with respect to the way he tells this story, something that is entirely appropriate given that the questions raised by each of his chosen ‘contexts’ demand different ways of presenting the ‘facts’. Elsewhere, however, Youmans faithfully follows the conventions of scholarly writing, including the custom of offering frequent correctives to established thinking. In the book’s opening chapter, for example, he begins with the bold claim that in comparisons of the two composers almost every commonly held assumption concerning their childhoods – from material circumstances to social maturation – ‘rests on misconception and exaggeration’, and more that this topic ‘has yet to inspire much serious interest’ (p. 20).Footnote ³ This clearing of the deck is a characteristic feature of many of the subsequent chapters, too. In his discussion of their conducting activity Youmans suggests that a serious treatment of this work has yet to be produced, while later in his account of their business dealings he draws extensively on evidence that he claims has either been downplayed or ignored, even if this leads to the rather straightforward conclusion that both Mahler and Strauss were good businessmen.Footnote ⁴ But these are minor concerns and do not detract from what is perhaps Youmans’s most significant accomplishment: providing us with a substantially new understanding of those aspects of their friendship that revolved around specifically musical matters.

We are reminded of this early on when Youmans observes that the relationship between Mahler and Strauss was above all a ‘musical one’ (p. 6). And it is perhaps for this reason that he is at his best when drawing on specific compositions to illustrate the complex dynamic that characterized their interactions. In the case of Mahler, the primary focus is on his symphonic writing with particular attention to the early and middle period works. With respect to Strauss the works that the reader most often encounters are the symphonic poems, especially Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia domestica and Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche. While the operas generally receive less attention, Youmans nevertheless manages to draw provocative connections with Strauss’s instrumental works, demonstrating how, for example, Till Eulenspiegel builds on the critique laid out in Guntrum in a way that gives ‘voice to a postmetaphysical conception of music with which Strauss would keep faith, though ever less joyfully, for the remainder of his career’ (p. 112). But, it was precisely Strauss’s ‘dismantling of Wagnerian musical metaphysics’ that remained the most serious point of contention between the two composers (p. 73). This boiled over after Mahler’s death when during the composition of Eine Alpensinfonie Strauss penned his now famous tirade against idealism.Footnote ⁵ In this remarkable outburst Strauss envisions his Alpine Symphony as a response to the influence of Schopenhauerian metaphysics on Wagner and Mahler, something that he aims to challenge by liberating music from religious associations through the ‘worship of eternal, glorious Nature’ (p. 19).

For Youmans, unpacking the implications of Strauss’s tirade is among the book’s central tasks. When he considers the question of Strauss’s relationship to Mahler’s symphonic works, for instance, he reminds us that in the Fourth Symphony ‘Strauss found the one case in which his friend showed him a path to his own future’ (p. 14). That Strauss could not contain his disappointment when Mahler turned away from this path helps us make sense of his less than charitable view of the Sixth. Here Youmans takes the liberty of imagining what might have gone through Strauss’s mind during an encounter that took place backstage following the work’s dress rehearsal in Essen. On the one hand, Mahler’s moment of crisis regarding the symphony’s autobiographical dimension – a dimension that was mapped out by Mahler as a ‘fantasy of his own tragic future’ (p. 56) – was met by Strauss with an obvious lack of empathy. On the other hand, Youmans correctly observes that Strauss’s reaction was anything but a misunderstanding, arguing forcefully that by making light of Mahler’s fragile emotional state ‘Strauss meant to restore some perspective to a friend who had been brainwashed by his own symphony’. What Strauss seemed to be saying, we are told, is that ‘[t]he mourning of tragic heroes through music was hopelessly outdated … not to mention the staging of such ceremonies with oneself in the title role’ (p. 177). Strauss’s ambivalent relationship to Mahler’s larger symphonic project also extended to the Third Symphony. When Strauss famously walked out of the work’s 1902 premiere he did so because he ‘had spent the better part of 20 years trying to destroy the worldview that the Third meant to resuscitate’ (205). Yet we are also reminded that near the end of Mahler’s life, Strauss, in a rather touching display, promised to prepare rehearsals for a performance of the Third that he hoped Mahler might once again conduct.

Another successful strategy employed by Youmans is the comparative pairing of works by the two composers, as in the case of Symphonia domestica and Kindertotenlieder (from the perspective of compositional influence), and on Guntrum and Mahler’s First Symphony (in terms of the creative decisions that helped shape the musical and aesthetic content of these works). These comparisons often provide fresh insight and reveal unexpected connections. In the case of Kindertotenlieder, Youmans hears in its musical fabric an audible response to Strauss’s Symphonia domestica, while the First Symphony and Guntram are paired in order to show two very different paths toward a conception of musical autobiography. Mahler’s Fourth and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier offers a particularly provocative pairing. Speculating on how Mahler might have reacted to Strauss’s new compositional direction, Youmans suggests that had Mahler lived longer he may have found in this opera ‘a different kind of link between himself and his friend, one based in an alternate form of musical engagement with the past’ (p. 18).

Even though Youmans’s musical explanations are by design non-technical, they frequently give rise to some of his most compelling insights. In his discussion of Mahler’s Fourth, for example, he considers the representation of childhood in a work that Strauss had long counted among his favourites. Invoking the perspective of the listener, he observes how in this symphony ‘we hear a movement for each of the three realms of existence – the world, hell, and heaven – before realizing through whom we have been listening’ (p. 31). And in a discussion of the opening of Mahler’s First we are asked to take the famous marking wie ein Naturlaut (like a sound of Nature) seriously, by which Youmans means ‘this music is not to be heard merely as music’ (p. 125). The broader implications of this crucial intersection between sound and listening are also addressed when he observes that by ‘[m]usically rendering the sounds that he hears in his everyday environment, Mahler blurs the distinction between music and sound, and between himself as composer and the aural world’ (p. 162). Particularly compelling in this formulation is the suggestion that Mahler’s own listening habits are reflected in the very fabric of his works.

Whether he is discussing a specific work or considering such questions as the two composers’ ‘diametrically opposed receptions of the legacy of musical idealism’ (p. 71), Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue takes us on a journey that traverses the broader historical and cultural climate of German-speaking Europe at the turn of the twentieth century (with a brief excursion to America along the way). And throughout this journey we are offered a succession of fresh and imaginative readings of the source material that provide us with new ways of understanding the fundamental importance of a profoundly meaningful friendship between two remarkable musicians. In his preface Youmans laments the scholarly partisanship that he believes long ago drove a wedge between adherents of Mahler and Strauss and that has continued to sustain an artificial division amongst scholars. An even if the extent of such a division is perhaps overstated, Youmans makes a strong case for a joint gathering of Mahlerians and Straussians that he describes in the preface as having long ago envisioned, a gathering that would surely provide, among other things, a forum for addressing the place of these two composers in that no less contested divide between Romanticism and Modernism.