Compiled from a private journal, only published after its author's death, these recollections are an invaluable record of Mahler's personal, professional and creative life during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A large part of the book recounts, at first hand, conversations with Mahler concerning his works and his ideas about performance (both in the opera-house and on the concert platform).Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858-1921) was herself a musician (a viola player) and a close and devoted friend of the composer until his marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902. She visited Mahler in Hamburg and frequented his circle in Vienna, also accompanying him and his family on a number of the summer vacations during which the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies came into being, together with many of the Wunderhorn songs.Dr Peter Franklin is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds.Front jacket illustration: The villa built by Mahler in 1899 beside the Worther See in Carinthia, southern Austria. In a summer-house high in the woods behind the villa he completed his Fourth Symphony. His Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and the later songs were also composed here.