Gustav Mahler (German: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; July 7, 1860 – May 18, 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer and one of the most important conductors of his time. As a composer, he connected the musical traditions of the 19th century with the new styles of the early 20th century. During his lifetime, his work as a conductor was widely respected, but his own music was not widely performed until after it was largely ignored for many years. During the Nazi era, his music was even forbidden in much of Europe. After World War II, a new generation of people began to listen to his music, and Mahler’s compositions became some of the most frequently performed and recorded in the world, a trend that continues today.
Mahler was born in Bohemia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire, to Jewish parents who had little wealth. He spoke German and showed musical talent early in life. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held several important conducting positions in European opera houses. In 1897, he became the director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). While working in Vienna, Mahler converted to Catholicism to secure the job, but he faced regular opposition from newspapers that spread anti-Semitic messages. Despite this, his creative ideas and high standards for performances earned him a reputation as one of the greatest opera conductors of his time, especially for his interpretations of works by composers like Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. Later in life, he briefly directed New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Mahler’s body of work is not very large. For most of his life, he composed music only part-time while working as a conductor. His early works include a movement from a piano quartet written during his studies in Vienna. Most of his later compositions required large orchestras, choirs, and operatic soloists. When first performed, many of his works were controversial and did not gain immediate approval from critics or audiences. Exceptions included his Second Symphony and the successful premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Some composers who followed Mahler’s style included Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern of the Second Viennese School. Later composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten admired and were influenced by Mahler. In 1955, the International Gustav Mahler Society was created to celebrate his life and achievements.
Biography
The Mahler family came from eastern Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. They were not wealthy, and the composer’s grandmother worked as a street peddler. At that time, Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire. The Mahler family was part of a German-speaking group among the Bohemians and was also Jewish. From this background, the future composer developed a lasting feeling of being an outsider, often describing himself as "always an intruder, never welcomed." The composer’s father, Bernhard Mahler, worked as a coachman and later became an innkeeper. He bought a small house in the village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt) and married Marie Herrmann in 1857. Marie was 19 years old and the daughter of a local soap maker. The couple had 14 children, but only six survived infancy. Their second son, Gustav Mahler, was born on July 7, 1860.
In December 1860, Bernhard Mahler moved with his wife and infant son to Jihlava (German: Iglau), where he started a successful business making and selling alcohol and running a tavern. The family grew quickly, but of the 12 children born in Jihlava, only six lived past infancy. Jihlava was a busy city with about 20,000 people, and Gustav learned music from street songs, dance tunes, folk melodies, and the music of the local military band. These influences later shaped his musical style.
At age four, Gustav discovered his grandparents’ piano and began playing it. He became skilled enough to be called a local child prodigy and gave his first public performance at the town theater when he was 10 years old. Although he loved music, his school records showed he was often distracted and unreliable in his studies. In 1871, his father sent him to a school in Prague to improve his grades, but Gustav was unhappy there and returned to Jihlava. In 1875, Gustav’s younger brother, Ernst, died after a long illness. To express his grief, Gustav and a friend began writing an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, as a tribute. Neither the music nor the text of this work survived.
Bernhard Mahler supported Gustav’s interest in music and helped him get into the Vienna Conservatory. Gustav auditioned for the renowned pianist Julius Epstein and was accepted for 1875–76. He studied piano with Epstein and won prizes after his first two years. In his final year, 1877–78, he focused on composition and harmony with teachers Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. Few of his student compositions survived, as he often discarded them when he was not satisfied. He destroyed a symphonic piece after it was rejected by the strict director Joseph Hellmesberger. Gustav may have gained his first conducting experience with the Conservatory’s student orchestra, though he mainly played percussion.
At the Conservatory, Gustav became friends with Hugo Wolf, a future song composer. Wolf was expelled for not following rules, but Gustav avoided the same fate by writing a letter of apology to Hellmesberger. Gustav attended lectures by Anton Bruckner and was influenced by him, even though Bruckner was not his teacher. Gustav also admired Richard Wagner’s music, though he may not have seen any of Wagner’s operas during his student years.
Gustav left the Conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but no medal for outstanding achievement. He then studied at the University of Vienna after passing a difficult exam called the Matura. He took classes in literature and philosophy. After leaving the university in 1879, he taught piano and continued composing. In 1880, he finished his first major work, a dramatic cantata called Das klagende Lied ("The Song of Lamentation"). This piece showed influences from Wagner and Bruckner but also included unique musical ideas. It was not performed until 1901, in a revised version.
Gustav became interested in German philosophy and was introduced to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner, and Hermann Lotze by his friend Siegfried Lipiner. These ideas continued to influence him and his music for many years.
From June to August 1880, Gustav took his first professional job as a conductor in a small theater in Bad Hall, a spa town near Linz. The theater only performed operettas, which Gustav described as a difficult and unexciting job. In 1881, he worked at the Landestheater in Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia), where he conducted his first full opera, Verdi’s Il trovatore. After this, he worked part-time as a chorus director in Vienna.
In January 1883, Gustav became the conductor at the Royal Municipal Theatre in Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic). He later said he felt nervous and anxious about the job. Despite challenges with the orchestra, he brought nine operas to the theater, including Bizet’s Carmen, and impressed the press. In 1883, he became the "Musical and Choral Director" at the Royal Theatre in Kassel, Germany. Though his title suggested authority, he was actually under the control of the theater’s Kapellmeister, Wilhelm Treiber, who disliked him. Despite this, Gustav had some successes, including directing a performance of his favorite opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz. On June 23, 1884, he conducted his own music for a play, Der Trompeter von Säckingen, marking the first public performance of his professional work.
Music
Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler's composing life into three distinct phases: a long "first period," extending from Das klagende Lied in 1880 to the end of the Wunderhorn phase in 1901; a "middle period" of more concentrated composition ending with Mahler's departure for New York in 1907; and a brief "late period" of elegiac works before his death in 1911.
The main works of the first period are the first four symphonies, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen song cycle, and various song collections in which the Wunderhorn songs predominate. In this period, songs and symphonies are closely related, and the symphonic works are programmatic. Mahler initially gave the first three symphonies full descriptive programs, all of which he later rejected. He devised, but did not publish, titles for each of the movements for the Fourth Symphony; from these titles, the German music critic Paul Bekker suggested a program in which Death appears in the Scherzo "in the friendly, legendary guise of the fiddler tempting his flock to follow him out of this world."
The middle period comprises a triptych of purely instrumental symphonies (the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh), the "Rückert" songs, the Kindertotenlieder, two final Wunderhorn settings, and, in some reckonings, Mahler's last great affirmative statement, the choral Eighth Symphony. Cooke believes that the Eighth stands on its own, between the middle and final periods. Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programs and descriptive titles; he wanted to write "absolute" music that spoke for itself. Cooke refers to "a new granite-like hardness of orchestration" in the middle-period symphonies, while the songs have lost most of their folk character and cease to influence the symphonies as explicitly as before.
The three works of the brief final period—Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth, and (incomplete) Tenth Symphonies—are expressions of personal experience, as Mahler faced death. Each of the pieces ends quietly, signifying that aspiration has now given way to resignation. Cooke considers these works to be a loving (rather than a bitter) farewell to life; the composer Alban Berg called the Ninth "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote." None of these final works were performed in Mahler's lifetime.
Mahler was a "late Romantic," part of an ideal that placed Austro-German classical music on a higher plane than other types, through its supposed possession of particular spiritual and philosophical significance. He was one of the last major composers of a line which includes, among others, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, and Brahms. From these antecedents, Mahler drew many of the features that were to characterise his music. Thus, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony came the idea of using soloists and a choir within the symphonic genre. From Beethoven, Liszt, and (from a different musical tradition) Berlioz came the concept of writing music with an inherent narrative or "programme," and of breaking away from the traditional four-movement symphony format. The examples of Wagner and Bruckner encouraged Mahler to extend the scale of his symphonic works well beyond the previously accepted standards, to embrace an entire world of feeling.
Early critics maintained that Mahler's adoption of many different styles to suit different expressions of feeling meant that he lacked a style of his own; Cooke, on the other hand, asserts that Mahler "redeemed any borrowings by imprinting his [own] personality on practically every note" to produce music of "outstanding originality." The music critic Harold Schonberg sees the essence of Mahler's music in the theme of struggle, in the tradition of Beethoven. However, according to Schonberg, Beethoven's struggles were those of "an indomitable and triumphant hero," whereas Mahler's are those of "a psychic weakling, a complaining adolescent who … enjoyed his misery, wanting the whole world to see how he was suffering." Yet, Schonberg concedes, most of the symphonies contain sections in which Mahler the "deep thinker" is transcended by the splendour of Mahler the musician.
Except for his juvenilia, little of which has survived, Mahler composed only in the media of song and symphony, with a close and complex interrelationship between the two. Donald Mitchell writes that this interaction is the backcloth against which all Mahler's music can be considered. The initial connection between song and symphony occurs with the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the First Symphony. Although this early evidence of cross-fertilisation is important, it is during Mahler's extended Wunderhorn phase, in which his Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies were written, that the song and symphony genres are consistently intermingled. Themes from the Wunderhorn song Das himmlische Leben ("The Heavenly Life"), composed in 1892, became a key element in the Third Symphony completed in 1896; the song itself forms the finale to the Fourth (1900) and its melody is central to the whole composition. For the Second Symphony, written between 1888 and 1894, Mahler worked simultaneously on the Wunderhorn song, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt ("The Sermon of St Anthony of Padua to the Fishes"), and on the Scherzo based on it which became the symphony's third movement. Another Wunderhorn setting from 1892, Urlicht ("Primal Light"), is used as the Second Symphony's fourth (penultimate) movement.
In Mahler's middle and late periods, the song–symphony relationship is less direct. However, musicologist Donald Mitchell notes specific relationships between the middle period songs and their contemporaneous symphonies—the second Kindertotenlieder song and the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the last Kindertotenlieder song and the Sixth Symphony finale. Mahler's last work employing vocal and orchestral forces, Das Lied von der Erde, is subtitled "A Symphony…"—Mitchell categorises it as a "song and symphony."
The union of song and symphonic form in Mahler's music is, in Cooke's view, organic; "his songs flower naturally into symphonic movements, being already symphonic in cast." To Sibelius,
Memorials and museums
The Gustav Mahler Museum in Hamburg is about the life and work of Gustav Mahler. It is located in the Composers Quarter. In Altschluderbach, near Toblach in South Tyrol, Italy, a small museum and memorial remain in the old hut where Mahler once lived. This museum is part of an animal park next to the Gustav Mahler Stube. The Stube had a museum on its first floor. Mahler and his wife, Alma, lived there from 1907 to 1910. Two other huts that Mahler used still exist and are set up as small museums. One is located at Attersee in Upper Austria, and the other is at Wörthersee in Carinthia. A mountain in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado is named Mount Mahler in honor of the composer.