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 The last half of the nineteenth century saw an arms race of musical rhetoric. Reacting to the overwhelming example of Beethoven, particularly his Ninth Symphony of 1823, composers sought out ever more grandiose, ever more picturesque, and ever more expressive effects in orchestral composition. The result was a period characterized by gargantuan works written for vastly enlarged orchestras, often with singers or choruses enlisted to depict the titanic struggles of the artist's soul. Thus we have Wagner's four-evening operatic cycle Das Ring der Nibelungen and stand-alone five-hour Parsifal, Bruckner's nine massive symphonies, Richard Strauss's tone poems, and a host of lesser-known works by the likes of Hans Pfitzner and Alexander von Zemlinsky.
In this atmosphere of rhetorical hyperinflation, though, one composer stood out for his sensitivity and, sometimes, restraint. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) used the resources of the large orchestra sparingly, delicately, with a refreshingly refined sensitivity to the personalities of individual instruments; he used simple musical materials very tellingly, co-opting folk song and even nursery tunes for his communicative purposes. With his original orchestration and innovative forms, Mahler showed the way out of a ballooning musical language into the fresh new aesthetics of the twentieth century.
Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in Kalischt in what was then Bohemia, although the family moved shortly thereafter to the Moravian town of Iglau. His father, Bernard, was by all accounts a bull-headed and ambitious businessman. He made a living peddling liquor and baked goods, and he also brought his no-nonsense mindset to the tending of his family. Gustav's mother, Marie, was a gentle, soft woman who was constantly pregnant, although only six of the couple's 14 children survived to maturity.
A constant parade of dying young siblings and domestic strife seem to have characterized Gustav's childhood as the Mahlers' eldest surviving son. Few specifics are known, although stories abound, all meant to explain the almost painful neurosis and emotional changeability that define Mahler's music. The most often repeated tale tells how the very young Gustav, running out into the street to escape an unusually vicious parental row, came upon a street musician playing the well-known folk tune "Ach, du lieber Augustin." This experience neatly explains the interpenetrating coexistence in Mahler's music between the purposefully banal and the apocalyptically wrenching.
The truth of this story is questionable, and the link between these events and symphonies composed decades later represents the sort of pop psychology that serves as the poorest of substitutes for genuine musical insight. The emotional landscape of the symphonies is so torturous and its juxtapositions so startling that our instinct is to seek such simplistic explanations for otherwise bewildering complexity.
What is known is that after a modest career as a boy pianist, as well as an informal education in folk music and music theory from some of the town's resident musicians, young Gustav was sent in 1870 to attend school in Prague. Two years later, however, his bull-headed father showed a protective (if not loving) side when he arrived to whisk young Gustav back to Iglau after hearing reports that he was being mistreated by his host family.
Back home Gustav progressed musically, continuing his studies locally and working on an opera. He had his eye on the Vienna Conservatory, but his father did not initially approve such impractical goals. Finally, in 1875, Gustav showed his own diplomatic mettle by winning the endorsement of the only sort of man his father would really listen to: Gustav Schwartz, a prominent and successful estate manager who ran a farm north of Iglau and who was with the teenage Gustav's pianism. When he finally heard the now-familiar argument from what he considered a respectable source, Bernard allowed his son to travel to Vienna and try his luck. After a meeting with piano teacher Julius Epstein, Gustav was allowed to enter the conservatory in the fall of 1875.
In Vienna, Mahler continued his study of the piano, scoring a string of successes within the conservatory. In 1877, though, he changed his focus to composition, perhaps under the influence of Anton Bruckner, a composer of lengthy symphonies who encouraged the young Mahler's admiration for Richard Wagner. As a composition student, Mahler's scraps of pieces, unfinished songs and chamber music gradually gave way to larger-scale orchestral works; the first, Das klagende Lied, would emerge in final form in 1881. Despite this training in composition, it was as a conductor that Mahler would emerge as a public figure in turn-of-the-century European musical life.
Mahler graduated from the Vienna Conservatory, without honors, in 1878. He spent the next two years as a part-time student at Vienna's university, soaking up extramusical influences ranging from Nietzsche and The Brothers Karamazov to a poet and playwright named Siegfried Lipiner, with whom Mahler became close friends. He moved with relative ease among the circles of young, forward-looking artists and students that clogged Viennese cafes at the time, but not until age 20 did the young musician find his first job.
It was an unglamorous post, not hinting at Mahler's future as world-renowned conductor and composer: leader of a light music band and stagehand at the Austrian summer resort of Bad Hall. An inauspicious beginning, this seasonal post became the first of a string of increasingly prestigious conducting appointments that would lead Mahler eventually back to Vienna and then on to New York City.
At Bad Hall Mahler first discovered how much he loved conducting; although composition students at the Vienna Conservatory routinely conducted orchestras in their own works, this was Mahler's first public, professional experience. Unable to secure a more permanent appointment, however, Mahler returned for the winter to Vienna, where he finished Das klagende Lied. The next summer, he took another apparently demeaning seasonal position, as Kapellmeister (music director) of the opera theater of Laibach (modern Ljubljana). Although the size of the orchestra and chorus was inadequate, the hall was better equipped and the repertoire more interesting. It was here that Mahler conducted his first opera, Verdi's Il trovatore. Despite positive notices from local critics, though, the 21-year-old Mahler was jobless again by autumn.
Again he returned to Vienna, and again he spent his enforced leisure at composition, although nothing remains today of these efforts. (Mahler's main project was an opera called Rübezahl, which never got past the early stages of composition; it did, however, cost him the friendship of composer Hugo Wolf, who claimed that Mahler had stolen the opera's plot from him.)
Finally in 1883 he secured his first real conducting appointment, as music director in the German city of Kassel. Here too the conditions were unfavorable; Mahler complained about oppressive management and inadequate talent, and local critics derided his willful distortions and unusual interpretations of the music he conducted. More important, though, the Kassel job was a step up in prestige. Furthermore, an abortive love affair in Kassel drove Mahler to compose two major works, the first since Das klagende Lied: the orchestral song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and a Symphonic Poem that would, after many revisions, become the First Symphony.
A series of snubs, real and imagined, hurt Mahler's pride and indomitable ambition sufficiently that he resigned his Kassel post in 1885. He spent the 1885-86 season as an opera conductor at Prague's largest theater, where he first conducted operas by Mozart and Wagner that he would return to again and again throughout his career. The following year he landed an appointment in Leipzig. With every new post, Mahler was coming closer and closer to fulfilling his dream of returning triumphant to Vienna as the new music director of the Vienna Opera.
Mahler was a conductor at the Leipzig Stadttheater until 1888. During this time he gained his first widespread attention as a composer from an unlikely source: the completion of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished comic opera Die drei Pintos, which was a huge hit in Leipzig and throughout Europe. He also completed the First Symphony while in Leipzig, as well as a symphonic movement called Todtenfeier ("Funeral Rites") that would later become the opening movement of the Symphony #2. In addition, Mahler's fame as a conductor continued to grow in Leipzig: he established a reputation as a Wagner conductor after taking over for the unwell Artur Nikisch, one of Europe's most famous maestros.
In 1888 Mahler moved on to the Royal Theater in Budapest, a more prestigious appointment still. A successful start conducting operas by Wagner was overshadowed, however, by the deaths of Mahler's father, mother and sister, all in 1888, which had a devastating effect on the always neurotic and depressive musician. These events were accompanied by an increasingly hostile reaction to Mahler from Budapest concert-goers, who wanted less of the weighty repertoire that he adored, and also by the public rejection of the First Symphony in 1889. When Mahler heard that the incoming director of the Opera would usurp much of his creative control, he wasted no time in accepting an enthusiastically offered post at the Stadttheater in Hamburg in 1891. Despite the unappreciative Budapest public, Mahler's star as a conductor was continuing to rise.
It was during his tenure in Hamburg, which lasted until 1897, that Mahler's compositional career blossomed; in 1893 he began to devote summers entirely to composition. Invariably he would retreat to some mountain resort area, where he would spend each morning in an isolated cabin sketching out new symphonic works, which he would then revise and finalize during the concert season. The Second Symphony (the "Resurrection"), with Todtenfeier as its first movement and a solo singer and chorus emerging during the final two movements, was written during the summers of 1893 and 1894, and the Third Symphony followed in 1895 and 1896.
Tragedy was never far from Mahler, though; in 1895 he learned that his younger brother Otto had shot himself in Vienna. Otto had also had musical aspirations and genuine talent, and it has been suggested that the realization that he could not compete with his illustrious older brother contributed to his demise.
Meanwhile, Mahler still had his eye on the Imperial and Royal Opera in Vienna. He was born a full-blooded Jew, though, and while anti-Semitism was an established part of most European cultures in the late nineteenth century, it was strongest in Vienna. Furthermore, the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Franz Joseph was responsible for appointing the conductors of the Opera. Continued successes in increasingly prestigious and visible appointments, however, along with a relentless personal campaign, had paved the way for Mahler to assume the post; and, in the end, the composer's overarching ambition and resolve led him to convert to Catholicism in February of 1897 to enhance his qualifications for the job. Possibly this decision had a partly spiritual motivation - Mahler had never felt any particular affinity for cultural or religious Judaism - but it was in large part simply a drastic example of the lengths to which he was willing to go to achieve his ambitions.
Finally, after his baptism and a barrage of letters on behalf of Mahler from close friends and distant professional acquaintances alike, he was appointed as a conductor of the Vienna Opera in the summer of 1897. In 1898 he was also appointed as the conductor of the Philharmonic Concerts, allowing him a public forum for his interpretations of non-operatic music, which had always been controversial because of their willfulness and eccentricity. Although he drew audiences to his programs, the orchestral players resented Mahler's dictatorial attitude, and he resigned, under pressure, from the Concerts in 1901. His tenure with the Vienna Opera, however, was longer lasting and more successful.
Before describing Mahler's 10-year career with the Opera, though, it is necessary to focus on one of the most momentous events of his life: his introduction to Alma Schindler in 1901. When the 41-year-old Mahler met her she was just over 20, and yet she had already embarked on what would be a long career as seductress to the elite among Viennese intelligentsia. Alma and Gustav were married in March of 1902; before her death in 1964, Alma would also become the wife of architect Walter Gropius and painter Franz Werfel and mistress to several others. Her lively memoirs are a valuable, if inaccurate, description of the private lives of these three Viennese artistic geniuses and her part (consistently exaggerated) in their success.
But if the Mahlers' marriage was rocky, it was not entirely Alma's fault. When Gustav met Alma, she was a composition student of Alexander von Zemlinsky (a noted composer himself and also the main teacher of Arnold Schönberg), but Gustav insisted at the time of their engagement that she stop composing, demanding that he be the only creative figure in the household. His frequent travels, relentless work schedule, and constant mood swings also contributed to the couple's problems, and Alma cannot be blamed entirely for seeking refuge in the arms of the young Gropius while she was still married to Gustav.
At the time of their marriage, however, Mahler was as happy as he had ever been. Alma had a stabilizing effect on his life, helping him to resume his busy summer composition schedule after a relatively fallow period of 1898-1899, when he traveled frenetically between conducting jobs. Between 1900 and 1901 Mahler finished the Fourth Symphony and several orchestral songs, and the next summer saw the completion of the Fifth Symphony.
Meanwhile, Mahler's tenure at the Vienna Opera was proceeding smoothly. He had earned the admiration of several prominent Vienna musicians (including Zemlinsky and Schönberg), and he found great inspiration in a long-standing partnership with stage designer Alfred Roller that began in 1903. Mahler and Roller created several remarkable performances together, specializing in the operas of Mozart.
The summers continued to be fruitful for composing: during the years 1902-6 Mahler produced the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, the start of the massive Eighth, and orchestral songs that would find their place in the collection of Kindertotenlieder ("Songs for Dead Children"). During this time Gustav and Alma also had two daughters, Maria (born in 1902) and Anna (born in 1904). By all accounts, Mahler was an extremely devoted and loving father.
From this high point of professional success and productivity and (relative) domestic stability, though, Mahler's life deteriorated dramatically. In 1907 he resigned effective in December from the Vienna Opera as a result of resurgent anti-Semitism and complaints that he was devoting too much time to composition. His 10-year honeymoon at the height of his profession, a period in which he had finally enjoyed the public success and admiration that has been his goal since his conservatory days, ended in an atmosphere of hostility. Then, early in the summer of 1907, his beloved daughter Maria died at the age of five from scarlet fever.
Compounding these tragedies, later that same year Mahler was diagnosed with a dangerous and potentially fatal heart condition. Under doctor's orders, he was to cut down on travel and professional obligations; more importantly, he was advised to abandon his beloved summer hikes and swims, daily rituals to which Mahler credited much of his creative inspiration. He acceded only fitfully and unwillingly to these strictures, but they - and the evidence of his impending mortality - weighed heavily on him.
Although Mahler's departure from the Vienna Opera was a personal disaster, it did not end his conducting career; and, despite momentous personal setbacks, his compositional output did not diminish. In 1908 he completed the masterful song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, a symphony in all but name. Aware that Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner had each only lived to complete nine symphonies, Mahler sought to cheat fate by avoiding the designation of this work as his Symphony #9.
Also in 1908 he accepted the directorship of the young Metropolitan Opera in New York, but managerial shakeups and positive experiences conducting concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra led Mahler to leave the Opera take up a position with the New York Philharmonic in 1910.
Throughout his tenure in New York, Mahler made several lengthy sojourns to Europe, both as conductor at the continent's cultural centers and composer at his beloved mountain villas in the summer. Together with his duties at the Opera and then the Philharmonic, these commitments created the busiest schedule of Mahler's career. Despite this, he was able to complete the work he did call his Symphony #9 in 1909 and to begin work on a Tenth in 1910.
Also during 1910, Alma began a semi-secret affair with Gropius, whom she would marry in 1915. Mahler found out about this liaison when a "secret" letter from Gropius to Alma was addressed - nobody knows whether intentionally or accidentally - to Mahler; he appears, however, to have done nothing with this knowledge.
In February of 1911, after a particularly strenuous season with the New York Philharmonic - where he had regularly added concerts to the schedule - Mahler became seriously ill. Upon hearing from his doctors that his heart was compromised and he might not survive the illness, he and Alma returned to Vienna, where he died on May 18. Despite his stratagems, Mahler's mortality caught up with him, and his superstitions were validated: he became the latest addition to the list of great composers to die without completing a Tenth Symphony.
Gustav Mahler's music can be difficult to appreciate today; much of his symphonic output can sound overblown, pretentious, or even grotesque. The key to understanding his music, though, is to accept these features as they are. The great Mahler conductor Leonard Bernstein has written that "Mahler is German music multiplied by n," and this emphasis on expression above all marks Mahler as a harbinger of things to come in the musically tumultuous twentieth century. Arnold Schönberg, the composer generally credited with (or blamed for) the creation of atonal music, explained his novel compositions as the logical extension of Mahler's music. Soon after Mahler's death, his brand of expressionism emerged as one of the very few musical traditions to survive the cultural upheavals of the first decades of the twentieth century.
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