In July 1910, the fifty-year-old Mahler—at the apex of his renown and creative gifts, despite the omnipresent threat of heart disease—discovered that his wife Alma had begun a passionate affair with the young Walter Gropius. Subsequent decades proved that for Alma’s husbands, cuckoldry constituted the job description’s sine qua non (Tom Lehrer devoted one of his most mordant lyrics to this fact), but Mahler understandably reacted with raging anguish, aggravated by bewilderment that Alma should have shucked her helot status. “You must,” he had announced before their marriage, “give yourself to me unconditionally, shape your future life, in every detail, entirely in accordance with my needs.”

For Mahler, the customer was always wrong.

He likewise squelched her youthful composing ambitions: “The role of composer falls to me—yours is that of loving companion!” (One sardonic reviewer of a 1978 Mahler biography commented: “The notion that a great artist must surely manifest ‘greatness of soul’ in his human relations was knocked from its Romantic pedestal long ago.”)

Faced with Alma’s adultery, Mahler consulted Freud. This four-hour meeting of minds—which reads like the scenario for a Tom Stoppard play—occurred during August in Leiden, Holland. About the session Mahler said uncharacteristically little. Freud, for his part, described it solely in long-delayed reminiscences, generic and reductionist even by Freudian standards:

The necessity for the visit arose, for him, from his wife’s resentment of the withdrawal of his libido from her. In highly interesting expeditions through his life history, we discovered his personal conditions for love, especially his Holy Mary complex …

Nine months after the Leiden visit, Mahler died. He left incomplete his Tenth Symphony, of which he had finished only the first two movements. With his conducting—especially via his decade-long dominance of the Vienna Opera—Mahler embodied a singularly lucid belief: audiences and performers must be antagonized on all possible, and many hitherto impossible, pretexts. For him, the customer was always wrong. Yet from his almost lunatic certitudes as executant, his approach to composing greatly differed, being prone to the drastic revisions that indicate fundamental lack of self-confidence. One seeks vainly in Mahler a detailed creative credo, as distinct from occasional opaque epigrams (“it [a symphony] must contain everything”). Outstanding composers need not, of course, have any such credo, but this particular gap greatly impedes psychobiographers, since it emphasizes their interpretations’ conjectural nature.

Mahler possessed nothing of Mendelssohn’s or Wagner’s verbal facility, never mind Schumann’s or Berlioz’s. Almost every time he verged on genuine literary discernment, an attack of the Deep-and-Meaningfuls (going well beyond the sufferance which Teutonic culture traditionally extends) overcame him. Aged thirty-four, he bailed up his disciple Bruno Walter with this adolescent monologue: “Whence do we come? Whither do we go? Why am I made to feel that I am free while yet I am constrained within my personality as in a prison? What is the object of toil and sorrow? Will the meaning of life be revealed by death?” While in 1897 he converted to Catholicism—a necessary step in late-Habsburg Austria for the musical posts he coveted—he seldom alluded to his newfound religion, and gave the periodic impression of shame over having adopted it.

At least Mahler eschewed a convulsive loathing for that religion, in which he differed from Freud. He spared Catholics, as Catholics, the venom which his fellow Jews as Jews often elicited from him. (“No effort of imagination”, he reported in 1903, during a Ukrainian visit, “could conjure up a dirtier creature than the Polish Jew of these parts.”) Not for Mahler the jovial Christophobic menace with which Freud, en route to America, proclaimed his own proselytizing intentions: “We’re bringing them the plague.” Moreover, Mahler harbored even less interest in psychoanalysis than Freud did in music. Despite the two men’s obvious lack of lasting rapport, Stuart Feder has sought to yoke them in a quasi-Plutarchian double harness, devoting almost as much space to the analyst’s intellectual background as to the composer’s.

Neither man benefits from this enforced propinquity. Examining Feder’s bland summaries of Freud’s career soon becomes an eerie experience, in that Freud receives the benefit of every possible doubt: as if Frederick Crews, H. J. Eysenck, Fuller Torrey, and other such recent demystifiers of the great panjandrum had never existed. (Worse yet, as if this were still 1948 and Laurence Olivier were still conscripting Ernest Jones to interpret Hamlet for him.) In one memorably evidence-free passage, Feder refers to the violinist Arnold Rosé, who married Mahler’s sister Justine, as an “oedipal substitute for her brother.” If only Feder had acknowledged the full significance of his own quote from an unusually prudent Freud in 1928: “Before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”

Perhaps the Freudian quotient is intended as product differentiation in a grossly overcrowded field. Tomes on Mahler continue to flood the market, ranging from musically illiterate coffee-table feuilletons—along the lines of The Mahler I Knew or at Least Met Twice in the Elevator—to Henry-Louis de La Grange’s hagiography, the third volume of which takes 1,051 pages to describe just three years of Mahler’s life. Unlike La Grange, Feder regularly hints at Mahler’s failure to attain human perfection; he rightly exhibits, for example, healthy skepticism about Mahler’s lament, “I lead an existence directed entirely towards others.” Regrettably, Feder’s observations on Mahler’s actual output are both limited and superficial, far inferior to the average CD booklet’s insights. Strange copy-editing errors further undermine the reader’s confidence. Georges Clemenceau somehow turns into Paul Clemenceau, and Oscar Kokoschka’s vital statistics become hopelessly garbled (Kokoschka lived from 1886 to 1980, but Feder credits him with reaching the age of ninety-six and, four pages earlier, with living from 1866 to 1944).

Mahler called the Philharmonic “a real American orchestra. Untalented and phlegmatic.”

Feder’s best pages deal with Mahler’s New York Philharmonic sojourn (1908– 1911), which hinted at what Mahler could have achieved abroad if he had ever supplemented his podium brilliance with a particle of courtesy. (He called the Philharmonic “a real American orchestra. Untalented and phlegmatic.”) At this period Toscanini managed his own transition from the Old World to the New with spectacular success, but then, Toscanini perceived by instinct, as Mahler with all his book-learning never realized, the difference between clear-sighted artistic dictatorship and indiscriminate, hectoring messianism.

Overall, nevertheless, it is hard to recommend Feder’s account. There are a dozen other eminent composers of Mahler’s time who, unlike Mahler, have yet to be honored by an adequate modern biography. Let us hope that a few publishers will soon steer would-be chroniclers to those figures, rather than imagining that a Triffid-like profusion of full-length Mahler analyses is forever desirable.