Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (Kalischt), then part of the Austrian Empire, the second of fourteen children born to Bernhard Mahler, a distiller and tavern keeper, and his wife Marie ^[1]. Only six of the fourteen siblings survived to adulthood, and the deaths of brothers and sisters in childhood left marks on the composer that scholars have traced through his later music, particularly the Kindertotenlieder, his songs on the death of children ^[2].

Within months of Gustav's birth the family moved to the larger town of Iglau (now Jihlava in the Czech Republic), where Bernhard's business prospered enough to support piano lessons for his evidently gifted son. The boy absorbed the sounds around him: military bands from the local garrison, folk tunes, street songs, and the trumpet calls that would echo through his symphonies decades later ^[1]. He gave his first public piano recital in Iglau at the age of ten.

As a German-speaking Jew in a Czech-speaking region of a German-dominated empire, Mahler grew up with a layered sense of not quite belonging anywhere. He later described himself as three times homeless: a Bohemian among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew throughout the world ^[3]. In 1875, at fifteen, he was accepted into the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied piano with Julius Epstein and composition with Franz Krenn, winning prizes in both disciplines before graduating in 1878 ^[1].

Mahler's conducting career began at the bottom. His first post, in the summer of 1880, was at a small spa theatre in Bad Hall in Upper Austria, where his duties reportedly included setting out the music stands ^[2]. From there he climbed through a series of provincial opera houses: Laibach (Ljubljana) in 1881, Olmütz in 1883, then Kassel, where he served as a junior conductor and endured a frustrating subordinate role ^[1].

The breakthrough came in Prague in 1885 and, more decisively, in Leipzig from 1886, where he worked alongside the celebrated conductor Arthur Nikisch. In Leipzig, Mahler completed and premiered Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos in 1888, a success that brought him money and attention across the German musical world ^[2]. That same year he finished his First Symphony and took up the directorship of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest, where the visiting Johannes Brahms praised his conducting of Mozart's Don Giovanni ^[1].

From 1891 to 1897 Mahler served as chief conductor at the Hamburg Stadttheater, one of Germany's leading opera houses. There he built his reputation as a perfectionist of ferocious energy, and there Hans von Bülow, the era's most famous conductor, acknowledged his talent on the podium even while recoiling from his compositions ^[2]. During the Hamburg years Mahler established the working pattern he kept for the rest of his life: conducting through the season, composing during summer retreats in the Austrian countryside, first at Steinbach on the Attersee, where he completed the Second and Third Symphonies in a small lakeside composing hut ^[4].

In 1897 Mahler secured the most coveted musical position in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). Because the imperial post was closed to Jews, he converted to Roman Catholicism that February, a step contemporaries and later biographers have read as chiefly pragmatic, though Mahler's spiritual searching was genuine and lifelong ^[1].

His ten years in Vienna, from 1897 to 1907, are widely regarded as a golden age of the house. Mahler imposed unprecedented discipline: he darkened the auditorium during performances, refused latecomers entry until suitable pauses, purged the claque, and demanded dramatic truth from singers accustomed to routine ^[3]. With the stage designer Alfred Roller, whom he engaged in 1903, he created productions of Tristan und Isolde, Fidelio, and Don Giovanni that used light, color, and simplified staging in ways that anticipated modern operatic production ^[2].

The cost was constant conflict. Mahler's uncompromising standards, his cuts to working routines, and his position as a converted Jew in an increasingly antisemitic city made him a target of the Viennese press throughout his tenure ^[3]. Yet the achievement was undeniable, and any account of Gustav Mahler achievements must rank the reformed Vienna Opera alongside the symphonies: he demonstrated that opera could be a unified artwork rather than a vehicle for star singers.

Mahler composed nine completed symphonies, the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), and several sets of songs with orchestra or piano, leaving a Tenth Symphony unfinished at his death ^[1]. Because he earned his living conducting, nearly all of this music was written in summer huts at Steinbach, Maiernigg on the Wörthersee, and Toblach in the Dolomites, a compressed working method that makes the scale of the output remarkable ^[4].

The symphonies enlarged the form in every dimension. The Second (Resurrection) and Third employ vocal soloists and choruses; the Third, at roughly ninety to one hundred minutes, is among the longest symphonies in the standard repertoire ^[2]. The Eighth Symphony, premiered in Munich on September 12, 1910, before an audience of about three thousand, calls for enormous orchestral and choral forces and was nicknamed the Symphony of a Thousand by the concert promoter; its premiere was the greatest public triumph of Mahler's life ^[1]. Alongside the monumental works stand pieces of chamber-like intimacy, such as the famous Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, scored for strings and harp alone.

Mahler's songs are inseparable from his symphonies. Material from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) flows into the First Symphony, and settings from the folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn permeate the Second, Third, and Fourth ^[2]. In Das Lied von der Erde, completed in 1909 on translated Chinese poems, he fused song cycle and symphony into a single form, closing with a long farewell movement, Der Abschied, that many listeners count among the most moving pages in orchestral music ^[5]. Among the most cited Gustav Mahler facts is his remark that a symphony must be like the world and embrace everything, a conviction audible in music that admits marches, folk dances, birdsong, and cowbells alongside counterpoint of great sophistication ^[3].

In November 1901 Mahler met Alma Schindler, the daughter of the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler and one of the most sought-after young women in Viennese society. They married on March 9, 1902, when he was forty-one and she was twenty-two ^[1]. As a condition of the marriage Mahler required Alma, herself a trained composer, to give up composing, a demand he came to regret; in 1910 he arranged for some of her songs to be published ^[3].

The couple had two daughters, Maria, born in 1902, and Anna, born in 1904. In the summer of 1907 Maria died of scarlet fever and diphtheria at the family's villa in Maiernigg, aged four. Within days of her death, doctors diagnosed Mahler with a defective heart valve, a condition that forced him to curtail the vigorous walking, swimming, and cycling he loved ^[1]. The double blow of 1907, together with his resignation from the Vienna Opera that same year, marked the darkest turning point of his life.

The marriage itself came under strain. In the summer of 1910 Mahler discovered Alma's affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, and in August of that year he sought out Sigmund Freud, then on holiday in the Netherlands, for a single extended consultation in Leiden, an encounter Freud later described in his correspondence ^[3]. Mahler poured his anguish into the manuscript of the unfinished Tenth Symphony, whose pages carry desperate annotations addressed to his wife ^[5].

After leaving the Vienna Court Opera in 1907, Mahler accepted an engagement with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, making his American debut on January 1, 1908, with Tristan und Isolde ^[1]. In 1909 he became principal conductor of the reorganized New York Philharmonic, dividing his years between demanding American seasons and Austrian summers devoted to composition at Toblach.

In these final summers he completed Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony and drafted the Tenth. Aware of what biographers have called the curse of the ninth, the superstition that no symphonist after Beethoven would pass that number, he declined to number Das Lied among his symphonies ^[5]. He never heard either work performed: Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony were both premiered posthumously by his protégé Bruno Walter, in Munich in 1911 and Vienna in 1912 respectively ^[2].

In February 1911, ill with a streptococcal blood infection, Mahler conducted his final concert with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. When treatments in Paris failed, he asked to be taken home to Vienna, where he died on May 18, 1911, at the age of fifty. He was buried, at his own request, beside his daughter Maria in the Grinzing cemetery, under a headstone bearing only his name ^[1].

For half a century after his death, Mahler's music held only a marginal place in concert programs outside a circle of devoted conductors, among them Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Willem Mengelberg, whose Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra kept a continuous Mahler tradition alive ^[2]. In Germany and Austria the Nazi regime banned his works entirely between 1933 and 1945 because he was born a Jew ^[3].

The revival came in the 1960s, propelled by the centenary of his birth, the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein, who recorded the first complete cycle of the nine symphonies with the New York Philharmonic, and the arrival of the long-playing record, which suited his vast structures ^[5]. Since then the symphonies have moved to the center of the orchestral repertoire, and the Adagietto of the Fifth reached audiences far beyond the concert hall through Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice ^[2].

Mahler's influence runs through Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, who revered him as a father figure of the new music, and later through composers as different as Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten ^[1]. Every serious Gustav Mahler biography, from Henry-Louis de La Grange's four-volume study to more recent single-volume accounts, returns to the same paradox: a musician his contemporaries valued mainly as a conductor became, a century later, one of the most performed and recorded symphonists in the world. His own prophecy, that his time would yet come, is quoted in nearly every survey of his life ^[3].