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September 12, 1910: The world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. Munich’s new Musik Festhalle was filled to capacity on two successive evenings for the performances, which were received with rapturous applause. Representatives of many European royal houses were in attendance, along with an array of stars from the musical and literary world, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. Knowledge of their relationship would precipitate an emotional crisis in Mahler that, compounded with his heart condition and the loss of his young daughter Maria, would lead to his premature death the next year.

In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships. Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities

Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

Following the imposition of Habsburg rule on Ottoman Bosnia in 1878, a new garrison was constructed in the old citadel of Trebinje. By using a micro-historical approach, this innovative book tells the story of the garrison in times of peace and war, describing the way in which the Austro-Hungarian administration rapidly transformed Trebinje into a tree-lined city dominated by the army.

Yet, the Habsburg "civilizing mission," marked by the building of hospitals, schools, roads, and railways was accompanied by ruthless violence against those who resisted the new foreign occupiers, especially after 1914. The tragic violence is described in the book alongside accounts of daily life. By personalizing historical events, the narrative reveals the perspective of people who found themselves in Trebinje and its garrison complex: the ordinary soldier, the condemned “insurgent,” the career officer, the cook, the shepherdess, the hotelier, or the journalist—all willing or unwilling participants in an extra-European style colonial project in the heart of Europe. 

For long periods in history, the Austrian capital found itself on the geographical edge of western civilisation. Yet from the 18th century on, Vienna has been a vibrant centre of European culture. This city is the scene of the formidable meeting of the two outstanding intellectuals that are at the core of this book. 

The warm relationship between W.H. Auden, the celebrated British-American poet (1907–1973), and his fellow expatriate, the Welsh-Austrian journalist, translator and writer Stella Musulin (1915–1996) lasted while Auden resided in the nearby small town of Kirchstetten starting in 1958. It was here that the poet was laid to rest in the autumn of 1973. This book is based on the unpublished letters of Auden to Musulin and her private journals.  

The study of this inspiring material yields new insights into Auden’s last, prolific, creative period and underscores the ‘Austrian Auden.’ In addition, Michael O’Sullivan pays tribute to the closest ‘Austrian’ friend of the poet. Baroness Stella von Musulin was an intellectual whose two books for Faber & Faber are acknowledged as classics: Vienna in the Age of Metternich and Austria: People & Landscape (with a foreword by Auden). The author situates the close relationship of two individuals in the context of Austria’s complex political, social, and cultural history in the Cold War years.