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{mah'-lur}
Gustav Mahler, b. Kalist, Bohemia, July 7, 1860, d. May 18,
1911, was an Austrian composer and conductor. His compositions
are few in number--they consist chiefly of nine completed
symphonies and seven song cycles--but vast in scale, often
taking an hour or more to perform and calling for a very large
orchestra, sometimes with a chorus and vocal soloists. Little
appreciated in its own time, Mahler's music is now seen as
an important link between the lyrical impulse of the Romantic
era and the more ironic attitudes of the arts in the 20th
century. The same tension between idealism and harsh reality
that inspired much of his music also characterized Mahler's
career as a conductor, where his refined taste and perfectionism
often had magnificent artistic results, but also tended to
alienate audiences and musicians.
The son of a Jewish distiller, Mahler heard a rich variety
of folk and art music during his Bohemian boyhood; the melodies
that give compassionate humanity to his symphonies have their
roots here. He studied in Vienna, taking courses at both the
conservatory and the university, and attending the lectures
of composer Anton BRUCKNER. In 1880, shortly before making
his conducting debut at a summer theater in the Austrian spa
of Hall, Mahler completed his first mature composition, the
cantata Das Klagende Lied. For the next decade or so, Mahler
accepted conducting posts at one opera house after another,
wearing out his welcome in each new place with his authoritarian
discipline and his devotion to serious opera. By sheer persistence
and the excellence of his performances, he had some success
in promoting the operas of Mozart, Weber, and Wagner to audiences
who were used to lighter fare. His first masterpieces, the
song cycle Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen (1883-85) and the
First Symphony (1884-88, revised 1893-96), slowly took shape
during this period. Mahler's only composition for the stage,
a completion of Weber's sketches for the opera Die Drei Pintos,
was produced in 1888.
Mahler read Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German
verse modeled on folk poetry, in 1887, and in the years following,
he set the poems as songs, incorporating some of the songs
into his Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies; these are sometimes
called his "Wunderhorn" symphonies. From 1891 to
1897 he held his first permanent conducting posts, with the
Hamburg Opera and--after the death of conductor Hans von BULOW,
with the Hamburg Symphony. It was while attending von Bulow's
funeral (1894) that Mahler conceived the spectacular choral
finale of his Second Symphony ("Resurrection"),
his best-loved work during his lifetime and long afterward.
Although Mahler's baptism as a Roman Catholic in 1897 was
a conversion of convenience, opening the way to his appointment
as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, he found much in Catholicism
to satisfy his philosophical and spiritual leanings. His ten
years at the Court Opera, and particularly his collaborations
with the stage designer Alfred Roller, are considered a highwater
mark in opera history and the culmination of an exceptionally
fertile period in Vienna's cultural life.
In 1901, Mahler married Alma Schindler, herself a talented
composer--although Mahler required her to give up her own
work in order to provide him with a secure environment in
which to compose. His Fifth through Eighth Symphonies followed
with unaccustomed speed over the next five years. The huge
Eighth Symphony (1906), and Das Lied von der Erde (1908-09),
the "symphonic" song cycle that followed, are considered
his ultimate achievements, summing up, as they seem to do,
a lifetime of musical concerns and preoccupations.
Anti-Semitism and charges of absenteeism combined to drive
Mahler from Vienna in 1907. The death of his eldest daughter
and the diagnosis of his own life-threatening heart condition
produced an attitude of resignation and a turning inward.
His Ninth Symphony (1908-09) and the incomplete Tenth (1910)
are heartrending documents from this period. During the last
four years of his life, Mahler maintained a strenuous schedule
of conducting on tour and at the Metropolitan Opera and the
Philharmonic in New York City.
Although 19th-century European composers all contributed to
the symphonic tradition, Mahler alone can be said to have
taken up the challenge to expand the symphonic form that Beethoven
laid down in his Ninth Symphony. He did so by infusing the
symphony with the poetic, psychological, and religious content
of vocal music, especially the German Lied. Unsurpassed as
an orchestrator, he was also, in his later works, a prefigurer
of atonality. Nevertheless he remains a controversial figure
with concertgoers. The naked emotionalism of his music is
greatly prized by some and repellent to others.
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