Gustav Mahler

• 1. Introduction

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  Gustav Mahler was born on the 7th of July 1860 in a village in Bohemia, the second son of a coachman-turned-innkeeper who had clawed his way up from nothing. By the time Mahler died on the 18th of May 1911, he had run the greatest opera house in the world, conducted hundreds of symphonies across three continents, and left behind a body of work so enormous and so strange that audiences and critics alike could barely agree on whether to admire it or resent it.

  The questions that hover over Mahler's life are not simple ones. How did a Jewish boy from a German-speaking minority in Bohemia become the director of the Vienna Court Opera, the most prestigious musical post in the Habsburg Empire? Why did his own compositions spend decades in obscurity, banned outright under the Nazis, while today they fill concert halls the world over? And what happened in those final three summers, when Mahler was composing music he knew might never be performed in his lifetime, music that Alban Berg would later call "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote"?

  The answers begin in Jihlava, a commercial city of 20,000 people, where a four-year-old boy discovered his grandparents' piano and never looked back.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Jihlava, called Iglau in the German of Mahler's day, was where the family settled in December 1860, just months after Gustav was born. His father Bernhard built a distillery and tavern business there, and the city offered the boy a rich sonic education: street songs, dance tunes, folk melodies, the trumpet calls and marches of the local military band. Mahler's grandmother had been a street pedlar. That was the family's starting point.

  Gustav gave his first public performance at the Jihlava town theatre when he was ten years old. His school reports from the Jihlava Gymnasium described him as absent-minded and unreliable at academic work. A brief stint at the New Town Gymnasium in Prague ended unhappily, and he returned home. Then, on the 13th of April 1875, his younger brother Ernst died after a long illness. Mahler was fifteen. He responded by starting an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, with a friend named Josef Steiner, as a memorial. Neither the music nor the libretto survived.

  That same year, Mahler was auditioned for the Vienna Conservatory by the renowned pianist Julius Epstein, and accepted for the 1875-76 academic year. He won prizes at the end of each of his first two years for his piano work. In his final year he concentrated on composition and harmony under Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. One of his fellow students was the future song composer Hugo Wolf, with whom he formed a close friendship. Wolf was eventually expelled for failing to submit to the Conservatory's discipline; Mahler avoided the same fate only by writing a penitent letter to the autocratic director Joseph Hellmesberger.

  Mahler attended occasional lectures by Anton Bruckner and, though never formally his pupil, came under Bruckner's influence. On the 16th of December 1877, he was present at the disastrous premiere of Bruckner's Third Symphony, at which most of the audience walked out. Mahler and other sympathetic students later prepared a piano version of the symphony and presented it to Bruckner. He left the Conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the silver medal for outstanding achievement. His philosophical education came partly through his friend Siegfried Lipiner, who introduced him to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. His biographer Jonathan Carr wrote 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."

• 3. The Conducting Ascent

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  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. The repertory was exclusively operetta. Julius Epstein had told him to accept it because he would soon work his way up. That prediction proved correct, though the path was neither smooth nor quick.

  His first full-scale opera came at the Landestheater in Laibach, now Ljubljana, in 1881, where he conducted Verdi's Il trovatore. He then moved to the Royal Municipal Theatre in Olmütz, where he arrived feeling, in his own words, "like one awaiting the wrath of God." Despite poor relations with the orchestra, he brought nine operas to the theatre and won over a sceptical press. At Kassel, from August 1883, he was subordinate to a Kapellmeister who disliked him and made his life miserable. On the 23rd of June 1884, at Kassel, he conducted the first professional public performance of a Mahler work: his incidental music to Der Trompeter von Säckingen.

  Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg: Mahler climbed from one to the next, each appointment more prestigious than the last, each marked by the same pattern of artistic brilliance and personal friction. In Leipzig, a fortuitous illness sidelined his senior colleague Arthur Nikisch, and Mahler stepped in to take charge of the complete Ring cycle. He scored a resounding public success. That same Leipzig period produced the celebrated premiere of Die drei Pintos on the 20th of January 1888, a completion of Weber's unfinished opera that Mahler had transcribed, orchestrated and partly composed himself. Tchaikovsky attended the third performance, on the 29th of January, and later wrote in a letter that he believed Mahler was "positively a genius."

  The Hamburg years, from 1891 to 1897, were in many ways the crucible. Mahler conducted 744 performances of 66 operas over six years. He brought the Hamburg singers to London in the summer of 1892 for an eight-week season of German opera, his only visit to Britain; the young composer Ralph Vaughan Williams heard his conducting of Tristan and "staggered home in a daze and could not sleep for two nights." From 1893 onward, Mahler reserved his summers for composing at Steinbach on the banks of Lake Attersee in Upper Austria. By 1897 he had secured what he had long been manoeuvring toward: the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, the Hofoper.

• 4. The Vienna Decade

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  The Hofoper appointment required a conversion. Vienna's post was barred to Jewish applicants, and Mahler converted to Catholicism in February 1897. He has been described as a lifelong agnostic. The city he entered was one that had recently elected Karl Lueger as mayor, a man who had once proclaimed: "I myself decide who is a Jew and who isn't." Anti-Semitic hostility would follow Mahler throughout his ten years there.

  He made his initial mark in May 1897 with praised performances of Wagner's Lohengrin and Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. On the 8th of October he was formally appointed to succeed director Jahn. His first production in office was Smetana's Dalibor, which angered Viennese German nationalists who accused him of fraternising with what they called the inferior Czech nation. The Austrian author Stefan Zweig wrote in his memoir The World of Yesterday that Mahler's appointment at thirty-eight caused "a frightened murmur and astonishment" through Vienna, because someone had entrusted the highest institute of art to "such a young person."

  The innovations came fast. Early in 1902 Mahler met the artist Alfred Roller, a figure associated with the Vienna Secession movement. The following year Mahler made him chief stage designer. Together they created more than 20 celebrated productions, among them Beethoven's Fidelio, Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide and Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. During his tenure a total of 33 new operas were introduced to the Hofoper, with 55 further new or revamped productions. A proposal to stage Richard Strauss's Salome in 1905 was rejected by the Viennese censors.

  The personal toll was considerable. In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands whose demands he rejected. The anti-Semitic press attacked him relentlessly. By 1907 he was at odds with the opera house administration over the time he spent on his own music. He signed a contract with the New York Metropolitan Opera on the 21st of June 1907, and on the 15th of October conducted his 645th and final performance at the Hofoper, a performance of Fidelio. His departing message to the company, pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered on the floor. Zwieg had also written that to see 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."

• 5. Mahler the Composer

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  Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler's composing life into three phases. The first, from Das klagende Lied in 1880 to the end of the Wunderhorn phase in 1901, produced the first four symphonies and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen cycle. The second, a middle period of more concentrated work ending with Mahler's departure for New York in 1907, produced the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies along with the Kindertotenlieder and the Rückert songs. The final period, brief and elegiac, yielded Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony and the unfinished Tenth.

  The German folk-poem collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which Mahler discovered in Leipzig around 1888, dominated his output for the following twelve years. Its influence is direct and measurable: themes from the Wunderhorn song Das himmlische Leben, composed in 1892, became a key element in the Third Symphony completed in 1896, and the song itself forms the finale of the Fourth. For the Second Symphony, written between 1888 and 1894, Mahler worked simultaneously on the Wunderhorn song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt and on the Scherzo based on it that became the symphony's third movement.

  Mahler told Sibelius that the symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything." He drew material from bird calls and cowbells, bugle fanfares, street melodies and country dances. His particular hallmark, identified by Cooke, was the constant intrusion of banality into moments of deep seriousness: in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony a trivial popular tune suddenly cuts into a solemn funeral march, then slowly transforms into a majestic Brucknerian chorale. Mahler himself described the Scherzo in the Third Symphony as "the most farcical and at the same time the most tragic piece that ever existed."

  A technical device Mahler used extensively is what Cooke called "progressive tonality": resolving a symphonic conflict in a different key from the one in which it was stated. The Second Symphony begins in C minor and ends in E-flat. The movements of the Fifth progress from C-sharp minor through to D major. The Sixth Symphony, unusually, begins and ends in A minor, a closed circuit that signifies unresolved conflict.

  The Eighth Symphony, composed at Maiernigg in eight weeks of furious activity in 1906, was the last of Mahler's works to be premiered in his lifetime. Its Munich premiere on the 12th of September 1910, advertised by its promoters as the Symphony of a Thousand, brought half an hour of applause. Alban Berg later called the Ninth Symphony "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote." None of the final three works were performed before Mahler's death.

• 6. Love, Loss and Last Years

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  In November 1901, at a social gathering that included the theatre director Max Burckhard, Mahler met Alma Schindler, stepdaughter of the painter Carl Moll. Alma was not initially keen to meet Mahler, on account of what she called "the scandals about him and every young woman who aspired to sing in opera." They disagreed about a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky, agreed to meet the following day at the Hofoper, and were married at a private ceremony on the 9th of March 1902. Alma was pregnant at the time; their daughter Maria Anna was born on the 3rd of November 1902, and a second daughter Anna arrived in 1904.

  Alma grew resentful of Mahler's insistence that there could be only one composer in the family. He wrote to her: "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." She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of... things closest to one's heart." His earlier companion Natalie Bauer-Lechner had said that living with him was "like being on a boat that is ceaselessly rocked to and fro by the waves."

  In the summer of 1907, at Maiernigg, both daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered. Maria died on the 12th of July, after a fortnight's struggle. Within days Mahler learned that his heart was defective. Alma described the diagnosis as a virtual death sentence; Mahler himself, in a letter to her on the 30th of August 1907, said he believed he could live a normal life if he avoided over-fatigue. The villa at Maiernigg was closed and never revisited.

  Mahler made his New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on the 1st of January 1908, conducting Tristan und Isolde. He later moved to the conductorship of the reformed New York Philharmonic, where in the 1909-10 season he rehearsed and conducted 46 concerts. The highlight of the summer of 1910 was the Eighth Symphony premiere in Munich, but it was overshadowed by his discovery that Alma had begun an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. Greatly distressed, Mahler sought advice from Sigmund Freud. One of Freud's observations was that much damage had been done by Mahler's insisting Alma give up her composing. Mahler accepted this, and began encouraging her music, editing and orchestrating some of her works. He dedicated the Eighth Symphony to her.

  On the 21st of February 1911, with a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, Mahler conducted what would be his last concert at Carnegie Hall, a program that included the world premiere of Busoni's Berceuse elegiaque. He was later diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis. On the 8th of April the family departed New York aboard SS Amerika. He reached Paris, entered a clinic at Neuilly, was transferred by train to the Löw sanatorium in Vienna on the 11th of May, developed pneumonia, and died on the 18th of May, aged 50. He was buried on the 22nd of May next to his daughter Maria, as he had requested. His tombstone bore only his name, because, in his own words, "any who come to look for me will know who I was and the rest don't need to know."

• 7. Neglect, Revival, Legacy

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  Mahler's friend Guido Adler calculated that at the time of the composer's death there had been more than 260 performances of the symphonies across Europe, Russia and America. The Fourth Symphony, with 61 performances, had been given most frequently. Yet performances grew less common after 1911, and the Nazi era brought an outright ban. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, Mahler's music was performed for Jewish orchestras and Jewish audiences alone: the Second Symphony in Berlin in early 1941, and the First and Fourth Symphonies along with the Songs of a Wayfarer in Amsterdam.

  In the Netherlands, the conductor Willem Mengelberg kept the flame alive, and his engagement with the New York Philharmonic from 1922 to 1928 brought Mahler regularly to American audiences. Leopold Stokowski gave the American premieres of the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in Philadelphia, the Eighth prompting a sensation that was immediately taken to New York. In Britain, Adrian Boult performed the Fourth Symphony with the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1926. The young Benjamin Britten heard Sir Henry Wood conduct the Eighth in London in 1938, found the performance "execrable" but was impressed by the music.

  Jonathan Carr's explanation for the 1950s revival is straightforward: "it was the long-playing record rather than the Zeitgeist which made a comprehensive breakthrough possible. Mahler's work became accessible and repeatable in the home." American composer Leonard Bernstein later implied he had single-handedly rescued Mahler from oblivion in 1960. His compatriot David Schiff countered that the revival was already well under way, sustained by conductors including Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos and John Barbirolli. Mahler himself had once predicted: "Would that I could perform my symphonies for the first time 50 years after my death!"

  Mahler's direct musical heirs included Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who together founded the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's Serenade Op. 24, Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra and Webern's Six Pieces all carry echoes of Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Later composers including Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill and Samuel Barber absorbed his influence. The International Gustav Mahler Society, founded in Vienna in 1955 with Bruno Walter as its first president, continues to work toward a complete critical edition of his works. A 2016 survey of 151 conductors by a British music magazine ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphonies of all time.