Bruno Walter, introducing the posthumous premiere of the song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde,” wrote that “the I is gone forever.” The composer who injected that “I” into his music was Gustav Mahler, an artist who often incorporated biographical clues, including his own idiosyncratic gait and even his irregular heartbeat, into his music.

Mahler was the center of the musical and social universe that was fin-desiecle Vienna, and his marriage to the beautiful but promiscuous Alma Schindler has been the subject of conjecture almost as often in the past 25 years as that of Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath. The latest of these analyses is “Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis” (Yale University Press, 353 pages, $39.95) by New York psychoanalyst Stuart Feder.

The book has an interesting structure, the biography of the composer serving as a series of flashbacks emanating from a four-hour walk that Mahler took with Sigmund Freud. The walk itself is a fanciful reconstruction, as neither analyst nor analysand documented it in detail. Freud did reminisce about the experience some years later, telling his socialite patient Marie Bonaparte about it and placing it in either 1912 or 1913. But he was in his 70s by this time and, considering Mahler died in 1911, his memories might have been just a bit fuzzy.

Further, the aristocratic Bonaparte, herself a larger than life personality and dangerously enamored of Mahler’s music, makes for an easily impeachable source. Mr. Feder points out that, in the interval from the actual encounter to the conversation of 1925, the Mahler myth had grown to gigantic proportions. The life of the composer, who penned a movement of his Seventh Symphony titled “Schattenhaft,” was now itself as elusive as a shadow for both music historians and popular biographers.

This book is one of a spate of psychoanalytical studies of composers. In this case, at least, the author is a trained professional, so I made a conscious decision to take on faith his conclusions. I trust, though, I might be forgiven a little healthy skepticism of the personality profile of the composer that slowly unfolds – which is focused on Mahler’s Virgin Mary fixation and fratricidal tendencies.

The essay as a whole is disturbingly absolutist, capturing that rather irritating attitude of the scientific community that it is always right. Researchers probing the human condition would be wise to consider before expounding as fact that Mahler married Alma because her middle name was Marie – a logical extension of his fixation – and that she agreed only because her father had been an artist (“maler” means painter in German).

Dr. Feder at one point reports that “Mann transformed what he perceived in Mahler into the fictional composer Gustav Aschenbach” – whereas the protagonist of “Death in Venice” was actually a writer with no discernable hint of musical talent. The good doctor is apparently confusing this Aschenbach with the hero of the film version by Luchino Visconti, memorable for its use of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.

This mistake, however, brings to mind the controversy surrounding Mann’s inference in the novella that Mahler indeed had homosexual tendencies. The great author justified his theory by implying it was generally known in his circle that such a penchant existed and that Dr. Freud him self was the source of the diagnosis.

Herein lies the problem: Mann traveled in the same social world, both in Europe and California, as did the Mahler family and friends. What may have started out as mere gossip over time developed into scholarly hypothesis. So although there is much to stimulate thought in Mr. Feder’s monograph, the original source material is questionable.

The root problem of this study may be narrowness of perspective. Dr. Feder makes much of Freud’s citing the story told to him by Mahler of an incident that occurred when the composer was a little boy. Apparently mom and dad were fighting, and the young Gustav fled into the street in a state of panic – only to encounter a local musician grinding out a raucous version of the popular song “Ach du lieber Augustin.”

Bonaparte rapturously told Freud that this is just the type of contrast between the tragic and the banal that Mahler puts into his music on a regular basis, and the analyst concludes that the composer is reliving his trauma. Fine, but there is no mention that Mahler assiduously learned this compositional technique from Anton Bruckner when the older symphonist was teaching at the University of Vienna.

Was Bruckner, a certifiable obsessive-compulsive (who, ironically, lived literally just around the corner from Freud but apparently never met him) also acting out his childhood memories? And what do we make of the fact that Mahler’s protege, Arnold Schonberg, was the one to actually employ this particular pop tune in his own String Quartet No. 2? Isn’t it conceivable the three were simply refining an aesthetic technique?

The champion obfuscator in this group was undoubtedly Alma herself. Her diaries are virtually illegible, filled with deletions in impenetrable violet ink. Most entries have come down to posterity only in transcriptions typed by the author many years later. She even took a stab at reconstructing the famous Freud interview, making it all about her and deigning to agree with the great man when he treats her in a complimentary manner!

Her correspondence with Gustav reads like an epistolary novel, and a new edition of his own messages to her has recently been published as “Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife,” (Cornell University Press, 421 pages, $40) revised and translated by Antony Beaumont. The text is meant to be an adjunct to the great four-volume biography of the composer by Henry-Louis de La Grange, the head of the Mediatheque musicale Mahler in Paris and the original editor of these letters.

Once again, however, there is a rather large caveat. The letters were preserved for posterity by Alma herself. We have run into this conundrum before: Brahms and Clara Schumann exchanged hundreds of missives that encompassed the entire spectrum of passion. They made a pact that they would destroy these letters. Brahms dutifully burned all of Clara’s, but she kept many of his locked away. From an historical perspective her actions seem admirable, but how many others did she discard as inappropriate?

The Mahler letters are fascinating and show a complex personality at work.New Yorkers will chuckle as the conductor refers to his Philharmonic as “apathetic and untalented.” But the journey is not for the squeamish. Once Alma has her affair with future husband Walter Gropius – the stimulation for the Freud consultation – Gustav is reduced to a rather pathetic figure, trying to preserve some of his masculinity in sarcastic telegrams to his wife, only to respond with long sniveling letters of apology when she objects to his flippant tone.

Mahler also feels compelled to compose much love poetry for her at this time. Although these odes can be revelatory as musical scholarship – for example, the nine-note chord that forms the climax of the Adagio from the contemporaneous 10th Symphony is referred to as expressing “the power of searing emotions” – being exposed to this level of intimacy made me feel like a voyeur.

The search for truth can be a frustratingly ambivalent process. Despite the best efforts of scholars, the private lives of Gustav and Alma remain like one of those marvelous buildings on the Ringstrasse: The exterior may be opulent, but the hidden interior is often impenetrable and somewhat seamy.