Someday They’ll Write My Biography : The uncompromising artist in Gustav Mahler finds the perfect uncompromising biographer : GUSTAV MAHLER; Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904), <i> By Henry-Louis de la Grange (Oxford University Press / Clarendon: $45. 1100 pp.)</i>

When Gustav Mahler died in 1911 at the age of 50--victim of a bad heart, a bacterial infection and, perhaps, his self-described madness--the world mourned a great, glamorous, dauntlessly autocratic conductor who also happened to be a composer. “We cannot see how any of his music can long survive him,” wrote an authority in the New York Tribune. According to Nicolas Slonimsky, encyclopedist in excelsis , the contemporary press found Mahler’s symphonies “too loud, too long and too discordant.”

Mahler was a giant on the podium who did not gladly suffer fools, be they guardians of the Austrian court, society ladies controlling the board at the New York Philharmonic, recalcitrant singers or lofty composers whose orchestrations struck him as worthy of improvement. He was a perfectionist and tyrant, totally dedicated to his crafts, pensive to the point of morbidity, uncompromising in his idealism. He was a stubbornly expansive romantic in a world advancing toward a taut modernist revolution.

His music always had sophisticated champions, and it certainly influenced such upstarts as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Ernst Krenek. General audiences, however, were often baffled by Mahler’s complexity and intimidated by his grandiosity.

Above all, they were discomforted by his unorthodox juxtaposition of the heroic and the intimate, the intellectual and the emotional, the spiritual and the folksy, the tragic and the mundane.

Popular wisdom and Tribune myopia notwisthstanding, the repute of Mahler the composer eventually did eclipse that of Mahler the conductor. The transformation took nearly fifty years. In many ways, the ultimate establishment of Mahler as a popular icon and youth hero can be credited to one intrepid interpreter, Leonard Bernstein--who sometimes labored under the inspired delusion that he was Mahler reincarnated.

Much has been written in recent years about Mahler--the man, the maestro, the music and, yes, the myth. There have been sentimental tributes, fanciful mini-biographies, pretty picture-books, formidable dissertations, socio-historical analyses and quasi-novels replete with amorous innuendo. There even has been a daringly tawdry film. Mahler has been psychoanalized in absentia (his brief visits to Sigmund Freud in 1910 paved the way), scrutinized by scholars as well as diletantes, often glorified, sometimes sanctified, occasionally even criticized. He has endured all the treatments that become a legend.

No one has written more about Mahler and the Mahler phenomenon than Henry-Louis de la Grange. And no one has written better.

Born in Paris in 1924, La Grange began his monumental research in 1960. The eventual result was “Gustav Mahler: Chronique d’une vie,” a massive three-volume study published between 1973 and 1984. It earned noble recognition for its author, including the title Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur .

The first volume appeared in La Grange’s own English translation 20 years ago. This winter, at last, we will have the a second volume in English, scrupulously enhanced with corrections and factual additions. It serves as down payment on a four-volume English edition that divides Mahler’s crucial Vienna period into two sections. The current installment is just the first half. A revised and updated version of the first English volume is to be published last.

La Grange thrives on context, defining his protagonist amid a detailed evocation of a specific time and place. Far more than a musicological portrait, his study is written with pervasive clarity, occasionally even with vigor. The tone suggests academic restraint, but, thank goodness, passion is never totally suppressed.

The dramatis personae is colorful. La Grange introduces a petty and conceited Leoncavallo, a sympathetic, hen-pecked Richard Strauss, a totally devoted Bruno Walter, a collegial Charpentier. Nice nuggets of anecdotal gossip can be found betweeen the historical revelations. Still, La Grange makes few concessions to the casual reader. Footnotes galore adorn every page. Sometimes they actually dominate the page. No detail of opera casting is deemed insignificant, no biographical addendum irrelevant. The internal documentation--mostly excerpts from newspaper articles and reviews impeccably translated from the original German--is exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting.

A few cold statistics suggest La Grange’s perspective and scope. Volume Two devotes 719 pages to historical reportage covering only 7 1/3 years of Mahler’s life, from May 1897 to September 1904, in doggedly chronological order. That averages 98.4 pages per year or, if you will, 8.17 pages per month. This isn’t exactly a quick read.

The appendices, accounting for 138 more pages, offer an annotated catalog of Mahler’s complete oeuvre , a history and crisp analysis of works written betweeen 1898 and 1904, and a “select” bibliography. In a brief foreword, La Grange bemoans a number of “inaccessible sources,” but, under the circumstances, one wants to doubt that many pieces of the Mahler puzzle are still missing.

Mahler was 37, a conductor of international estime and an accomplished if controversial composer when Vienna beckoned in 1897. At the time, Mahler regarded Vienna with justifiable awe. The city represented a capital of international culture and, as such, a logical step up from his post in Hamburg.

Although hardly an orthodox Jew, Mahler knew he would face anti-Semitism in Austria. Naively, he thought he could alleviate the problem with a hasty conversion to Catholicism. The move may have been cynical, but it was characteristically practical. Ultimately it proved ineffective.

At the Court Opera, Mahler instituted ruthless reform. He enlarged and modernized the repertory, banished the beloved Viennese tradition of Schlamperei (a sort of comfortable sloppiness), personally manned the podium with staggering frequency, performed works without the cuts that had become customary, engaged young singers to supplant aging civil servants on the roster, and enforced the novel concept of opera as valid theater rather than a concert in costume. At the Philharmonic, which he inherited from Hans Richter a year later, he swept out comparable cobwebs.

When he wasn’t busy on the podium or in his office, he found time for numerous romantic involvements (notably with sopranos: the tempestuous Anna von Mildenburg and the dazzling Selma Kurz). In 1901 he fell in love with Alma Schindler, the brilliant 22-year-old daughter of the landscape artist Anton Schindler, herself a composer of considerable potential and, in many ways, an extraordinarily liberated woman. They were married a year later, but the relationship was never smooth. Mahler insisted that his wife to give up her own music so she might devote herself totally to his needs. Alma tried to comply but soon realized that she could not bear the suppression.

As a conductor, Mahler enjoyed resounding successess with the public, his sponsors and with some of the press. As a composer, and a comparatively progressive one at that, he encountered considerable hostility. He was never immune to classic Viennese intrigues, or to professional jealousies. Nor, with the passage of seasons, was he immune to a degree of artistic boredom.

Anti-Semitism dogged his efforts, as feared. “The Jewish Regime at the Vienna Opera” was the headline over an early article in the Deutsche Zeitung . “What Herr Mahler sometimes does cannot be called conducting,” wrote a critic who signed himself E. Th. “It is more like the gesticulations of a dervish and, when the Kapellmeister has St. Vitus’s dance, it’s really very difficult to keep time....All men of taste, musicians or laymen, know very well what Mahler is aiming at and find it offensive....Perhaps he will find a means of obtaining the trumpets of Israel for the Opera, the self-same trumpets that the entire Jewish press have been blasting in praise of ‘Herr Direktor,’ and then, perhaps, the walls will come tumbling down.”

Understandably, Mahler’s morale fluctuated as his tenure at the Hofoper and Philharmonie came under increasing fire. Sometimes he was defiant. Sometimes he was disconsolate. Under the circumstances, it seems almost miraculous that he was able to compose anything, much less a group of masterpieces that includes some “Wunderhorn” songs, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, the “Ruckert” songs and the “Kindertotenlieder.”

For all its upheaval, Mahler’s life remained astonishingly orderly. His powers of concentration were virtually superhuman.

Still, no one could be surprised when he began to look for an excuse to leave Vienna without seeming a coward. New York came up with the perfect excuse in 1907, or so Mahler thought. Henry-Louis de la Grange will tell us all about it two volumes from now.