When I first started to become interested in Mahler, the first book I bought about him was Norman Lebrecht's wonderful "Mahler Remembered." I still recommend the book as a great introductory resource to Mahleria–and not to malaria–as it not only gives a good overview of the major events in Mahler's life, both personal and creative, but is brimming with primary-source accounts of the most varied sort. Mahler knew Adler and Brahms and Bruckner, Clara Clemens and Hans von Bülow, Busoni and Gabrilowitsch and Schoenberg, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Wolf and Zemlinsky; Klimt, Schiele, Rodin, Hermann Bahr, Sigmund Freud, Hoffmannsthal, Rolland, Zuckerkandl, and Zweig. To name just a few. And while he is remembered today primarily as one of the most influential composers of the 20h century, he was, of course, arguably the most famous conductor of his time. His first major success, however, was not exactly for conducting, nor exactly for composition.

Mahler, as a young man, became the first to untangle the personal musical shorthand of a certain Carl Maria von Weber, who has graced the CCM pages a few times over the years (though, admittedly, not so many times as Mahler). When Weber died, he had left, among other things, an incomplete comic opera, The Three Pintos. Myriad people had looked over the scores, sketches, etc., over the years (including Liszt), but Mahler was the one to skillfully put the work into a performable state. The resultant hit catapulted Mahler to a fame he only built upon from there on out.

When I read the Lebrecht, there was only one available recording of the work, only on LP, of course, and I eventually got it. Like the Piano Quartet movement in A minor, which also only had the single recording for a long time, Die Drei Pintos has since been recorded more. This month's clip, from the very opening of the opera, is from that first recording, now available on CD, with Lucia Popp and Hermann Prey, who just recently was himself the subject of a CCM.

Famous wit, von Bülow, might have negatively gibed that what was painting (Maler) and what was weaving (Weber) was all the same, but the resulting music still tantalizes and scintillates today.