In his person Gustav Mahler was one of the most tormented of composers, feeling from beginning to end like a stranger in the world, and his music was made in his own image. But sorrow is only one of the notes in the rich fabric of his art, which ranges from the childlike to the despairing, the earnest to the sardonic. His symphonies signal the end of romanticism, reaching a level of giganticism in forces and ambition that could hardly be carried further in the concert hall. In the freedom of his harmony and form and in his mingling of popular and exalted elements, he was equally a prophet of the music of the coming twentieth century.
Mahler was born in a small Bohemian village, son of an Austrian-Jewish tavern keeper. He spent his youth in Iglau, a German-speaking Czech town, where as Austrians the family were outsiders and as Jews doubly so. His father was distant and abusive, his mother frail but loving. Gustav inherited her weak heart and in adulthood seemed to affect her limp. There were a total of twelve children, variously afflicted, half of whom died in infancy; other siblings died later, from illness and suicide. From early on Gustav was obsessed with music, especially Czech folk music and the military marches he heard in the street. For him this music seemed to resonate with his feelings and his sorrows, and he never lost that sense of it. He began composing at four. His talent was prodigious; he made his piano debut at ten and at fifteen entered the Vienna Conservatory.
From the beginning Mahler intended to be a composer, but after his early efforts caused little stir he took up conducting and relegated composing to summer vacations. That pattern would last for the rest of his life. If his reputation as a composer was sketchy in his lifetime, as a conductor his success was spectacular. In seventeen years he rose from provincial opera houses to perhaps the most important podium in Europe: at age thirty-seven, likely with the backstage influence of Brahms, he became artistic director of the Vienna Opera. To secure the job he was more or less required to convert to Christianity. Mahler was not raised religiously, and in the next years his music was full of Christian imagery, partly born of his gnawing obsession with death and his desperate hope of resurrection. But the anti-Semitic press in Vienna never let the public forget his origins. In Vienna in those days, born a Jew, always a Jew. For Mahler, it cemented his position as an outsider.
In musical terms his regime at the opera was triumphant, historic. But if his performances earned him admirers, the fierce and relentless way he pursued his goals earned him enemies. His most celebrated performances were of Wagner and Mozart. In 1902 he married Alma Maria Schindler, called the most beautiful woman in Vienna. Mahler was not made for contentment, but in the next years he was among the most prominent conductors of the time and massively productive in his work. Despite his shaky health, he was an indefatigable swimmer and alpine hiker. He and Alma had two daughters, whom he doted on. This was the period of Symphonies 4 through 8.
In 1907 everything seemed to fall in on him at once. He was hounded out of the Opera by his critics, his three-year-old daughter died, and he was found to have a heart condition that he was not likely to survive for long. He declared that he had prophesied those three disasters in his tragic Symphony No. 6, which had three massive hammerblows of fate, the last of which he said felled the hero of the work. In despair, he went back to the score and took out the last blow. Meanwhile his marriage was increasingly troubled; eventually Alma took a lover.
At forty-seven, having lost probably the best job he could hope for in Europe, Mahler turned to the United States. In early 1908 he began conducting at the Metropolitan Opera and then took the podium of the New York Philharmonic. Once again his performances were hailed but his enemies proliferated. Alma later said the machinations of the board of the Philharmonic destroyed his position and hastened his death. Exhausted, Mahler returned to Vienna in 1911 and died there in May. At the end he seemed to be conducting, whispered the word “Mozart…” and was gone.
Along with much critical lambasting, Mahler had some successes with his music, but it never really triumphed in his lifetime. It was some fifty years after his death before his work was really embraced by the world. As he said prophetically near the end: “My time is yet to come.” His eventual triumph was largely due to the efforts of later champions, above all Leonard Bernstein. To many in his time, Mahler’s music was simply incomprehensible. Its temper ranges from the naive and childlike to towering proclamations. His harmonies are searching; sometimes a piece ends in a different key than its beginning; sometimes tonality all but disappears. His joining of little marches, shopworn popular tunes, simple folk melodies, military marches, and stretches of Beethovenian grandeur was bewildering to listeners who had grown up on Beethoven and Brahms. “The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said; “it must embrace everything.”
Brahms was a friend to Mahler and admired him greatly as a conductor, but Mahler’s first two symphonies scared the old master, though he could not have missed Mahler’s extraordinary gift with the orchestra. For me there are four supreme masters of the art of orchestration: Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, and Mahler. All of them worked in the twentieth century, when orchestral color had become more important than ever before.
Mahler wrote little but symphonies and song cycles. For those new to him I suggest starting with one of the cycles for orchestra: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). (If you can find it, listen to the classic recording by George Szell and the London Symphony Orchestra.) The texts are from a collection of German folk poetry published in the early nineteenth century, from which generations of German song composers drew. The subjects are all over the place, from the spooky ghost-march “Reveille” to the childlike naïveté of “Who made up this little song?” to the sweet goofiness of “St. Anthony of Padua preaches to the fish.” Every number is a delightful and individual gem. His love of folk music, naive and sentimental tunes, and military music are all over the settings. In each of them—performances range in number and order, but there are around a dozen—you hear Mahler’s wonderfully colored and vibrant orchestration. He usually required a large orchestra, but picked out constantly changing combinations within the band. The Wunderhorn is a teaser for his later symphonies, because he used some of his song themes in them.
For the symphonies, his worlds in sound, naturally start with the five-movement Symphony No. 2 (1888–1895). Its nickname is “Resurrection,” because its subject is nothing less than Mahler’s life, death, and resurrection. There’s a gigantic and portentous first movement, a slow movement based on the Austrian folk dance called a Ländler, a deliriously demonic scherzo based on the St. Anthony song in Wunderhorn (for me this exquisitely scored and utterly original scherzo is the glory of the symphony). The fourth movement features an alto singing a Wunderhorn poem, “Urlicht” (Primal Light), about longing to return to God; much of it is hymnlike in tone. The mammoth finale brings in a choir singing a lyric of Klopstock’s about resurrection, followed by a poem of Mahler’s own whose operative line is “I will die to be alive.” The tone of the opening is magical, radiant; when Mahler wants to conjure paradise, he can do it as well as anybody. The choral conclusion is either monumentally grand or monumentally tacky, depending on taste. Many would agree that in the symphonies Mahler falls into banality sometimes, and does so on the same epic scale as nearly everything else he does.
The Fourth Symphony, finished in 1900, is unique in his output, small-scale, good-humored, delicious from its jangling introduction and folklike first theme. After a wry scherzo and expansive and gorgeous slow movement, the finale features a soprano on another Wunderhorn song, a child’s vision of heaven that mainly involves lots of good things to eat. Mahler makes it at once ironic and touching. By this point his scoring sounds as if somehow a light had been turned on inside the orchestra, giving it a singular glow.
Finally, his penultimate completed (more or less) symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth), in six movements. Sung alternately by a tenor and alto, the poems are German translations of Chinese verses. Mahler finished it in 1909 and didn’t live to hear it. He probably didn’t expect to. The music is a farewell to life, in tone everything from grotesque and anguished to nostalgic. It begins with music that will later paint a bizarre image in the text: a howling ape crouching on a gravestone. It goes on to a drinking song: “The wine beckons in golden goblets… first I’ll sing you a song. The song of sorrow shall ring laughingly in your soul.” The middle movements are enchanting pastels evoking the joy of life: “Young girls picking flowers, / Picking lotus flowers at the riverbank. /Amid bushes and leaves they sit, / gathering flowers in their laps and calling / one another in raillery.” The finale builds to a hair-raising dance of death. The coda, ending on the word evig (forever), is heartbreakingly beautiful. This is a work from a man who no longer believes in immortality staring into his grave, but singing to the end.
If Mahler was virtually the last gasp of the romantic era, he also prophesied a great deal of the century to come, in its music and in its tragedy. Leonard Bernstein said, “Ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its spiritual prophet.” He saw it through the lens of his own joy and suffering, but he was singing of universal themes that will never lose their resonance.
More Mahler: The orchestral song cycles Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) and Rückert Lieder; Symphonies Nos. 5, 6, and 7.