Professor Peter Franklin focuses on intercultural communication and intercultural management in his teaching, writing and research at Hochschule Konstanz University of Applied Sciences. For many years he has also advised organisations working across cultures and trained and coached their employees better to understand, handle and leverage culturally complex contexts. Raised in the UK, Peter has spent his entire professional life in Germany, where since 1992 he has worked in numerous international contexts and projects.

As a leading European conductor, and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Maher (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned to counter biased criticism of him in which German-nationalist, hide-bound traditionalist or antisemitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography, Peter Franklin re-confronts the myth of Mahler the misunderstood hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends: the profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, the dictatorial conductor and husband, the iconoclast, the traditionalist. Mahler's life and works emerge as battle-grounds for some of the major conflicting currents and impulses of his period, in which Empires and ideals struggled with the spectre of their own destruction.

1. Mahler's world; 2. Becoming a musician in Vienna; 3. Playing the artist - the beginnings of a career; 4. The 'devil' in the wings; 5. Imperial and royal (nature and the city); 6. Alma's Mahler; 7. On the heights; 8. 'What I leave behind me ...'.