1860–1911 · Austria · 20th century
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) was an Austrian composer and one of the leading opera and symphonic conductors of his era. As director of the Vienna Court Opera he thoroughly reformed operatic staging, while his symphonies and song cycles bridged nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century music. For players, his songs for voice and piano offer an accessible way into the late-Romantic vocal tradition.
Gustav Mahler was born into a poor Jewish family in the Bohemian village of Kaliště, in a region now part of the Czech Republic. His father, Bernhard Mahler, kept an inn and traded on a small scale, as his own father had done before him; his mother, Marie Herrmann, was the daughter of a small soap manufacturer. Gustav was the second of fourteen children, eight of whom died in early childhood. Soon after his birth the family moved to the Moravian town of Jihlava, largely German-speaking, with its own theatre, fairs and a military brass band. The folk songs and marches he heard there as a child stayed with him for life and later found an important place in his own music.
His musical gift showed itself early: he began piano lessons at six and had already given his first public performance in Jihlava at ten. Around that time he also made his first attempts at composing: after his younger brother Ernst died in 1874, Mahler and his friend Josef Steiner began an opera in his memory, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, though neither the music nor the libretto survived. At school his interests lay only in music and literature rather than his grades, and a transfer to a Prague gymnasium did not help. His father eventually accepted that his eldest son would not take over the family business, and in 1875 took Gustav to Vienna to the well-known teacher Julius Epstein.
Convinced of Mahler's exceptional gift, Epstein sent him to the Vienna Conservatory, where he himself became his piano teacher; Mahler studied harmony under Robert Fuchs and composition under Franz Krenn, and attended Anton Bruckner's lectures as an auditor, later regarding him as one of his principal teachers. Vienna at the time was one of Europe's musical capitals: conductor Hans Richter appeared in its concerts, Adelina Patti and Paolina Lucca sang at the Court Opera, and folk songs and dances were heard constantly in its streets. In the autumn of 1875 Richard Wagner visited the city, and Mahler witnessed the open feud between his admirers and the followers of Brahms: his early piano quartet of 1876 shows Brahms's influence, while the cantata Das klagende Lied, written four years later, already shows the influence of Wagner and Bruckner.
Alongside the Conservatory, Mahler completed his Jihlava gymnasium studies externally, and between 1878 and 1880 attended lectures on history and philosophy at the University of Vienna, earning his living by giving piano lessons. After graduating from the Conservatory in 1878, he grew close to fellow unrecognised young composers Hugo Wolf and, especially, Hans Rott, whose gift Mahler would later call remarkable even in the symphony Rott wrote as a student. In 1881 Mahler entered his cantata Das klagende Lied for the Beethoven Prize, but the jury, which included Johannes Brahms, Eduard Hanslick, Karl Goldmark and Hans Richter, awarded it to Robert Fuchs; a year earlier Rott had lost the same competition, and the jury's ridicule broke him — four years later the 25-year-old composer died in an asylum. Mahler responded to his own defeat differently: setting composition aside for a time, he accepted his first conducting post that same year, 1881, in Laibach, present-day Ljubljana.
Mahler never formally studied conducting — the historian Kurt Blaukopf later called him a "conductor without a teacher"; he apparently first stood at the podium while still at the Conservatory, and in the summer of 1880 conducted operettas at the spa theatre in Bad Hall. No permanent post was available to him in Vienna, and in his early years he got by on temporary engagements for modest pay, repeatedly finding himself out of work: in 1881 he was first Kapellmeister in Laibach, and in 1883 briefly served in Olmütz, where, by his own account, the players took their work seriously more out of sympathy for their idealistic conductor than from conviction. As a committed Wagnerian, he insisted from the start that conducting was an art, not a craft.
The Royal Theatre in Kassel gave Mahler the post of second conductor and chorus master in August 1883, and he stayed there two years. An unhappy love for the singer Johanna Richter brought him back to composing: in 1884 he wrote, to his own words, the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, later reworked for voice and orchestra, though it was not publicly performed until 1896. In January 1884, in Kassel, Mahler first heard the famous conductor Hans von Bülow and asked to join his ensemble in any capacity, but received only a noncommittal reply; when Bülow looked for an assistant around this time, he chose Richard Strauss instead. Disagreements with the theatre's management led Mahler to leave Kassel in 1885; he offered his services to Angelo Neumann, director of the German Opera in Prague, and was engaged for the 1885/86 season, where he conducted operas by Mozart, Gluck and Wagner for the first time.
From Prague, Mahler moved to Leipzig, where the young but already celebrated Artur Nikisch was first conductor, leaving Mahler to make do with second place — even though the city, with its famous conservatory and celebrated concert orchestra, was a recognised stronghold of musical professionalism. His initially wary relations with Nikisch improved, and by January 1887, in Mahler's own words, the two had become good colleagues. At the request of the composer Carl Maria von Weber's grandson, Mahler completed his unfinished opera Die drei Pintos from surviving sketches; its premiere on 20 January 1888 became Mahler's first real triumph as a composer. Working on the opera also brought him a hopeless love for Weber's wife, Marion, and in March 1888 his First Symphony poured out of him — the work that was to become the most performed of everything he wrote.
In May 1888 Mahler left Leipzig after a conflict with the theatre's management and took the post of director at the Royal Opera in Budapest, with a salary of ten thousand gulden a year. Within less than a year he turned the troubled theatre into a genuinely national stage, insisting that performances be given in Hungarian and bringing guest artists such as the soprano Lilli Lehmann to Budapest. In 1889 both his father and mother died, one after the other, and Mahler took on responsibility for his younger brother and sisters. On 20 November 1889 the premiere of his First Symphony, then still called Symphonic Poem in Two Parts, was given in Budapest under his own baton; it left the audience, the critics and even his close friends puzzled. Even so, his reputation as a conductor kept growing, and after three successful seasons, having left Budapest in March 1891 under pressure from a new intendant, he was immediately offered a far more flattering post — in Hamburg.
In Hamburg, one of Germany's leading opera houses after the court theatres of Berlin and Munich, Mahler took the post of first Kapellmeister from 1891 on a very high salary. There fate again brought him together with Hans von Bülow, who directed the city's subscription concerts: now Bülow valued Mahler as a conductor and readily gave him the podium, though he still would not perform his younger colleague's own compositions — the first movement of the Second Symphony, by the composer's own account, filled him with genuine dread. In January 1892 Mahler staged Eugene Onegin in Hamburg; Tchaikovsky, who had come for the premiere, gave up his plan to conduct it himself, impressed by Mahler's work, and that same year the Hamburg company's guest performances of Wagner's Ring and Beethoven's Fidelio in London drew praise, including from Bernard Shaw. When Bülow died in February 1894, direction of the subscription concerts passed to Mahler.
In Hamburg the creative crisis that had lasted four years finally came to an end: first came the song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and in 1894 the Second Symphony was completed, its first movement a farewell to the naive idealist hero of the First. That same year, in June 1894, a new performance of the First Symphony at the festival in Weimar caused real controversy for the first time — among the indignant reviews was the young conductor Bruno Walter, who became one of the devoted followers of Mahler's music for the rest of his life. To introduce the Second Symphony, Mahler chose Berlin: in March 1895 he performed its first three movements, and in December of the same year the whole work, with the Berlin Philharmonic. The reception was closer to failure than triumph, and the hall had to be filled with conservatory students, yet the impression made by the final movement surprised even the composer himself, and it was from that Berlin evening that the gradual conquest of the public began, despite continuing rejection from most critics.
Mahler's successes as a conductor in Hamburg did not go unnoticed in Vienna: from late 1894 agents of the Court Opera came for preliminary talks. Mahler himself was sceptical about these talks — he wrote that his Jewish origin closed the door to any court theatre, whether in Vienna, Berlin, Dresden or Munich. All the same, Vienna had long been his true "homeland," and his longing for it did not leave him even in his secure position in Hamburg.
On 23 February 1897 Mahler converted to Catholicism; most of his biographers link the decision to his hope of an invitation to the Court Opera, though researchers point out that the conversion did not conflict with his own cultural background — even in Jihlava he had been closer to Catholic than to Jewish culture — so the wish to become first Kapellmeister in Vienna was hardly the only reason for his baptism. In March 1897 Mahler made a short tour with concerts in Moscow, Munich and Budapest, and in April he signed a contract with the Court Opera; at his farewell benefit in Hamburg on 16 April the audience gave him a real ovation, and he arrived in Vienna only as third conductor, though, by a friend's account, firmly intending to become first.
Vienna of the late 1890s received Mahler differently from the city he remembered from his youth: the atmosphere had grown less liberal, and ahead of the new conductor's appointment the Viennese press made no secret of antisemitic sentiment — his long friendship with Victor Adler, a leader of Austrian social democracy, also counted against him. The Court Opera's staff greeted the new conductor coldly, but on 11 May 1897, when Mahler first appeared before the Viennese public conducting Wagner's Lohengrin, the hall, by Bruno Walter's account, was struck "like a storm and an earthquake." That August he had to work for three men at once, conducting almost every evening, while also preparing a new production of a comic opera by Lortzing.
That September, despite the active opposition of the influential Cosima Wagner, who wanted another conductor in the post, Mahler succeeded the ageing Wilhelm Jahn as director of the Court Opera — at the time the summit of a career for Austrian and German opera conductors, not least because Vienna spared no expense on opera. There Mahler had the widest opportunities yet to realise his ideal of true musical drama on the opera stage: he adopted the Meiningen ensemble's principle of a single directorial vision, and in 1903 appointed Alfred Roller chief designer of the theatre — together they created a series of productions that formed an entire era in the history of Austrian theatre.
In 1902 Mahler married Alma Mahler; the couple had two daughters, Anna Mahler and Maria Anna Mahler. Gustav Mahler died in Vienna on 18 May 1911 of endocarditis complicated by sepsis and was buried at Grinzing Cemetery.
Mahler's output as a composer is relatively small and consists almost entirely of symphonies and vocal works: in his lifetime he was known above all as one of the leading conductors of his era, and recognition as a composer came only half a century after his death. Today his symphonies and songs have a firm place in the concert repertoire, and he is one of the most frequently performed composers, his music having joined the late Romanticism of the nineteenth century to the language of the twentieth. Among his best-known works are the First, Second, Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies.
The roots of his musical language lay in the folk songs and marches he heard as a child in Jihlava — both genres remained an important part of his symphonic and vocal writing. One of his first mature song cycles, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for voice and orchestra, grew out of the same imagery as the Second Symphony, whose first movement became the composer's farewell to the naive, dreaming hero of his own First Symphony.
Between 1901 and 1904 Mahler wrote ten songs to poems by Friedrich Rückert; five were collected as the Rückert-Lieder, and the other five formed the cycle Kindertotenlieder, whose title translates as Songs on the Death of Children. For anyone taking their first steps into his vocal music, the site has several of his songs for voice and piano — "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n," "Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen," "Wenn dein Mütterlein," "Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen," "Rheinlegendchen" and "In diesem Wetter" — ranging from intermediate to advanced level, in which folk-like simplicity sits alongside a piano part of almost symphonic complexity. Such songs rely less on technical bravura than on an even, sustained vocal line shared with the pianist, so it makes sense to turn to them after mastering a few solo piano pieces first.