Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born on 7 July 1860 at Kaliště, a village in Bohemia, into a German-speaking Jewish family. A few months later the family moved to Jihlava (Iglau) in Moravia, where his father ran a distillery and tavern. Of fourteen children, eight died young, and these losses marked Gustav deeply. He grew up to the sound of military bands from the nearby barracks, folk songs and bells, which later appear in his symphonies. At ten he gave his first piano recital.

In 1875 he entered the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied piano, harmony and composition. He also attended university lectures and befriended the composer Hugo Wolf. He admired Bruckner and attended his lectures. After his studies, unable to live from his compositions, he chose the profession of conductor. In 1880 he obtained his first post in a small spa town in Upper Austria, Bad Hall, conducting operettas.

He then rose rapidly: Ljubljana, Olomouc, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig. In 1888, aged twenty-eight, he became director of the Royal Opera in Budapest and in 1891 principal conductor at the Hamburg Opera. He was a demanding, authoritarian conductor who imposed strict discipline on musicians but achieved extraordinary results. He composed mainly in summer: from 1893 he retreated to the shores of Lake Attersee, to a small isolated hut where no one was to disturb him. He said: “I am a summer composer.”

In 1897 he converted to Catholicism, then a necessary condition for the most prestigious post in Europe: director of the Vienna Court Opera. For ten years he transformed the institution, modernised stagings with the painter Alfred Roller, barred latecomers from entering during performances and had the house lights dimmed. He also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. But his methods and the antisemitism of some circles earned him many enemies.

His symphonies are immense in length and in forces. Mahler said: “The symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything.” He mixed folk songs, military marches, waltzes, chorales, birdsong and meditations on life and death. His Symphony No. 1, “Titan” (1888), quotes the nursery round Frère Jacques in a minor key, like a funeral march; the Second, “Resurrection” (1895), ends with a triumphant chorus; the Fifth (1902) contains the famous Adagietto, a declaration of love to his wife.

In 1902 he married Alma Schindler, a brilliant twenty-two-year-old and a composer herself, whom he unfortunately asked to give up composing. They had two daughters. In 1907 Mahler had a terrible year: his elder daughter Maria died of diphtheria, he was diagnosed with a heart condition, and he left the Vienna Opera. He went to New York, where he conducted the Metropolitan Opera and then the New York Philharmonic. He composed Das Lied von der Erde (1908), on Chinese poems, and the Ninth Symphony (1909), a farewell to life.

On 12 September 1910 he conducted in Munich the triumphant premiere of his Symphony No. 8, nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of its gigantic forces of more than a thousand musicians and singers. It was the greatest success of his life. Gravely ill, he returned to Vienna in spring 1911 and died there on 18 May, aged fifty, leaving his Tenth Symphony unfinished. He had predicted: “My time will come.” Long neglected and banned by the Nazis, his music has enjoyed worldwide success since the 1960s.