Gustav Mahler
Austrian composer and conductor
1860 CE to 1911 CE
Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) is a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation.
He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic.
Then his family moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava) where Mahler grew up.
As a composer, he acts as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century.
While in his lifetime his status as a conductor is established beyond question, his own music gains wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which include a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era.
After 1945, the music is discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then becomes one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displays his musical gifts at an early age.
After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he holds a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper).
During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Jewish press.
Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensure his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart.
Late in his life, he is briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Mahler's œuvre is relatively small in size though extremely wide in scope, depth and complexity.
For much of his life, composing is necessarily a part-time activity while he earns his living as a conductor, but he devotes as much time as he can to his compositions, faithfully reserving his summer months for intense periods of creative concentration, supplemented as time permitted during his active concert seasons with the tasks of editing and orchestrating his expansive works.
Aside from early works, such as a movement from a piano quartet composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works are designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists.
Most of his twelve symphonic scores are very large-scale works, often employing vocal soloists and choruses in addition to augmented orchestral forces.
These works are often controversial when first performed, and several are slow to receive critical and popular approval; exceptions include his Symphony No.
2, Symphony No.
3, and the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910.
Some of Mahler's immediate musical successors include the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admire and are influenced by Mahler.
The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955, to honor the composer's life and work.
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Music by Romantic composers Johannes Brahms, Modesto Mussorgsky and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky has a similarly dramatic impact.
Brahms, in his dramatic compositions, continues Beethoven’s symphonic tradition, as do Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler.
Gustav Mahler had left Prague to take up his post as a professional conductor at the Neues Stadttheater in Leipzig, where rivalry with his senior colleague Arthur Nikisch begins at once.
This is primarily over how the two should share conducting duties for the theater's new production of Wagner's Ring cycle.
Nikisch's illness, in January 1887, means that Mahler takes charge of the whole cycle, and scores a resounding public success.
This does not win him popularity with the orchestra, who resent his dictatorial manner and heavy rehearsal schedules.
Mahler had taken his first professional conducting job in a small wooden theater in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz, in the summer of 1880.
The repertory was exclusively operetta; it was, in Carr's words, "a dismal little job", which Mahler accepted only after Julius Epstein told him he would soon work his way up.
In 1881, he had been engaged at the Landestheater in Laibach (now Ljubljana, in Slovenia), where the small but resourceful company was prepared to attempt more ambitious works.
Here, Mahler had conducted his first full-scale opera, Verdi's Il trovatore, one of more than fifty that he presented during his time in Laibach.
After completing his six-month engagement, Mahler had returned to Vienna and worked part-time as chorus-master at the Vienna Carltheater.
In January 1883, Mahler became conductor at a run-down theatre in Olmütz (now Olomouc).
Despite poor relations with the orchestra, Mahler brought five new operas to the theater, including Bizet's Carmen, and won over the press that had initially been hostile to him.
After a week's trial at the Royal Theater in the Hessian town of Kassel, Mahler had became the theater's "Musical and Choral Director" from August 1883.
The title concealed the reality that Mahler was subordinate to the theatrer's Kapellmeister, Wilhelm Treiber, who disliked him and set out to make his life miserable.
Despite the unpleasant atmosphere, Mahler had moments of success at Kassel.
He directed a performance of his favorite opera, Weber's Der Freischütz,and, on June 23, 1884, conducted his own incidental music to Joseph Victor von Scheffel's play Der Trompeter von Säkkingen ("The Trumpeter of Säkkingen"), 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 Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer").
In January 1884, the distinguished conductor Hans von Bülow brought the Meiningen Court Orchestra to Kassel and gave two concerts.
Hoping to escape from his job in the theater, Mahler unsuccessfully sought a post as Bülow's permanent assistant.
However, in the following year his efforts to find new employment resulted in a six-year contract with the prestigious Leipzig Opera, to begin in 1886.
Unwilling to remain in Kassel for another year, Mahler resigned in July 1885, and through good fortune had been offered a standby appointment as an assistant conductor at the Neues Deutsches Theater (New German Theatre) in Prague.
In Prague, the emergence of the Czech National Revival has increased the popularity and importance of the new Czech National Theater, and has led to a downturn in the Neues Deutsches Theater's fortunes.
Mahler's task is to help arrest this decline by offering high-quality productions of German opera.
He has early success presenting works by Mozart and Wagner, composers with whom he will be particularly associated for the rest of his career, but his individualistic and increasingly autocratic conducting style leads to friction, and a falling out with his more experienced fellow-conductor, Ludwig Slansky.
Gustav Mahler premieres his Symphony No. 1, in Budapest, on November 20, 1889.
Mainly composed between late 1887 and March 1888, though it incorporates music Mahler had composed for previous works, it had been composed while Mahler was second conductor at the Leipzig Opera, Germany.
Although in his letters Mahler almost always refers to the work as a symphony, the first two performances describe it as a symphonic poem and as a tone poem in symphonic form respectively.
The work is premièred at the Vigadó Concert Hall, but is not well received.
Mahler will make some major revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg in October 1893; further alterations will be made in the years prior to the first publication, in late 1898.
Some modern performances and recordings give the work the title Titan, despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for the second and third performances, and never after the work had reached its definitive four-movement form in 1896.
Mahler will conduct more performances of this symphony than of any of his later works.