How Mikhail Gorbachev discovered Gustav Mahler

In August 1991, while being held hostage by insurgent generals in his Crimean dacha, the Russian leader came close to despair.

His wife Raisa was locked in another room, suffering a hypertension attack.

He was refused all contact with the outside world unless he agreed to resign. Gorbachev walked round and round the room, studying the classical record sleeves on the bookshelves.

Four months later in Moscow, on one of his last nights in office, he saw that one of those symphonies, Mahler’s fifth, was being performed that night, conducted by Claudio Abbado. ‘I had the feeling,’ wrote Gorbachev, ‘that Mahler’s music somehow touched our situation.’ Raisa told Abbado: ‘I have been shaken by this music. It left me with a feeling of despondency, a feeling that there is no way out.’

Abbado remembered the conversation as a moment when he touched history. I reported it on the opening page of my book, Why Mahler.