Stephen E. Hefling received the A. B. in music from Harvard and the Ph. D. from Yale, with a dissertation examining Mahler’s “Todtenfeier” movement from the dual perspectives of programmatic influence and compositional process as documented in Mahler’s surviving sketches and drafts. Currently Professor Emeritus of Music at Case Western Reserve University, he has also taught at Stanford and Yale Universities as well as Oberlin College Conservatory. Prof. Hefling has published numerous articles and book chapters in Musical Quarterly, 19th Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Journal of Music Theory, Performance Practice Review, the revised New Grove Dictionary, Rethinking Mahler (Oxford, 2017), Gustav Mahler: Interpretationen seiner Werke (Laaber, 2011), Mahler im Kontext / Contextualizing Mahler (Vienna, 2011), German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2008), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (Cambridge, 2007), Mahler and His World (Princeton, 2002), The Mahler Companion (Oxford, 1999), The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (New York, 1997), etc.

He rediscovered Mahler’s manuscript version of Das Lied von der Erde for voices and piano, and edited that work for the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Vienna, 1989/rev. 2012). His monograph on Das Lied appeared in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series in 2000, and he has written program notes for Mahler recordings by leading conductors including Pierre Boulez, Lorin Maazel, and Manfred Honeck. Hefling has both edited and contributed to the volumes Mahler Studies (Cambridge, 1997) and Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music (New York, 1998/2003). He is a Vice President of the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in Vienna and Co-director of the Mahler Neue Kritische Gesamtausgabe (New Complete Critical Edition), for which he is currently preparing the new orchestral edition of Das Lied von der Erde. In addition, Hefling is completing The Reilly Digital Catalogue of Mahler’s Musical Manuscripts, which is now a functional database. He is also writing a two-volume study entitled The Symphonic Worlds of Gustav Mahler for Yale University Press.

For his work on Mahler, Prof. Hefling has been awarded grants from The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, The Freedman Foundation, The Kaplan Foundation, The Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship at Yale University; he has been a speaker at international conferences on the composer in Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, New York, Montpellier, London, Guildford, and Boulder. Also a specialist in baroque performance practice, Prof. Hefling has performed widely with early music ensembles in the northeastern US, and has served as director of the Yale Collegium Musicum and the Cleveland Baroque Soloists; his book Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music (New York, 1994) is generally considered the standard reference on that topic.