Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Stuart Feder. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2004.  viii + 353 pp. $36.50.

I cannot but wholeheartedly welcome Stuart Feder's book on Gustav Mahler . Not only does psychoanalytic musicology suffer from a shortage of fundamental and insightful works, but Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis represents a definitive contribution to the rapidly developing field of Mahler studies. The book gives an unsurpassed portrait of Mahler and the influence of three deep emotional crises on his music. The last of these led Mahler to consult with Freud. For a lay audience, this book should provoke wide interest because it deals with the meeting of two creative giants. It pivots on a reconstruction of a four-hour walk that one of the most innovative composers and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century took together in Leiden, Holland, in August 1910.

All this and more is revealed in Feder's book with stylistic clarity, psychoanalytic acumen, and extensive historical investigation. No one could have been better prepared for the task of writing this book than was Feder, who, besides his training in medicine and psychoanalysis, held an M.A. in music from Harvard. Feder was the principal editor of two volumes on psychoanalysis and music (Feder, Karmel, and Pollock 1990; 1993) that are still a basic source of reference, and he wrote two volumes on American composer Charles Ives (1992; 1999). Feder's first paper on Mahler was published in 1978, followed by others in 1980, 1981, and 1997, which means that he spent three decades in researching Mahler's life and music, with his own education enabling him to overcome what Martin Nass (1981, 165) considers to be the basic reason for the dearth of creative psychoanalytic works on music: a focus on content instead of on style and form.

Feder's book weaves together three strands of exegesis, each with a different level of elaboration: historiography, psychoanalysis, and musicology. Although historiography is not one