Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler (Kaliště, Czech Republic, 7 July 1860 – Vienna, 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian composer and conductor of Jewish origin whose works, together with those of Richard Strauss, are considered the most important of late Romanticism.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Gustav Mahler was one of the most important orchestral and opera conductors of his time. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he successively conducted several increasingly important orchestras in various European opera houses, reaching in 1897 what was then considered the most prestigious post: the direction of the Court Opera of Vienna (Hofoper). During his ten years in the Austrian capital, Mahler, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, endured the opposition and hostility of the antisemitic press. Nevertheless, thanks to his innovative productions and his insistence on the highest standards of performance, he earned recognition as one of the greatest opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He subsequently became director of the Metropolitan Opera House and of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

As a composer, he concentrated his efforts on symphonic form and the lied. His Second, Third, Fourth and Eighth symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) combined both genres in their scores. He himself claimed that composing a symphony meant "building a world with all the means possible", and so his works in this field are marked by an extremely wide heterogeneity. He introduced elements of varied origin, such as folk melodies, marches and military fanfares, through a personal use of the chord, unusually breaking up or lengthening melodic lines, combined or juxtaposed within the formal framework he had absorbed from the Viennese classical tradition. His symphonic works reached immense proportions and included dissonant harmonies that went beyond the chromaticism Wagner used in Tristán e Isolda. The appearance of disorder that resulted, together with the extra effort required to recognise any "classical" formality in its structure, generated incomprehension of his music and attracted an almost general hostility, despite the support of an enthusiastic minority, among whom were the members of the Second Viennese School, who regarded him as their most direct precursor.

Among his works, his nine completed symphonies (ten, if the sketches for the Tenth are included) and several song cycles or lieder stand out. His principal song collections are: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer); the cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), based on a collection of German folk songs; Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) and the Rückert-Lieder, both based on texts by the German poet Friedrich Rückert; and also the innovative synthesis of symphony and song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, with words from poems translated from Chinese into German.

The reappraisal of Mahler was slow, as was that of Anton Bruckner, and it was delayed by his great originality and by the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria, since his Jewish origin led to his works being labelled "degenerate" and "modern". The same happened to other composers who fell out of favour in the Third Reich.