“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

Nonfiction: Gustav Mahler, by Stephen Downes (Reaktion Books): Goethe, Wagner, Nietzsche: these are fairly well-known influences on the music and thought of Gustav Mahler. Fewer know, I’d wager, that Mahler was an avid reader of Laurence Sterne’s digressive free-for-all Tristram Shandy, or of E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose Tomcat Murr is a similarly whimsical novel purporting to be the memoirs of a cat accidentally shuffled with a Mahleresque composer…