The Manchester girl that Mahler loved
mainI’ll be elaborating about Marion von Weber at the Liverpool Phil tonight.
Here‘s some dirt that I dug up seven years ago.
The world owes Mahler’s First Symphony to Marion von Weber, his Leipzig love…
Now for the nagging detail. In an excess of local patriotism, Leipzig scholars trawled through the rest of Marion’s life to find some exceptional trait, and came up with no further incident from the day Mahler left in 1886 until her death in 1931. But tracing her origins, they found an inconvenient fact. Marion was not from Leipzig at all: she was from Manchester. Fancy that.
An English researcher, Nigel Simeone, has furnished me with further details. Marion was born into a German-Jewish family called Schwabe, living at 313 Oxford Road …
Read on here.
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