I.

Introduction

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Austrian composer and conductor, whose works mark the culmination of the late romantic development of the symphony. His compositions had a major influence on 20th-century composers, especially members of the Second Viennese School such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Mahler is considered one of the most important composers of the early 20th century.

II.

Mahler’s Life

Mahler was born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire and now modern Kaliště in the Czech Republic). In 1875 he was accepted at the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied piano, harmony, and composition. From 1877 until 1880 he attended lectures in history and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He also had lessons in composition from Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, whose symphonies Mahler later promoted.

Mahler’s first job as conductor was in summer operetta at Bad Hall, Austria, in 1880. It was followed by subordinate conducting positions in a number of central European cities: Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1881); Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic, 1882); Kassel, Germany (1883-1885); Prague (now Czech Republic, 1885); and Leipzig, Germany (1886-1888). Job-hopping from one provincial city to another while climbing the ladder was the typical path for a young conductor. More important positions followed: director of the Royal Opera in Budapest (1888-1891) and chief conductor of the Hamburg Opera (1891-1897).

Mahler’s goal was Vienna. The most prestigious post in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was director of the Imperial Opera in Vienna. It was offered to Mahler in 1897. Because imperial appointments were not open to Jews, Mahler, a nonobservant Jew, converted to Roman Catholicism. He led the Imperial Opera for the next ten years, until 1907. Through his efforts Vienna attained world prestige as an operatic center.

In 1898 Mahler took over as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, as well. His dictatorial manner with orchestra members and soloists made him enemies among musicians, and his re-orchestration of symphonies by other composers, including Beethoven and Schumann, did not go unnoticed by audiences and critics.

Mahler’s numerous concert engagements in addition to his opera responsibilities left him little time to compose. His creative activity took place primarily during summer holidays in the Austrian countryside. Conflicts with the orchestra and increasingly hostile reception from critics, exacerbated by Viennese anti-Semitism, took a growing toll. In 1901 Mahler gave up his Philharmonic position and the following year married Alma Schindler, a gifted musician almost 20 years younger. In 1907 Mahler resigned from the Imperial Opera. Later that year, soon after the death of their older daughter at the age of four, Mahler learned that he had a serious heart condition.

Mahler needed to conduct to earn a living. He accepted an offer from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, making his debut with Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde in January 1908. He remained principal conductor for two seasons, and in 1910 became conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Mahler met with limited success in the United States. The audiences and critics were largely unprepared for the advanced repertory he offered. Accustomed to having almost unlimited power in Vienna, he was unprepared for the resistance he met from management and boards of trustees in New York. In 1911 his heart condition forced Mahler to give up the Philharmonic position. He returned to Vienna where he died on May 18, 1911, at the age of 50.

III.

Mahler as Conductor

Mahler’s work as a conductor shaped a generation of conductors who followed, including Willem Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, and Otto Klemperer. His clarity and strictness of interpretation, his discipline of the orchestra, and his focused and thorough rehearsals were especially influential. The operas he conducted achieved a new, heightened unity of musical and dramatic interpretation that included staging and other production elements. His interpretations of Wagner operas became the standards for the time. Mahler also interpreted the operas of Carl Maria von Weber and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with great effectiveness.

IV.

Mahler as Composer

Mahler primarily composed songs and symphonies. He wrote numerous songs and nine symphonies, and left a tenth symphony unfinished. Four of the nine numbered symphonies, and the unnumbered symphony Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth, 1908), include vocal parts for soloists with or without choruses. The song cycles Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children, 1901-1904) and Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1888-1891) exist in two versions, one with piano accompaniment and the other with orchestral accompaniment. Another song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1883), also has an orchestral accompaniment.

In composing song cycles Mahler followed in the tradition of Franz Schubert. Characteristic of Mahler’s songs is a simple, even naïve surface with a complex musical structure underneath. The nine songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn used the texts of popular folk poems. The Kindertotenlieder were based on poems by Friedrich Rückert written after the deaths of Rückert’s two young children. They seemed prophetic in Mahler’s case, when his older daughter died in 1907.

Motifs from Mahler’s songs also appear in his symphonies. Fragments of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for example, appear in the second and fourth symphonies. In addition to intermingling voices with orchestral music, Mahler mixed what was considered “high” art music with the music of the people. For example, the waltz and a country dance called the ländler make appearances in the symphonies, but with distorted rhythms or tonalities as if satire were intended.

In his symphonies Mahler was the heir of German composers Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner and Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. Beethoven had introduced the use of choral and solo vocal music in the symphony with the last movement of his Symphony No. 9, the Choral Symphony. Mahler extended this practice, bringing it to culmination in his Symphony No. 8, nicknamed “Symphony of a Thousand,” which was written for numerous soloists, three choruses, and an enormous orchestra. Mahler also achieved in his symphonies a musical and dramatic unity akin to that sought by Wagner in his music dramas.

Mahler extended the boundaries of the symphonic form to its late romantic culmination. Like Bruckner’s, Mahler’s symphonies are long, lasting an hour or more, and they employ vast orchestral resources. Unlike Bruckner, Mahler abandoned the standard four-movement form. His symphonies have anywhere from two movements (Symphony No. 8) to six movements (Symphony No. 3).

Mahler provides a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries and between romanticism and modernism. Like Wagner and Bruckner, he pushed the traditional system of keys and chords almost to its limits, but he remained within that system. Although he used dissonance he did not move into the atonality that came to characterize the music of the early 20th century. He did, however, alter the basic premise of the traditional system so that most of his symphonies progress through tonal schemes and end in a key different from the initial key. (Previous symphonies began and ended in the same key.)

Mahler’s orchestration anticipated the 20th century in its emphasis on the color, or timbre, of individual instruments and small combinations of instruments, and its inclusion of unusual instruments such as the mandolin and harmonium. Likewise, he foreshadowed the 20th-century concern with counterpoint. The texture of his music is always contrapuntal (displaying counterpoint in its strongly differentiated parts), and orchestration was for him a tool for making the different musical lines sound with the greatest possible clarity.

Mahler’s symphonies also represent a psychological journey, usually in the form of a titanic struggle between optimism and a despair that expresses itself in mocking irony. However, all the symphonies except No. 6 end either joyfully or in a mood of serene resignation. It is perhaps the combination of human vulnerability and consummate musicianship that accounts for the lasting appeal of Mahler’s music.