Gustav Mahler

Better known during his lifetime as a conductor, Gustav Mahler was a composer whose work was long forgotten before being rediscovered, establishing himself as an important milestone in the transition from Romanticism to Modernism, with his unusual symphonies and poignant Lieder, notably Song of the Earth. Born in Kalište, Bohemia, on July 7, 1860, Gustav Mahler was the second of fourteen children born to a Jewish brewer. Growing up in Iglau, he learned to play the piano, began composing, and became immersed in the tunes sung at home and the sound of the bugle in the nearby military garrison. In 1875, he entered the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied for three years with Julius Epstein (piano), Robert Fuchs (harmony) and Franz Krenn (composition). As a university student, he studied philosophy and music theory with Anton Bruckner. He in turn gave piano lessons and composed the cantata Das Klagende Lied (1880), before taking a job as a conductor at a theater in Bad Hall, Upper Austria, where he directed operettas. Over the next few years, he worked in Ljubljana, Slovenia (1881-1882), Olmütz, Moravia (1883) and Kassel, Prussia (1883-1885), where his feelings for a female singer inspired him to write Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen for voice and piano, which were later orchestrated. Appointed assistant to Kapellmeister Anton Seidl at the Prague Opera, Mahler stayed only one season before joining Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig, where he remained until 1888. He completed Carl Maria von Weber's opera Die drei Pintos at the request of the latter's grandson, and until 1891 held his first important position at the Budapest Opera, where his Symphony no. 1, nicknamed "Titan", was coldly received. He was already an experienced conductor when he took up his post in Hamburg, for six years during which he expanded his repertoire at a steady pace. In the summer of 1892, he made a one-off trip to London to conduct operas, retiring for the rest of the year to the Austrian countryside near Salzburg to compose Symphony no. 2, the "Resurrection " (completed in 1894) and Symphony no. 3, the "Sommermorgentraum" (completed in 1896). In 1897, in order to take up a position at the Vienna Opera, he had to convert to Catholicism, which did not bother him too much, as he did not follow the rites of the Jewish religion. During his ten-year tenure, Mahler established his reputation and gave the institution its full lustre with his own stagings of operas by Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. He was also appointed director of the Philharmonic Orchestra, from which he was forced to resign in 1901, due to his stormy relations with the musicians, who reproached him for his authoritarianism. Every summer, Mahler moved to a villa in Maiernigg overlooking the Wörthersee in Carinthia, where he composed his symphonies in seclusion in a garden shed: No. 4 (premiered in Munich in 1901), which like the two preceding symphonies reuses a lied; No. 5 and its famous Adagietto used in Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice (premiered in Cologne in 1904); No. 6 (premiered in Essen in 1906); No. 7 (completed in 1906 and premiered in Prague in 1908). On March 9, 1902, Gustav Mahler married Alma Schindler, a painter's daughter, former pupil of Zemlinsky and herself a lieder composer, who gave him two daughters, Maria, known as "Putzi", who died of scarlet fever and diphtheria at the age of four, and Anna, who became a sculptor. Alma Schindler, who had to give up her musical pretensions, introduced him to the social circle of the Viennese Secession, where Mahler was revered by the young composers Schönberg, Berg and Webern. This period also saw the birth of his great lieder cycles for voice and orchestra: Das Knaben Wunderhorn, based on a collection of traditional poems (completed in 1901), then, on poems by Rückert: the Rückertlieder (1901-1903) and the deeply moving Kindertotenlieder (1901-1904). In 1906, Mahler began composing his most ambitious symphony, No. 8, known as the "Symphony of a Thousand", because of its imposing size: orchestra, eight solo voices, adult choir and children's choir. In 1907, he left Vienna for an American adventure. Expected to join New York's Metropolitan Opera, he became its principal conductor from 1908 to 1910, before relinquishing his post to the Italian Arturo Toscanini, to devote himself to conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to which he was appointed in 1909. Despite the public and critical success he achieved, his options displeased the members of both institutions, and he had no choice but to resign. As usual, Mahler travelled to Europe every summer to compose far from the hustle and bustle, at Toblach in the Tyrol. Between 1907 and 1909, he composed the magnificent symphony for contralto, tenor and orchestra Das lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), based on a German translation of Chinese poems. After Mahler's premiere of Symphony No. 8 in Munich on September 12, 1910, Bruno Walter conducted the premiere of Das lied von der Erde on November 20, 1911. In 1908, Mahler began composing Symphony No. 9, which was completed two years later and premiered posthumously in Vienna on June 26, 1912. Stricken by a bacterial infection that spread over the months of 1910, he was already very ill when he decided to return to Vienna after his New York experience, and was unable to complete Symphony no. 10 beyond two movements. It was reconstructed from the composer's sketches by Deryck Cooke, with Alma Mahler's consent. During their tumultuous marriage, Alma Mahler had had an affair with the architect Walter Gropius, but in the last few months, she returned to her husband after urging him to consult Sigmund Freud. On February 21, 1911, Gustav Mahler gave his last concert in New York, and died of pneumonia in a Vienna hospital on May 18, at the age of 50. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the composer's importance was recognized. As for Alma Mahler, she became the lover of painter Oskar Kokoschka and married Walter Gropius in 1915, then writer Franz Werfel in 1929, before taking refuge in France on the eve of the Second World War and emigrating to the United States, where she died on December 11, 1964, aged 85.