The Mahlers in New York
Thursday, May 14, 7:30 PM - FREE
Canyon Theater at the Boulder Public Library, 1001 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder
At the age of 47, Mahler started over in New York City, first conducting the Metropolitan Opera and then the New York Philharmonic (the only North American organization other than MahlerFest to receive the International Gustav Mahler Society's Gold Medal). Joseph Horowitz has adapted his fictionalized book about Alma and Gustav's time in New York for the stage.
The play is approximately 90 minutes long. The action takes place in New York City and Toblah, Austria, December 1907 to May 1911. The audience is invited to stay for a discussion with the participants.
- HOROWITZ | The Marriage: The Mahlers in NY
Joseph Horowitz, Gustav Mahler
Esther Van Zyl, Alma Mahler
Mel Schaffer, Coda
Jack Tamburri, Director
ABOUT THE MARRIAGE
“In a novel of so much value, the central triumph is not Horowitz’s ability to humanize Mahler, but to have provided readers—for the first time in my experience—with a nuanced, believable, balanced, and compelling portrait of Alma Mahler.”
--Kenneth Woods, reviewing Horowitz’s novel for The American Purpose
“Gustav Mahler is one of history’s most complex and contradictory personalities, a man disarmingly naïve, intellectually profound, blunt to the point of rudeness, dictatorial, preoccupied—and frequently all at the same time. Literary biographers struggle to pin him down . . . , With his unparalleled knowledge of fin-de-siècle classical music in America, Joseph Horowitz [has] brought us closer to Mahler and his wife Alma than any other author I have read. . . . History has not been kind to Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, 20 years her husband’s junior, but Horowitz makes her a far more complex and sympathetic figure than the usual trophy hunter on the lookout for the next husband. . . . What emerges is a woman desperate to find herself but tragically shackled to the least likely man to help her do so. At times, your heart breaks for them both. . . . In Gustav and Alma Mahler, Horowitz has created two of classical music’s most convincing fictional portraits.”
--Clive Paget, reviewing Horowitz’s novel in Musical America