Gustav Mahler died only 11 years into the 20th century, and saw none of the events that we think of as making our world modern. And yet, in many ways, his voice is very characteristic of the modern age. His symphonies are huge, complex essays on intensely personal, emotional, and spiritual journeys; his song cycles are anguished studies of death and loss.
Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, now in the western Czech Republic. His family was Jewish, and Jews at the time suffered from legal and social prejudice in the empire. His parents were poor: the village where Gustav was born consisted only of a scattering of rough peasant huts—and his parents’ marriage seems to have been an unhappy one. Gustav’s father, Bernard Mahler, had some good qualities: he was energetic and ambitious, but he treated his wife brutally. Soon after Gustav was born, the family moved to a larger town, Iglau, and here they seem to have been relatively comfortable. When it was discovered that Gustav had musical talent, he was able to have piano lessons. He made such progress that he gave a public recital at the age of ten, and was accepted at the Vienna Conservatory in September 1875. Mahler spent three years at the conservatory, earning money as a part-time piano teacher. He won prizes for his own piano playing and for composition, but was perhaps overlooked in the competition for greater prizes and positions because of the director’s anti-Semitism.
Probably the greatest influences on Mahler at the time were his friendship and reverence for the composer Anton Bruckner, and his discovery of the operas of Wagner, which were to play a significant role in Mahler’s professional life. One of Mahler’s classmates at the conservatory was the composer Hugo Wolf. The two struck up a close friendship, although they quarrelled bitterly later.
Mahler’s first major composition was the cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, Das Klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow), written in 1880. The libretto for this is Mahler’s own, and was based on German fairy tales. The music includes many characteristics of the mature composer: the orchestral interludes that illustrate the story, the more extensive use of woodwind than was common at the time, and the broad melodic lines that became Mahler’s hallmark for many listeners.
The basis of Mahler’s professional life and the work he was principally known for during his lifetime was that of a conductor. He got his first job in 1880 in Hall, in Northern Austria, conducting musical comedies, and for the next few years moved from post to post gaining invaluable experience of the rough and tumble world of a working conductor’s life. The orchestras and singers with whom he worked were second rate, but already Mahler’s fanatically high standards were making themselves felt—he demanded more rehearsal time than performers were used to and strict attention to every detail of the music and drama.
His first important post was at the Hamburg Municipal Theatre in Germany, where he was hired in 1891 and stayed for six years. In the summer of 1892, he visited London to conduct a season of German opera, including Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. There he was heard by the young Henry Wood, later a famous conductor himself, and founder of the Promenade Concerts in London, and by a music student, Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, who was deeply affected by the performance.
Mahler’s work in Hamburg established a pattern that remained for much of his life. As conductor of an opera company, he also had to oversee much of the day-to-day running of the theatre and already concerned himself with all the details of performances such as lighting and set design. His only time for composition was in the summer, usually during vacations in the country, which was for Mahler an indispensable experience. For many years, his summer retreat was at Steinbach-am-Attersee, near Salzburg, and here in 1893 he finished his Symphony No. 1, which was performed at the Weimar Festival in June 1894. It was received with a vociferous mixture of enthusiasm and dislike, but was also the trigger for one of the most important events of Mahler’s life. A young Jewish musician named Bruno Schlesinger was so interested in the reviews of the symphony that he became a disciple of Mahler. Later, under the adopted name Bruno WALTER, he conducted and disseminated Mahler’s works, making some of the best loved 20th-century recordings of the composer’s work.
While Mahler was at Hamburg, he composed his second and third symphonies and the song-cycle Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, or “Wayfarer Songs.” In 1897, he was offered the post of principal conductor and director of the Vienna Opera House, and stayed for the next ten years. This post was possibly the peak of the opera conductor’s profession, but it was not without difficulties. Prejudice against Mahler as a Jew was becoming more pronounced, and his perfectionism aroused antagonistic responses among the orchestra and singers. Nevertheless, his productions there were justly famous, and many of his musicians realised that they were privileged in participating in music-making of a very high order.
It was while he was in Vienna in 1901 that the 41-year-old composer met his future wife, Alma Maria Schindler, then 22 years old. They married five months later, and Mahler was devoted to Alma during their ten years together. She lived on for a further 53 years after his death, marrying twice more, and died in 1964. In the years following his marriage, Mahler astonishingly wrote almost a symphony a year, completing a first draft of his eighth in just eight weeks in the summer of 1906. All of Mahler’s symphonies call for large numbers of musicians, with much greater wind sections than usual, but the eighth is sometimes nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the great number of people involved, including the vocal soloists and chorus.
Mahler’s time at Vienna was coming to an end. The Opera House was in debt, which was blamed on Mahler’s lavish spending. He clashed with the royal family over his frequent absences to conduct elsewhere; and ominously, in 1907, Mahler experienced the first indications of the heart problem that was to kill him four years later.
Ordered to rest, Mahler did nothing of the kind but went on to sign a contract with the director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York for the 1908 season. Sadly, before he and Alma set off, their elder daughter died of scarlet fever. She was only four and a half. Mahler’s time in New York was destined to be brief and not altogether successful. Opera politics soon ousted him at the Met in favour of Arturo TOSCANINI, and Mahler then took on the post of conductor with the New York Philharmonic. He worked hard to improve the standard of the orchestra, but his autocratic methods made him disliked and he clashed continually with the management. He and Alma returned to Austria for their summer breaks each year.
In 1907, after the death of their child, Mahler read some translations of Chinese poems that a friend gave him to distract him from his grief. In the summer of 1908, he used the song texts to compose what is perhaps his most loved work, Das Lied von der Erde, which he described as a symphony for tenor, alto and orchestra. Bruno Walter was later to record a famous performance of this piece with the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier. In 1909, Mahler wrote his Symphony No. 9, and in 1910 embarked on Symphony No. 10, but left it unfinished when he was overcome by illness in the spring of 1911 and died of bacterial endocarditis on May 18. His last two symphonies were never performed in his lifetime.
After his death, his music was kept alive by a few faithful musicians, but was not widely known until the second half of the 20th century, when it has steadily grown in popularity. The length of his symphonies (several approach one-and-a-half hours in performance) and their complexity are at last recognised as a wonderful expression of the complexities and the passion of life itself.
Sue Harper
SEE ALSO:
LATE ROMANTICISM; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC; VOCAL AND CHORAL MUSIC.
Haylock, Julian. Gustav Mahler: An Essential Guide to His Life and Works (London: Pavilion, 1996);
La Grange, Henry-Louis de. Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Das Lied von der Erde; Kindertotenlieder; Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; Symphony No. 5; Symphony No. 8.