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Gustav Mahler Follow Artist +

An Austrian conductor and composer of symphonies

and lieder cycles, Mahler was known for the length,
depth, and painful emotions of his works.

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Escucha Gustav Mahler

en Apple Music

Active 1890s - 1900s

Musical Period Post-Romantic, Romantic

Born July 7, 1860 in Kalischt,

Czech Republic

Died May 18, 1911 in Vienna,

Austria

Genre Classical

Styles Symphony, Vocal Music

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Biography

Gustav Mahler Biography by Rovi Staff

"Imagine the universe beginning to sing and

resound," Mahler wrote of his Symphony No.
8, the "Symphony of a Thousand." "It is no
longer human voices; it is planets and suns
revolving." Mahler was late Romantic music's
ultimate big thinker. In his own lifetime he was
generally regarded as a conductor who
composed on the side, producing huge,
bizarre symphonies accepted only by a cult
following.

Born in 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia, he came

from a middle-class family. He entered the
Vienna Conservatory in 1875, studying piano,
harmony, and composition in a musically
conservative atmosphere. Nevertheless, he
became a supporter of Wagner and Bruckner,
both of whose works he would later conduct
frequently, and became part of a social circle
interested in socialism, Nietzschean
philosophy, and pan-Germanism. Around
1880, he began conducting and wrote his first
mature work, Das klagende Lied. Mahler's
conducting career advanced rapidly, moving
him from Kassel to Prague to Leipzig to
Budapest; he was usually either greatly
respected or thoroughly despised by the
performers for his exacting rehearsals and
perfectionism. In 1897 he became music
director of the Vienna Court Opera and then, a
year later, of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Mahler's conducting career permitted
composition only during the summers, in a
series of "composing huts" he had built in
picturesque rural locations. He reserved this
time for symphonies, all of them large-scale
works, and song cycles. He completed his first
symphony in 1888, but it met with utter
audience incomprehension. In Das Lied von
der Erde (The Song of the Earth), he merged
the two forms into an immense song-
symphony. The Viennese public largely failed
to understand his music, but Mahler took their
reactions calmly, accurately predicting that
"My time will yet come." Meanwhile, his
autocratic ways as a conductor alienated
musicians. In 1901, the press and the
musicians essentially forced his resignation
from the Philharmonic. He married a young
composition student, Alma Schindler in 1902,
and they soon had two daughters. By 1907
Mahler was increasingly away from Vienna,
conducting his own works, and thus he
resigned from the opera as well. Just after
accepting the position of principal conductor
of New York's Metropolitan Opera, but before
leaving Vienna, Mahler's older daughter, age
4, died from scarlet fever and diphtheria, and
he learned he himself had a defective heart
valve. In New York, he was impressed by the
caliber of talent and quickly gained audience
approval. In 1909 he became conductor of the
New York Philharmonic, which he found much
more agreeable than the opera work by this
time. The following year, he had a triumphant
premiere of his massive Symphony No. 8 in
Munich. Despite the professional successes,
his personal life suffered another blow when
his and Alma's marriage began having
problems. They stayed together, and after he
became ill in February 1911, she saw to it that
he made it back to Vienna, where he died on
May 18.

The conductors Bruno Walter, Otto

Klemperer, Willem Mengelberg, and Maurice
Abravanel kept Mahler's legacy alive, and
Mahler's are now among the most often
recorded of any symphonies. His frequent
incorporation of vocal elements into
symphonic writing brought to full fruition a
process that had begun with Beethoven's
Symphony No. 9, demonstrating his music's
firm roots in the Germanic classical tradition.
However, it was his huge tapestries of shifting
moods and tones, ranging from tragedy to
bitter irony (often explicitly indicated in
performance directions), from café music to
evocations of the sublime, that portended a
century in which multiplicity ruled.

Discography

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