Composer
Gustav Mahler
The Romantic symphony expanded to its largest possible scale.
Gustav Mahler spent most of his career as a celebrated conductor, and composed largely in the summer months between conducting seasons - yet still produced some of the Late Romantic era's most ambitious symphonies, routinely expanding the form's length, orchestral forces, and emotional scope well beyond what earlier composers had attempted.
Life in brief
Mahler was born in 1860 in a village in Bohemia, into a German-speaking Jewish family; several of his many brothers and sisters died in childhood, and death haunts his music. He is often quoted as saying he was "thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world."
After studying at the Vienna Conservatory, he worked his way up through a string of opera houses, and in 1897 he became director of the Vienna Court Opera - converting to Catholicism, as the post effectively required. He transformed the company, raising standards ruthlessly, dimming the house lights, and refusing entry to latecomers. Each summer he retreated to a small composing hut in the countryside to write. In 1902 he married Alma Schindler, a gifted young composer.
The year 1907 brought three blows: he left Vienna after years of hostile, often antisemitic press attacks; his elder daughter died; and he was diagnosed with a heart condition. He spent his last seasons conducting in New York, at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, and died in Vienna in 1911, aged 50.
Music and style
Mahler reportedly told the composer Jean Sibelius that "a symphony must be like the world - it must embrace everything," and his symphonies do: folk songs, military marches, birdsong, cowbells, funeral processions, and moments of overwhelming spiritual vision, sometimes side by side. Many include singers, and several grew out of his own songs.
His Symphony No. 2, nicknamed the "Resurrection," runs well over an hour and calls for an enormous orchestra plus chorus and vocal soloists, building toward a massive choral finale confronting death and resurrection directly. That willingness to treat the symphony as a vehicle for the biggest possible questions - life, death, meaning - is characteristic of his output generally.
Key works
- Symphony No. 1 (1889) - including a funeral march built on a minor-key "Frère Jacques."
- Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection" (1894).
- Symphony No. 5 (1902) - with the famous Adagietto for strings and harp, often heard as a love letter to Alma.
- Symphony No. 8, "Symphony of a Thousand" (1910) - premiered with more than a thousand performers.
- Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth") - a symphony of songs on Chinese poems. Mahler, wary of the "curse" of composers dying after a ninth symphony, avoided giving it a number.
- Symphony No. 9 and the unfinished Tenth.
- Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children") and other song cycles with orchestra.
Legacy
Mahler's music sat at the edge of what Romantic-era harmony could support, and his influence runs directly into the 20th-century Modernist composers who followed him, including Schoenberg, who considered him a direct predecessor. He reportedly said, "My time will come." It did - in the 1960s, largely through Leonard Bernstein's championing, and his symphonies are now central to every major orchestra's repertoire. The Adagietto reached a huge audience through Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice.
Where to start listening: the finale of Symphony No. 2 is a genuinely overwhelming full-scale introduction; his Symphony No. 1's third movement (a minor-key take on "Frère Jacques") is a stranger, shorter starting point. The Adagietto from the Fifth is ten minutes of pure, aching beauty.