Gustav Mahler was born in July 1860 as a Jew in a German-speaking enclave of the Czech provinces. Just over two weeks later, the painter and designer, Alfons Mucha, destined to be the leading exponent of Art Nouveau, was also born just seventy miles away as an ethnic Czech.

The lives of these two formidable personalities seemed ever after to be intertwined, as they moved between Vienna, Prague, Paris and New York, revealing as they went the cultural tensions that existed between Czech and Germans in the approach to the First World War.

Only in New York in 1909 did the paths of the artists finally cross, in a way that showed Mahler embracing his Czech roots and  Mucha to be a man of the theatre.

In an exploration of the many contradictions of culture and ethnicity, musicologist Peter Davison, shows how the major works of Mahler and Mucha attempt to forge coherent individual identity amidst the rootlessness the modern age.