Gustav Mahler, Julius Korngold and the Neue Freie Presse

Julius Korngold, critic at the highly influential newspaper Neue Freie Presse, was close to and supportive of Gustav Mahler and, for the first time, essays on the man and his music are made available in English. Those on his time at Vienna’s Imperial Opera are extensive and well informed.

Both Korngold and Mahler shared a common Moravian Jewish background, born in 1860 and both students of Anton Bruckner. The paper was Jewish owned, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was its cultural editor and Korngold’s employer. Claims that Mahler was driven out of Vienna by an antisemitic press are shown to be wrong, given Mahler’s support by the most powerful critic of the day writing in the Empire’s most influential newspaper. Importantly, the essays also reveal a world of Modernism that includes Mahler’s innovations at the opera, and Modernism in music before departures from tonality. Mahler was claimed by Arnold Schoenberg as his musical hero, firmly placing him in the Modernist camp. Yet Korngold was universally seen as an archconservative and his relationship with Mahler was personal and his understanding profound. The book addresses the question of “Mahler, the first Modernist or the last Romantic?”.

The book will be invaluable for Mahler enthusiasts, musicians, musicologists as well as cultural historians.

Michael Haas studied piano and composition at Vienna’s Music Academy and Vienna’s Conservatory and received his PhD in 2016 at London Middlesex University. From 1977, he was engaged as a producer at Decca Records working primarily with Sir Georg Solti. In the mid-1980s, he initiated the series “Entartete Musik”, the first retrospective of music lost during the Nazi years. He then moved to Sony Classical where he produced Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic before being appointed Vice President at Sony Classical in New York. He returned to Decca Records in 1995. In 2000, Haas worked as a freelance producer and was appointed Director of the Suppressed Music Division at the Jewish Music Institute at SOAS, London University. From 2002–2010 he was Music Curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. His books include Forbidden Music – The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (2013) and The Music of Exile (2023). In 2016 he co-founded the Exilarte Center at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts. Over the course of his professional career as recording producer Haas has won many recording prizes including four Grammys.