Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century

Family background#

The Mahler family came from eastern Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, and were of humble circumstances—the composer’s grandmother had been a street pedlar . Bohemia was then part of the Austrian Empire; the Mahler family belonged to a German-speaking minority among Bohemians, and was also Jewish. From this background the future composer developed early on a permanent sense of exile, “always an intruder, never welcomed”. The pedlar’s son Bernhard Mahler, the composer’s father, elevated himself to the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie by becoming a coachman and later an innkeeper. He bought a modest house in the village of Kaliště (), and in 1857 married Marie Herrmann, the 19-year-old daughter of a local soap manufacturer. In the following year Marie gave birth to the first of the couple’s 14 children, a son named Isidor, who died in infancy. Two years later, on 1860, their second son, Gustav, was born.

Childhood#

In December 1860, Bernhard Mahler moved with his wife and infant son to the city of Jihlava (), The family grew rapidly, but of the 12 children born to the family in the city, only six survived infancy. All of these elements would later contribute to his mature musical vocabulary. He developed his performing skills sufficiently to be considered a local and gave his first public performance at the town theatre when he was ten years old. Although Gustav loved making music, his school reports from the Jihlava portrayed him as absent-minded and unreliable in academic work. In 1871, in the hope of improving the boy’s results, his father sent him to the New Town Gymnasium in Prague, but Gustav was unhappy there and soon returned to Jihlava. On 13 April 1875 he suffered a bitter personal loss when his younger brother Ernst (b. 18 March 1862) died after a long illness. Mahler sought to express his feelings in music: with the help of a friend, Josef Steiner, he began work on an opera, (“Duke Ernest of Swabia”), as a memorial to his lost brother. Neither the music nor the libretto of this work has survived.

Student days#

Bernhard Mahler supported his son’s ambitions for a music career, and agreed that the boy should try for a place at the Vienna Conservatory. The young Mahler was auditioned by the renowned pianist Julius Epstein, and accepted for 1875–76. Few of Mahler’s student compositions have survived; most were abandoned when he became dissatisfied with them. He destroyed a symphonic movement prepared for an end-of-term competition, after its scornful rejection by the autocratic director Joseph Hellmesberger on the grounds of copying errors. He attended occasional lectures by Anton Bruckner and, though never formally his pupil, was influenced by him. On 16 December 1877, he attended the disastrous premiere of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, at which the composer was shouted down, and most of the audience walked out. Mahler and other sympathetic students later prepared a piano version of the symphony, which they presented to Bruckner. Along with many music students of his generation, Mahler fell under the spell of Richard Wagner, though his chief interest was the sound of the music rather than the staging. It is not known whether he saw any of Wagner’s operas during his student years. Mahler left the conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the silver medal given for outstanding achievement. He then enrolled in the University of Vienna (he had, at his father’s insistence, sat and with difficulty passed the , a highly demanding final exam at a , which was a precondition for university studies) and followed courses which reflected his developing interests in literature and philosophy. Its first performance was delayed until 1901, when it was presented in a revised, shortened form. Mahler developed interests in German philosophy, and was introduced by his friend Siegfried Lipiner to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. These thinkers continued to influence Mahler and his music long after his student days were over. Mahler’s biographer Jonathan Carr says that the composer’s head was “not only full of the sound of Bohemian bands, trumpet calls and marches, Bruckner chorales and Schubert sonatas. It was also throbbing with the problems of philosophy and metaphysics he had thrashed out, above all, with Lipiner”.

First appointments#

From June to August 1880, Mahler took his first professional conducting job, in a small wooden theatre in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz. After completing this engagement, Mahler returned to Vienna and worked part-time as chorus-master at the Vienna Carltheater. From the beginning of January 1883, Mahler became conductor at the Royal Municipal Theatre in Olmütz (now Olomouc) in Moravia. Despite poor relations with the orchestra, Mahler brought nine operas to the theatre, including Bizet’s Carmen, and won over the press that had initially been sceptical of him. Despite the unpleasant atmosphere, Mahler had moments of success at Kassel. He directed a performance of his favourite opera, Carl Maria von Weber’s , and 25 other operas. On 23 June 1884, he conducted his own incidental music to Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s play (“The Trumpeter of Säckingen”), the first professional public performance of a Mahler work. An ardent, but ultimately unfulfilled, love affair with soprano Johanna Richter led Mahler to write a series of love poems which became the text of his song cycle (“Songs of a Wayfarer”).

Prague and Leipzig#

In Prague, the emergence of the Czech National Revival had increased the popularity and importance of the new Czech National Theatre, and had led to a downturn in the ’s fortunes. Mahler’s task was to help arrest this decline by offering high-quality productions of German opera. He enjoyed early success presenting works by Mozart and Wagner, composers with whom he would be particularly associated for the rest of his career, In Leipzig, Mahler befriended Captain (1849–1897), grandson of the composer, and agreed to prepare a performing version of Weber’s unfinished opera (“The Three Pintos”). Mahler transcribed and orchestrated the existing musical sketches, used parts of other Weber works, and added some composition of his own. Mahler’s involvement with the Weber family was complicated by Mahler’s alleged romantic attachment to Carl von Weber’s wife Marion Mathilde (1857–1931) which, though intense on both sides – so it was rumoured by for example English composer Ethel Smyth – ultimately came to nothing. In February and March 1888 Mahler sketched and completed his First Symphony, then in five movements. At around the same time Mahler discovered the German folk-poem collection (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), which would dominate much of his compositional output for the following 12 years. However, Mahler had secretly been invited by Angelo Neumann in Prague (and accepted the offer) to conduct the premiere there of “his” , and later also a production of by Peter Cornelius. This short stay (July to September) ended unhappily, with Mahler’s dismissal following his outburst during a rehearsal. However, through the efforts of an old Viennese friend, Guido Adler, and cellist David Popper, Mahler’s name went forward as a potential director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest. He was interviewed, made a good impression, and was offered and accepted (with some reluctance) the post from 1 October 1888.

Apprentice composer#

In the early years of Mahler’s conducting career, composing was a spare time activity. Between his Laibach and Olmütz appointments he worked on settings of verses by Richard Leander and Tirso de Molina, later collected as Volume I of (“Songs and Airs”). Mahler’s first orchestral song cycle, , composed at Kassel, was based on his own verses, although the first poem, "" (“When my love becomes a bride”) closely follows the text of a poem. There has been frequent speculation about lost or destroyed works from Mahler’s early years. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg believed that the First Symphony was too mature to be a first symphonic work, and must have had predecessors. In 1938, Mengelberg revealed the existence of the so-called “Dresden archive”, a series of manuscripts in the possession of the widowed Marion von Weber. According to the Mahler historian Donald Mitchell, it was highly likely that important Mahler manuscripts of early symphonic works had been held in Dresden; this archive, if it existed, was almost certainly destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Royal Opera, Budapest#

On arriving in Budapest in October 1888, Mahler encountered a cultural conflict between conservative Hungarian nationalists who favoured a policy of Magyarisation, and progressives who wanted to maintain and develop the country’s Austro-German cultural traditions. In the opera house a dominant conservative caucus, led by the music director Sándor Erkel, had maintained a limited repertory of historical and folklore opera. By the time that Mahler began his duties, the progressive camp had gained ascendancy following the appointment of the liberal-minded Ferenc von Beniczky as intendant. Aware of the delicate situation, Mahler moved cautiously; he delayed his first appearance on the conductor’s stand until January 1889, when he conducted Hungarian-language performances of Wagner’s and to initial public acclaim. However, his early successes faded when plans to stage the remainder of the Ring cycle and other German operas were frustrated by a renascent conservative faction which favoured a more traditional “Hungarian” programme. Shortly after these family and health setbacks the premiere of the First Symphony, in Budapest on 20 November 1889, was a disappointment. The critic August Beer’s lengthy newspaper review indicates that enthusiasm after the early movements degenerated into “audible opposition” after the Finale. Mahler was particularly distressed by the negative comments from his Vienna Conservatory contemporary, Viktor von Herzfeld, who had remarked that Mahler, like many conductors before him, had proved not to be a composer. In 1891, Hungary’s move to the political right was reflected in the opera house when Beniczky on 1 February was replaced as intendant by Count Géza Zichy, a conservative aristocrat determined to assume artistic control over Mahler’s head. One of his final Budapest triumphs was a performance of Mozart’s (16 September 1890) which won him praise from Brahms, who was present at the performances on 16 December 1890. During his Budapest years Mahler’s compositional output had been limited to a few songs from the song settings that became Volumes II and III of , and amendments to the First Symphony.

Stadttheater Hamburg#

Mahler’s Hamburg post was as chief conductor, subordinate to the director, Bernhard Pohl (known as Pollini) who retained overall artistic control. Pollini was prepared to give Mahler considerable leeway if the conductor could provide commercial as well as artistic success. This Mahler did in his first season, when he conducted Wagner’s for the first time and gave acclaimed performances of the same composer’s and . Another triumph was the German premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, in the presence of the composer, who called Mahler’s conducting “astounding”, and later asserted in a letter that he believed Mahler was “positively a genius”. Mahler’s demanding rehearsal schedules led to predictable resentment from the singers and orchestra in whom, according to music writer Peter Franklin, the conductor “inspired hatred and respect in almost equal measure”. However, Mahler refused further such invitations as he was anxious to reserve his summers for composing. This concert also introduced six recent settings. Mahler achieved his first relative success as a composer when the Second Symphony was well-received on its premiere in Berlin, under his own baton, on 13 December 1895. Mahler’s conducting assistant Bruno Walter, who was present, said that “one may date Mahler’s rise to fame as a composer from that day.” That same year Mahler’s private life had been disrupted by the suicide of his younger brother Otto on 6 February. At the Stadttheater Mahler’s repertory consisted of 66 operas of which 36 titles were new to him. During his six years in Hamburg, he conducted 744 performances, including the debuts of Verdi’s Falstaff, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, and works by Smetana. He overcame the bar that existed against the appointment of a Jew to this post by what may have been a pragmatic conversion to Catholicism in February 1897. Despite this event, Mahler has been described as a lifelong agnostic.

Hofoper director#

As he waited for the Emperor’s confirmation of his directorship, Mahler shared duties as a resident conductor with Joseph Hellmesberger Jr. (son of the former conservatory director) and Hans Richter, an internationally renowned interpreter of Wagner and the conductor of the original Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876. Director Wilhelm Jahn had not consulted Richter about Mahler’s appointment; Mahler, sensitive to the situation, wrote Richter a complimentary letter expressing unswerving admiration for the older conductor. Subsequently, the two were rarely in agreement, but kept their divisions private. Vienna, the imperial Habsburg capital, had recently elected an anti-Semitic conservative mayor, Karl Lueger, who had once proclaimed: “I myself decide who is a Jew and who isn’t.” In such a volatile political atmosphere Mahler needed an early demonstration of his German cultural credentials. He made his initial mark in May 1897 with much-praised performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Mozart’s . Shortly after the triumph, Mahler was forced to take sick leave for several weeks, during which he was nursed by his sister Justine and his long-time companion, the viola player Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Mahler returned to Vienna in late July to prepare for Vienna’s first uncut version of the Ring cycle. This performance took place on 24–27 August, attracting critical praise and public enthusiasm. Mahler’s friend Hugo Wolf told Bauer-Lechner that “for the first time I have heard the Ring as I have always dreamed of hearing it while reading the score”. On 8 October Mahler was formally appointed to succeed Jahn as the Hofoper’s director. His first production in his new office was Smetana’s Czech nationalist opera Dalibor, with a reconstituted finale that left the hero Dalibor alive. This production caused anger among the more extreme Viennese German nationalists, who accused Mahler of “fraternising with the anti-dynastic, inferior Czech nation.” The Austrian author Stefan Zweig, in his memoirs The World of Yesterday (1942), described Mahler’s appointment as an example of the Viennese public’s general distrust of young artists: “Once, when an amazing exception occurred and Gustav Mahler was named director of the Court Opera at thirty-eight years old, a frightened murmur and astonishment ran through Vienna, because someone had entrusted the highest institute of art to ‘such a young person’ … This suspicion—that all young people were ’not very reliable’—ran through all circles at that time.” Zweig also wrote that “to have seen Gustav Mahler on the street in Vienna was an event that one would proudly report to his comrades the next morning as if it were a personal triumph.” During Mahler’s tenure a total of 33 new operas were introduced to the Hofoper; a further 55 were new or totally revamped productions. However, a proposal to stage Richard Strauss’s controversial opera Salome in 1905 was rejected by the Viennese censors. Early in 1902 Mahler met Alfred Roller, an artist and designer associated with the Vienna Secession movement. A year later, Mahler appointed him chief stage designer to the Hofoper, where Roller’s debut was a new production of . The collaboration between Mahler and Roller created more than 20 celebrated productions of, among other operas, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Mozart’s . In the Figaro production, Mahler offended some purists by adding and composing a short recitative scene to Act III. In spite of numerous theatrical triumphs, Mahler’s Vienna years were rarely smooth; his battles with singers and the house administration continued on and off for the whole of his tenure. While Mahler’s methods improved standards, his histrionic and dictatorial conducting style was resented by orchestra members and singers alike. In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff. The anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society, long opposed to Mahler’s appointment, continued to attack him relentlessly, and in 1907 instituted a press campaign designed to drive him out. By that time he was at odds with the opera house’s administration over the amount of time he was spending on his own music, and was preparing to leave. but had won few friends—it was said that he treated his musicians in the way a lion tamer treated his animals. His departing message to the company, which he pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered over the floor. After conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony on 24 November, Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December.

Philharmonic concerts#

When Richter resigned as head of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription concerts in September 1898, the concerts committee had unanimously chosen Mahler as his successor. The appointment was not universally welcomed; the anti-Semitic press wondered if, as a non-German, Mahler would be capable of defending German music. Attendances rose sharply in Mahler’s first season, but members of the orchestra were particularly resentful of his habit of re-scoring acknowledged masterpieces, and of his scheduling of extra rehearsals for works with which they were thoroughly familiar. In April 1901, dogged by a recurrence of ill-health and wearied by more complaints from the orchestra, Mahler relinquished the Philharmonic concerts conductorship. In his three seasons he had performed around 80 different works, which included pieces by relatively unknown composers such as Hermann Goetz, Wilhelm Kienzl and the Italian Lorenzo Perosi.

Mature composer#

The demands of his twin appointments in Vienna initially absorbed all Mahler’s time and energy, but by 1899 he had resumed composing. The remaining Vienna years were to prove particularly fruitful. While working on some of the last of his settings he started his Fourth Symphony, which he completed in 1900. By this time he had abandoned the composing hut at Steinbach and had acquired another, at Maiernigg on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia, where he later built a villa. In this new venue Mahler embarked upon what is generally considered as his “middle” or post- compositional period. Between 1901 and 1904 he wrote ten settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, five of which were collected as . The other five formed the song cycle (“Songs on the Death of Children”). The trilogy of orchestral symphonies, the Fifth, the Sixth and the Seventh were composed at Maiernigg between 1901 and 1905, and the Eighth Symphony written there in 1906, in eight weeks of furious activity. Within this same period Mahler’s works began to be performed with increasing frequency. In April 1899 he conducted the Viennese premiere of his Second Symphony; 17 February 1901 saw the first public performance of his early work , in a revised two-part form. Later that year, in November, Mahler conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, in Munich, and was on the rostrum for the first complete performance of the Third Symphony, at the festival at Krefeld on 9 June 1902. Mahler “first nights” now became increasingly frequent musical events; he conducted the first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies at Cologne and Essen respectively, in 1904 and 1906. Four of the , and , were introduced in Vienna on 29 January 1905.

Marriage, family, tragedy#

During his second season in Vienna, Mahler acquired a spacious modern apartment on the Auenbruggergasse and built a summer villa on land he had acquired next to his new composing studio at Maiernigg. Alma was not initially keen to meet Mahler, on account of “the scandals about him and every young woman who aspired to sing in opera.” The two engaged in a lively disagreement about a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma was one of Zemlinsky’s pupils), but agreed to meet at the Hofoper the following day. a daughter Maria Anna, who was born on 3 November 1902. A second daughter, Anna, was born in 1904. On the other hand, Mahler’s family considered Alma to be flirtatious, unreliable, and too fond of seeing young men fall for her charms. Mahler was by nature moody and authoritarian—Natalie Bauer-Lechner, his earlier partner, said that living with him was “like being on a boat that is ceaselessly rocked to and fro by the waves.” Alma soon became resentful because of Mahler’s insistence that there could only be one composer in the family and that she had given up her music studies to accommodate him. “The role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner … I’m asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange.” She wrote in her diary: “How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of … things closest to one’s heart.” Mahler’s requirement that their married life be organized around his creative activities imposed strains, and precipitated rebellion on Alma’s part; the marriage was nevertheless marked at times by expressions of considerable passion, particularly from Mahler. In the summer of 1907 Mahler, exhausted from the effects of the campaign against him in Vienna, took his family to Maiernigg. Soon after their arrival both daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered, but after a fortnight’s struggle Maria died on 12 July. Immediately following this devastating loss, Mahler learned that his heart was defective, a diagnosis subsequently confirmed by a Vienna specialist, who ordered a curtailment of all forms of vigorous exercise. The extent to which Mahler’s condition disabled him is unclear; Alma wrote of it as a virtual death sentence, though Mahler himself, in a letter written to her on 30 August 1907, said that he would be able to live a normal life, apart from avoiding over-fatigue. The illness was, however, a further depressing factor. Mahler and his family left Maiernigg and spent the rest of the summer at Schluderbach. At the end of the summer the villa at Maiernigg was closed and never revisited.

New York#

Mahler made his New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 1 January 1908, when he conducted Wagner’s . On his return to Austria for the summer of 1908, Mahler established himself in the third and last of his composing studios, in the pine forests close to Toblach in Tyrol. Here, using a text by Hans Bethge based on ancient Chinese poems, he composed (“The Song of the Earth”). For its 1908–09 season the Metropolitan management brought in the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to share duties with Mahler, who made only 19 appearances in the entire season. One of these was a much-praised performance of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride on 19 February 1909. In the early part of the season Mahler conducted three concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra. This renewed experience of orchestral conducting inspired him to resign his position with the opera house and accept the conductorship of the re-formed New York Philharmonic. He continued to make occasional guest appearances at the Met, his last performance being Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades on 5 March 1910. Back in Europe for the summer of 1909, Mahler worked on his Ninth Symphony and made a conducting tour of the Netherlands. The highlight of Mahler’s 1910 summer was the first performance of the Eighth Symphony at Munich on 12 September, the last of his works to be premiered in his lifetime. The occasion was a triumph—“easily Mahler’s biggest lifetime success”, according to Carr —but it was overshadowed by the composer’s discovery, before the event, that Alma had begun an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. Greatly distressed, Mahler sought advice from Sigmund Freud, and appeared to gain some comfort from his meeting with the psychoanalyst. One of Freud’s observations was that much damage had been done by Mahler’s insisting that Alma give up her composing. Mahler accepted this, and started to positively encourage her to write music, even editing, orchestrating and promoting some of her works. Alma agreed to remain with Mahler, although the relationship with Gropius continued surreptitiously. In a gesture of love, Mahler dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her.

Illness and death#

In spite of the emotional distractions, during the summer of 1910 Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements. He and Alma returned to New York in late October 1910, where Mahler threw himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Around Christmas 1910 he began suffering from a sore throat, which persisted. On 21 February 1911, with a temperature of 40 °C (104 °F), Mahler insisted on fulfilling an engagement at Carnegie Hall, with a program of mainly new Italian music, including the world premiere of Busoni’s . This was Mahler’s last concert. After weeks confined to bed he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, a disease to which people with defective heart valves were particularly prone and which could be fatal. Mahler did not give up hope; he talked of resuming the concert season, and took a keen interest when one of Alma’s compositions was sung at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda, on 3 March. On 8 April the Mahler family and a permanent nurse left New York on board SS Amerika bound for Europe. They reached Paris ten days later, where Mahler entered a clinic at Neuilly, but there was no improvement; on 11 May he was taken by train to the Löw sanatorium in Vienna, where he developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. Hundreds had come to the sanatorium during this brief period to show their admiration for the great composer. After receiving treatments of radium to reduce swelling on his legs and morphine for his general ailments, he died on 18 May, aged 50. On 22 May 1911 Mahler was buried in the , as he had requested, next to his daughter Maria. His tombstone was inscribed only with his name because “any who come to look for me will know who I was and the rest don’t need to know.” Alma, on doctors’ orders, was absent, but among the mourners at a relatively pomp-free funeral were Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as “the holy Gustav Mahler”), Bruno Walter, Alfred Roller, the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, and representatives from many of the great European opera houses. The New York Times, reporting Mahler’s death, called him “one of the towering musical figures of his day”, but discussed his symphonies mainly in terms of their duration, incidentally exaggerating the length of the Second Symphony to “two hours and forty minutes”. In London, The Times obituary said his conducting was “more accomplished than that of any man save Richter”, and that his symphonies were “undoubtedly interesting in their union of modern orchestral richness with a melodic simplicity that often approached banality”, though it was too early to judge their ultimate worth. Alma Mahler survived her husband by more than 50 years, dying in 1964. She married Walter Gropius in 1915, divorced him five years later, and married the writer Franz Werfel in 1929. In 1940 she published a memoir of her years with Mahler, entitled Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters. This account was criticised by later biographers as incomplete, selective and self-serving, and for providing a distorted picture of Mahler’s life. The composer’s daughter Anna Mahler became a well-known sculptor; she died in 1988. The International Gustav Mahler Society was founded in 1955 in Vienna, with Bruno Walter as its first president and Alma Mahler as an honorary member. The Society aims to create a complete critical edition of Mahler’s works, and to commemorate all aspects of the composer’s life.

Three creative periods#

Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler’s composing life into three distinct phases: a long “first period”, extending from in 1880 to the end of the 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 song cycle and various song collections in which the songs predominate. 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 conjectured a programme 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 and the , two final settings and, in some reckonings, Mahler’s last great affirmative statement, the choral Eighth Symphony. Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programmes 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, The three works of the brief final period—, 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”.

Antecedents and influences#

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. 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.

Genre#

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 and the First Symphony. Although this early evidence of cross-fertilisation is important, it is during Mahler’s extended phase, in which his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies were written, that the song and symphony genres are consistently intermingled. Themes from the song (“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 song, (“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 setting from 1892, (“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. Mahler’s last work employing vocal and orchestral forces, , is subtitled “A Symphony …"—Mitchell categorises it as a “song and symphony.”

Era: Late Romantic
Lived: 1860–1911
From: Austrian Empire (now Austria), Cisleithania (now Austria)
Born in: Kaliště · died Vienna
Known as: conductor, composer, classical composer, bandleader, theatre manager, chapelmaster
Genres: classical music, symphony, chamber music