Why would Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), modernist titan and so-called prophet of the New Music, commit himself time and again to the venerable sonata-allegro form of Mozart and Beethoven? How could so gifted a symphonic storyteller be drawn to a framework that many have dismissed as antiquated and dramatically inert? Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas offers a striking new take on this old dilemma. Indeed, it poses these questions seriously for the first time. Rather than downplaying Mahler's sonata designs as distracting anachronisms or innocuous groundplans, author Seth Monahan argues that...