At Sixtus and Sevens: A study of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony reveals Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ as one of many intertexts, John Warner finds

Review of Anna Stoll Knecht, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (Oxford University Press, 2019).

March 2021, Volume 15, Number 1, 89–93.

Each of Mahler’s symphonies is well overdue a book-length study, and perhaps none more so than the Seventh. Variously seen as either Mahler’s Cinderella or an almighty flop, it is at last given a thorough, open-minded and meticulously researched investigation in Anna Stoll Knecht’s recent publication. The symphony is all too often dismissed as fragmented, unnecessarily bombastic, insincere, over-reminiscent of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and a poor successor to the Sixth. Stoll Knecht tackles these main issues head-on, giving the work the fair hearing it deserves.