Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860. Life during his early years included his experiencing the early death of several of his siblings. And he determined that he needed to express his own feelings about life through the sounds of music. He progressed as student, pianist, operatic assistant and other early leadership positions. Ultimately he became known as an Opera conductor in the small towns of Hungary and Germany.
After many years of struggle and conflict, conductor Gustav Mahler reached the zenith of possible accomplishments when he was appointed General Director of the Vienna Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. As a child who happened to be born into Jewish home, this was astonishing, and also highly controversial. Mahler accumulated many enemies, especialy in the Viennese press, amd also among performers. He demanded the kind of dedication and excellence that had been somewhat lax in the music making of those days.
As a composer, Mahler devoted his vacations to creating his own sounds. At first he composed Lieder (songs) based on old German verse and poems. Eventually he progressed to composing symphonies. There was at the beginning tremendous opposition to his music. Even his own oorchestra in Vienna found Mahler’s music to be too crass, too rough, even too ugly for the “refined” Viennese tastes.
Mahler was diagnosed with a severe heart illness in 1910 after he had had enough of the attacks in Vienna, amd he resigned from his positions there. For a couple of years he moved to New York and conducted there. Ultimately he returned to Vienna as a very ill man, and he died there on May 18, 1911. For the next 30 years or so, Mahler’s music was rarely performed.
After 1945, however, his compositions were rediscovered and championed by a new generation of listeners and conductors. Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century. When BBC Music Magazine surveyed 151 conductors to name their top three symphonies, Mahler was represented with three symphonies in the top-ten list.
Here is Leonard Bernstein, directing the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony number 1:
