Thank you for the recommendation. The Hurwitz book looks worthwhile, but from my perusal of the author's comments on amazon.com, it seems this work provides minimal biographical content -- it is, apparently, mostly an analysis of the music. I will certainly look for it in the bookstore, and examine it with interest.
Each of us has individualized tastes in reading; generally, I don't much care to have music explained to me at any length, unless there is a "hook," such as with Bryan McGee's book on Wagner in relation to Schopenhauer, etc. I do enjoy learning about the broader cultural context of the classical music that I find compelling. Since I've started to listen seriously to Mahler and his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, I've been reading associated literature. I've read a couple of books by Joseph Roth, finished one volume of Schnitzler's short stories/novellas, and am halfway through another; I'm also about halfway through the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.
I quite like Schnitzler, who is a master psychologist and a superb short-story writer, with terrific insights into the male psyche in particular. Roth is enjoyable, but less interesting to me. Musil strikes me as a very fine writer who confines himself to a very narrow range of human experience; his book reminds me of Thomas Mann in his jokey/ironic mode. But unlike Mann, he seems to never leave that mode.
A contemporary novel that some readers of this forum may find interesting is Andre Bernstein's The Conspirators, which was published in the last year or so This novel is set in a provincial town near the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and concerns political intrigue, power relations, and the local Jewish community.
The novel recalls Feodor Dostoevsky's The Possessed in a number of ways. In my view, Bernstein's novel is one of the few contemporary works I'm familiar with that actually approaches the stature of Dostoevsky's great work. Though The Conspirators has its flaws -- a strict editor would greatly have helped in two or three places in particular -- it is a stunning work of philosophical/political fiction. One chapter in particular -- a confrontation between a Jewish religious leader and a financier -- strikes me as one of the most powerful novelistic scenes I've read, and recalls, in its power, the Grand Inquisitor's visit with Christ in the Brothers Karamazov; it also the reminds me of the scene between King Phillip and the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's Don Carlo.
But I digress.
