Jonathan Carr, a bureau chief for The Economist and other media outlets who died in 2008, wrote a short and highly readable biography of the composer Gustav Mahler in 1999. It’s an excellent example of at least two phenomena, both of which strike me as especially if not essentially British.

First, Carr is a superb amateur expert. There are experts on everything, and Carr was an expert on international relations in Europe. How dare he encroach upon the domain of classical music expertise, especially regarding a composer as sesudo as Mahler? It’s not like there aren’t other Mahler bios out there, and indeed Carr must contend
with–among other competitors–Henri Louis de La Grange’s multivolume life of the composer, which runs to over 3,000 pages (in French). There’s something refreshingly plucky about entering into the fray under such conditions, confident that one can make a productive contribution even this late in the game. My students would do well to emulate this attitude, staring at daunting bibliographies and charged with adding some value in the few short weeks of a semester.

Second, Carr is a serial debunker. The whole rhetorical strategy of his book is to upend established orthodox opinions regarding Mahler. He holds particular contempt for cultural theorist and philosopher Theodor Adorno for getting the interpretation wrong, and for Mahler’s wife Alma, for getting the facts wrong. Just about every paragraph seems to begin with some construction like, “While on the face of it, this may appear likely, a closer inspection of the evidence suggests that…” The debunker trick is a neat one, because it flatters the reader, who is presumed to know all this established wisdom and then accompanies the debunker on a journey reserved to the cognoscenti. Thing is, Carr debunks many things about which I–no expert, not by a long shot, but someone who has seen Mahler performed by a number of orchestras, who has all the symphonies on CD, many in multiple versions–was largely unaware. (Do you burn in indignation knowing that Mahler was “not allowed” to conduct Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony until he came to America? Is your anger appeased by learning that in fact that’s not true?) Moreover, a lot of the debunking is, in retrospect, more like adding nuance than controverting received wisdom. No matter. It’s a lively way to structure a book and encourages a complicity between author and reader. You both pretend all the way through that you know all these Mahler myths and it makes you more likely to accept the author’s version of events.

For both reasons–because the book was written by a particularly well-versed fan, and because it takes the reader under its wing as though he or she were a fellow insider–it fills a niche for Mahler lovers. It’s a fine companion to listening to the symphonies and the major song cycles, listening projects in which good companionship is warmly welcomed and positively productive.