Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler: The Composer Who Scheduled His Own Revival

"Would that I could perform my symphonies for the first time 50 years after my death!" It reads like self-pity. It was closer to a forecast. Mahler died in 1911 known across Europe as the most formidable opera conductor alive and as a composer whose premieres drew reviews suggesting he belonged in prison; the long-playing record and a new generation of listeners arrived in the 1950s and made him, by the 1960s, one of the most performed and recorded composers in the world. Almost nobody has been so precisely right about their own posterity.

Kaliště, and Twelve Children

He was born on 7 July 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, to Jewish parents of modest means. His father Bernhard had climbed from the son of a street peddler to innkeeper and distillery owner; his mother Marie Herrmann was a soap manufacturer's daughter. The family moved to Jihlava that December. Of the twelve children born there, six survived infancy. His elder brother Isidor died in infancy, his brother Ernst after a long illness in 1875 — Mahler wrote an opera as a memorial — and his brother Otto killed himself in 1895. In October 1889, within eight months, he lost his father, a sister and his mother, and took charge of four younger siblings.

He found music at four on his grandparents' piano, was a local Wunderkind, and performed publicly at ten. He entered the Vienna Conservatory in 1875, studying piano under Julius Epstein and winning prizes in his first two years, then concentrating on composition under Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. He graduated with a diploma but without the silver medal for outstanding achievement. He then spent a year at the University of Vienna on literature and philosophy, absorbing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Fechner through his friend Siegfried Lipiner.

The Apprenticeship

His conducting career began in provincial misery: an operetta season at Bad Hall in 1880, then Ljubljana, where he conducted his first full-scale opera, Il trovatore. Of the next posting he wrote: "From the moment I crossed the threshold of the Olmütz theatre I felt like one awaiting the wrath of God." Kassel from 1883 to 1885 put him under a hostile senior Kapellmeister and produced, out of an unhappy affair with the soprano Johanna Richter, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. In Prague he conducted 68 performances of fourteen operas in twelve months. At Leipzig from 1886 he fought Arthur Nikisch over the Ring, prepared and premiered a performing version of Weber's Die drei Pintos, wrote the First Symphony in five weeks of 1888, and discovered Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the folk-poem collection that dominated his output for the next twelve years.

The First Symphony's premiere in Budapest on 20 November 1889 went badly; the critic Viktor von Herzfeld remarked that Mahler, like many conductors, had proved "not to be a composer."

Hamburg

At the Hamburg Stadttheater from 1891 he conducted 744 performances in six years and introduced 36 new operas. Tchaikovsky, present at the German premiere of Eugene Onegin, called his conducting "astounding" and later declared him "positively a genius." On the company's 1892 London visit — his only trip to Britain — the young Ralph Vaughan Williams heard his Tristan and "staggered home in a daze and could not sleep for two nights." He established a summer composing hut at Steinbach in 1893, the first of several. The Berlin premiere of the Second Symphony on 13 December 1895 was well received; his assistant Bruno Walter wrote that "one may date [Mahler's] rise to fame as a composer from that day."

Vienna: Ten Years of Warfare

The directorship of the Vienna Hofoper was closed to a Jew, so in February 1897 he converted to Catholicism, remaining a lifelong agnostic. Vienna's antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger had already announced the operative principle: "I myself decide who is a Jew and who isn't." Stefan Zweig recalled that Mahler's appointment at thirty-eight sent "a frightened murmur and astonishment" through the city, and that "to have seen Gustav Mahler on the street was an event that one would proudly report to his comrades the next morning as if it were a personal triumph." Hugo Wolf said of his 1897 Ring: "for the first time I have heard the Ring as I have always dreamed of hearing it while reading the score."

Over ten years he introduced 33 new operas and remade 55 more, and with the designer Alfred Roller from 1903 produced more than twenty celebrated stagings including Fidelio, Iphigénie en Aulide and Le nozze di Figaro. He also fought everyone. He inspired hatred and respect in roughly equal measure; the stagehands revolted over working conditions in December 1903; it was said he treated his musicians the way a lion tamer treats his animals. A press campaign drove him out in 1907. His farewell message was torn down and scattered. His 645th and last performance there was Fidelio, on 15 October 1907.

The Symphonies

He composed in summers, in huts, around the conducting that paid for it. The first period — Symphonies 1 to 4 and the Wunderhorn songs — kept songs and symphonies interwoven and carried explicit programmes. The middle period, Symphonies 5 to 8 with the Rückert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder, abandoned programmes for "absolute" music of granite-like orchestral hardness. The late works — Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth, and the unfinished Tenth — face death directly and each end quietly.

The hallmarks are unmistakable: progressive tonality, in which a symphony resolves in a different key from the one it opened in; bird calls, cow-bells, bugle fanfares, Ländler and street tunes; the constant intrusion of banality into moments of high seriousness, as when a trivial popular melody cuts across the funeral march of the Fifth and transforms into a Brucknerian chorale. He told Sibelius that "the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything," and described the Third's scherzo as "the most farcical and at the same time the most tragic piece that ever existed ... It is as though all nature is making faces and sticking out its tongue."

Contemporaries mostly recoiled. A Vienna critic wrote of the Third: "Anyone who has committed such a deed deserves a couple of years in prison." Heinrich Reinhardt dismissed the Sixth as "Brass, lots of brass, incredibly much brass!" The exception was the Eighth, the Symphony of a Thousand, premiered in Munich on 12 September 1910 to thirty minutes of applause — easily his biggest success in life, and dedicated to Alma.

Alma, and the End

He met Alma Schindler in November 1901 and married her on 9 March 1902. He insisted there could be only one composer in the family and required her to abandon her studies; she wrote in her diary of being "so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart." Her stepfather had called him "that rachitic degenerate Jew." Their daughter Maria died of scarlet fever and diphtheria on 12 July 1907, and that same summer Mahler was diagnosed with a heart defect Alma called a virtual death sentence. After discovering her affair with Walter Gropius in 1910, he consulted Sigmund Freud and began encouraging her to compose again.

He signed with the Metropolitan Opera in June 1907, debuting with Tristan on 1 January 1908, then took the New York Philharmonic, rehearsing and conducting 46 concerts in the 1909–10 season. His last concert, at Carnegie Hall on 21 February 1911, was given with a temperature of 104°F. Bacterial endocarditis was diagnosed. He sailed for Europe, entered a clinic at Neuilly, was moved to the Löw sanatorium in Vienna on 11 May, developed pneumonia and died on 18 May 1911, aged fifty. His tombstone at Grinzing carries his name only — any who come looking, he said, will know who he was.

Why Gustav Is Called a Genius

The word was used about him in his lifetime, by a composer with no reason to flatter: Tchaikovsky, after the Eugene Onegin premiere, believed Mahler was "positively a genius" — a judgement about conducting, not composition. The compositional case rests on two things. The first is scale of conception: the decision that a symphony must "embrace everything" produced works that hold cow-bells and military fanfares and cabaret tunes inside structures of an hour and more without the seams showing. The second is technique in the service of that idea — progressive tonality, which lets a symphony argue its way from one key to another and makes the resolution feel earned rather than announced. Deryck Cooke's assessment is the fairest: Mahler "redeemed any borrowings by imprinting his [own] personality on practically every note," producing music of "outstanding originality." His immediate legatees, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, moved through him into atonality, which he defended in them while rejecting for himself; Berg thought the Ninth "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote."

The counter-case was made loudly and by serious people. His symphonies were controversial at nearly every premiere and slow to gain approval; the London Times obituary allowed them "union of modern orchestral richness with a melodic simplicity that often approached banality," and Bernard Shaw's younger contemporaries in the 1930s found Mahler "expensively second-class." He was pilloried for re-scoring Beethoven and other masters, which the Vienna Philharmonic openly resented. His conducting career, not his composing, paid the bills and made his name; the New York Times obituary called him a towering musical figure of his day chiefly on that basis. And the revival owed as much to technology as to merit — Jonathan Carr's verdict is that "it was the long-playing record rather than the Zeitgeist which made a comprehensive breakthrough possible." Harold Schonberg noted the peculiar intensity of the result: "it is hard to think of a composer who arouses equal loyalty."

The Fifty-Year Delay

His music was banned as degenerate under the Nazis and performed in secret by Jewish orchestras in Berlin in 1941 and in occupied Amsterdam for Jewish audiences only. Willem Mengelberg kept him alive in the Netherlands and carried him to New York from 1922; Stokowski gave the American premieres of the Eighth and Das Lied in 1916; Adrian Boult and Henry Wood introduced him to Britain. Aaron Copland argued in the 1920s that Mahler was thirty years ahead of his time. The International Gustav Mahler Society was founded in Vienna in 1955 with Bruno Walter as its first president. Shostakovich, Britten, Copland, Weill, Berio, Bernstein, Barber and John Williams all took something from him. In 2016 a BBC Music Magazine survey of 151 conductors placed three Mahler symphonies in the ten greatest ever written. He had asked for fifty years. He got rather more.