Mahler, Gustav

born July 7, 1860, Kaliště, Bohemia, Austrian Empire

died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria

Austrian-Jewish composer and conductor.

He attended the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. He wrote his first significant work, the cantata Das Klagende Lied (1880), as he was eking out an existence by giving lessons. In 1880 he became a conductor, and though his dictatorial manner was disliked and critics found his interpretations extreme, by 1886 he had achieved success in Prague. He also began the first of his 10 symphonies (1888–1910), his main compositional legacy. In 1897 he was named director of the Vienna Opera; his stormy reign there was acknowledged as an artistic success. He moved to the Metropolitan Opera in 1908 and the New York Philharmonic in 1909–10. Ill with heart disease and mourning his daughter's death, he wrote the masterly orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (1908–09) and his ninth symphony. His orchestral songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1892–98) and Kindertotenlieder (1904; Songs on the Deaths of Children) are frequently performed. His emotionally charged and subtly orchestrated music drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, he was later regarded as an important forerunner of 20th-century techniques of composition.

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▪ Austrian composer

Introduction

born July 7, 1860, Kaliště, Bohemia, Austrian Empire

died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria

 Austrian-Jewish composer and conductor noted for his 10 symphonies (symphony) and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of 20th-century techniques of composition and an acknowledged influence on such composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.

Early life

      Mahler was the son of an Austrian-Jewish tavern keeper living in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt), in the southwestern corner of the modern Czech Republic; a few months later the family moved to the nearby town of Jihlava (German: Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood and youth. These simple facts provide a first clue to his tormented personality: he was afflicted by racial tensions from the beginning of his life. As part of a German-speaking Austrian minority, he was an outsider among the indigenous Czech population and, as a Jew, an outsider among that Austrian minority; later, in Germany, he was an outsider as both an Austrian from Bohemia and a Jew.

      Mahler's life was also complicated by the tension existing between his parents. His father, a self-educated man of fierce vitality, had married a delicate woman from a cultured family, and, coming to resent her social superiority, he resorted to physically maltreating her. In consequence Mahler was alienated from his father and had a strong mother fixation, which even manifested itself physically: a slight limp was unconsciously adopted in imitation of his mother's lameness. Furthermore, he inherited his mother's weak heart, which was to cause his death at the age of 50. Finally, there was a constant childhood background of illness and death among his 11 brothers and sisters.

      This unsettling early background may explain the nervous tension, the irony and skepticism, the obsession with death, and the unremitting quest to discover some meaning in life that was to pervade Mahler's life and music. But it does not explain the prodigious energy, intellectual power, and inflexibility of purpose that carried him to the heights as both a master conductor and a composer. The positive elements in his makeup stemmed no doubt from his father's side of the family, as did his great physical vitality. Despite his inherited heart trouble, he was an extremely active man—a ruthless musical director, a tireless swimmer, and an indefatigable mountain walker.

      His musical talent revealed itself early and significantly. Around the age of four, fascinated by the military music at a nearby barracks and the folk music sung by the Czech working people, he reproduced both on the accordion and on the piano and began composing pieces of his own. The military and popular styles, together with the sounds of nature, became main sources of his mature inspiration. At 10 he made his debut as a pianist in Jihlava and at 15 was so proficient musically that he was accepted as a pupil at the Vienna Conservatory. After winning piano and composition prizes and leaving with a diploma, he supported himself by sporadic teaching while trying to win recognition as a composer. When he failed to win the Conservatory's Beethoven Prize for composition with his first significant work, the cantata Das klagende Lied (completed 1880; The Song of Complaint), he turned to conducting for a more secure livelihood, reserving composition for the lengthy summer vacations.

Career as a conductor

      The next 17 years saw his ascent to the very top of his chosen profession. From conducting musical farces in Austria, he rose through various provincial opera houses, including important engagements at Budapest and Hamburg, to become artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera (Vienna State Opera) in 1897, at the age of 37. As a conductor he had won general acclaim, but as a composer, during this first creative period, he immediately encountered the public's lack of comprehension that was to confront him for most of his career.

      Since Mahler's conducting life centred in the traditional manner on the opera house, it is at first surprising that his whole mature output was entirely symphonic (his 40 songs are not true lieder but embryonic symphonic movements, some of which, in fact, provided a partial basis for the symphonies). But Mahler's unique aim, partially influenced by the school of Richard Wagner (Wagner, Richard) and Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz), was essentially autobiographical—the musical expression of a personal view of the world. And for this purpose, song and symphony were more appropriate than the dramatic medium of opera: song because of its inherent personal lyricism, and symphony (from the Wagner and Liszt point of view) because of its subjective expressive power.

Musical works: first period

      Each of Mahler's three creative periods produced a symphonic trilogy. The three symphonies of his first period were conceived on a programmatic basis (i.e., founded on a nonmusical story or idea), the actual programs (later discarded) being concerned with establishing some ultimate ground for existence in a world dominated by pain, death, doubt, and despair. To this end, he followed the example of Ludwig van Beethoven's (Beethoven, Ludwig van) Symphony No. 6 in F Major (Pastoral) and Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector)' Symphonie fantastique in building symphonies with more than the then traditional four movements; that of Wagner's music-dramas in expanding the time span, enlarging the orchestral resources, and indulging in uninhibited emotional expression; that of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Choral) in introducing texts sung by soloists and chorus; and that of certain chamber works by Franz Schubert in introducing music from his own songs (settings of poems from the German folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Youth's Magic Horn] or of poems by himself in a folk style).

      These procedures, together with Mahler's own tense and rhetorical style, phenomenally vivid orchestration, and ironic use of popular-style music, resulted in three symphonies of unprecedentedly wide contrasts but unified by his unmistakable creative personality and his firm command of symphonic structure. The program of the purely orchestral Symphony No. 1 in D Major (1888; one of its five movements was later discarded) is autobiographical of his youth: the joy of life becomes clouded over by an obsession with death in the macabre "Funeral March in the Manner of Callot" (basically a parody of popular music), which is eventually routed in the arduous and brilliant finale. The five-movement Symphony No. 2 (1894; popular title Resurrection) begins with the death obsession (the first movement's “funeral ceremony”) and culminates in an avowal of the Christian belief in immortality (a huge finale portraying the Day of Judgment and ending with a setting of the 18th-century German writer Friedrich Klopstock's "Resurrection" ode involving soloists and chorus). The even vaster Symphony No. 3 in D Major (1896), also including a soloist and chorus, presents in six movements a Dionysiac vision of a great chain of being, moving from inanimate nature to human consciousness and the redeeming love of God.

      The religious element in these works is highly significant. Mahler's disturbing early background, coupled with his lack of an inherited Jewish faith (his father was a freethinker), resulted in a state of metaphysical torment, which he resolved temporarily by identifying himself with Christianity. That this was a genuine impulse there can be no doubt, even if there was an element of expediency in his becoming baptized, early in 1897, because it made it easier for him to be appointed to the Vienna Opera post. The 10 years there represent his more balanced middle period. His newfound faith and his new high office brought a full and confident maturity, which was further stabilized by his marriage in 1902 to Alma Maria Schindler (Mahler, Alma), who bore him two daughters, in 1902 and 1904.

Musical works: middle period

      As director of the Vienna Opera (and for a time of the Vienna Philharmonic Concerts), Mahler achieved an unprecedented standard of interpretation and performance, which proved an almost unapproachable model for those who followed him. A fanatical idealist, he drove himself and his artists with a ruthless energy that proved a continual inspiration and with a complete disregard for personal considerations that won him many enemies who worked for his dismissal. At this time too, he made a number of tours and became famous over much of Europe as a conductor. He continued his recently acquired habit of devoting his summer vacations, in the Austrian Alps, to composing, and, since, in his case, this involved a ceaseless expenditure of spiritual and nervous energy, he thereby placed an intolerable double strain on his frail constitution.

      Most of the works of this middle period reflect the fierce dynamism of Mahler's full maturity. An exception is Symphony No. 4 (1900; popularly called Ode to Heavenly Joy), which is more of a pendant to the first period: conceived in six movements (two of which were eventually discarded), it has a Wunderhorn song finale for soprano, which was originally intended as a movement for Symphony No. 3 and which evokes a naive peasant conception of the Christian heaven. At the same time, in dispensing with an explicit program and a chorus and coming near to the normal orchestral symphony, it does foreshadow the middle-period trilogy, Nos. 5, 6, and 7. These are all purely orchestral, with a new, hardedged, contrapuntal clarity of instrumentation, and devoid of programs altogether, yet each clearly embodies a spiritual conflict that reaches a conclusive resolution. No. 5 (1902; popularly called Giant) and No. 7 (1905; popularly called Song of the Night) move from darkness to light, though the light seems not the illumination of any afterlife but the sheer exhilaration of life on Earth. Both symphonies have five movements. Between them stands the work Mahler regarded as his Tragic Symphony—the four-movement No. 6 in A Minor (1904), which moves out of darkness only with difficulty, and then back into total night. From these three symphonies onward, he ceased to adapt his songs as whole sections or movements, but in each he introduced subtle allusions, either to his Wunderhorn songs or to his settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, including the cycle Kindertotenlieder (1901–04; Songs on the Deaths of Children).

      At the end of this period he composed his monumental Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major (1907) for eight soloists, double choir, and orchestra—a work known as the Symphony of a Thousand, owing to the large forces it requires, though Mahler gave it no such title. This stands apart, as a later reversion to the expansive metaphysical tendencies of the first period, and represents a consummation of them: the first continuously choral and orchestral symphony ever composed. It could be called at once a massive statement of human aspirations and a cry for illumination, from both the religious and the humanistic points of view. The first of its two parts, equivalent to a symphonic first movement, is a setting of the medieval Catholic Pentecost hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus" ; part two, amalgamating the three movement-types of the traditional symphony, has for its text the mystical closing scene of J.W. von Goethe's Faust drama (the scene of Faust's redemption). The work marked the climax of Mahler's confident maturity, since what followed was disaster—of which, he believed, he had had a premonition in composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6. This work had revealed for the first time a superstitious element in his personality. The finale originally contained three climactic blows with a large hammer, representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled” (he subsequently removed the final blow from the score). Afterward he identified these as presaging the three blows that fell on himself in 1907, the last of which portended his own death: his resignation was demanded at the Vienna Opera, his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died, and a doctor diagnosed his fatal heart disease.

Musical works: last period

      Thus began Mahler's last period, in which, at the age of 47, he became a wanderer again. He was obliged to make a new reputation for himself, as a conductor in the United States, directing performances at the Metropolitan Opera and becoming conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York; yet he went back each summer to the Austrian countryside to compose his last works. He returned finally to Vienna, to die there, in 1911.

      The three works constituting his last-period trilogy, none of which he ever heard, are Das Lied von der Erde (1908; The Song of the Earth), Symphony No. 9 (1910), and Symphony No. 10 in F Sharp Major, left unfinished in the form of a comprehensive full-length sketch (though a full-length performing version has been made posthumously). The first of the three again revealed Mahler's superstition: beginning as a song cycle (to Chinese poems in German translations), it grew into “A Symphony for Tenor, Baritone (or Contralto) and Orchestra.” Yet, he would not call it “Symphony No. 9,” believing, on the analogy of Beethoven and Bruckner, that a ninth symphony must be its composer's last. When he afterward began the actual No. 9, he said, half jokingly, that the danger was over, since it was “really the tenth”; but in fact, that symphony became his last, and No. 10 remained in sketch form when he died.

      This last-period trilogy marked an even more decisive break with the past than had the middle-period trilogy. It represents a threefold attempt to come to terms with modern man's fundamental problem—the reality of death, which in his case had effectively destroyed the religious faith he had opposed to death as an imagined event. Das Lied von der Erde—a six-movement “song-cycle symphony” as opposed to the two-part “oratorio symphony,” No. 8—views the evanescence of all things human in veiled poetic terms—sardonic, wistful, and grief-stricken by turns—until it finds a sad consolation in the beauty of the Earth that endures after the individual is no longer alive to see it.

      In the four-movement No. 9, purely orchestral, the confrontation with death becomes an anguished personal one, evoking horror and bitterness in Mahler's most modern and prophetic movement, the "Rondo-Burleske," and culminating in a finale of heartbroken resignation. The finales of both these works end with an extraordinary, long-drawn disintegration of the musical texture, suggesting dissolution, and the more extreme case in No. 9 was for long thought to be Mahler's final comment on human existence. Growing familiarity with the sketch of No. 10, however, has suggested that he broke through to a more positive attitude: its five movements deal with the same conflict as the two preceding works, but the resignation attained at the end of the finale is entirely serene and affirmative.

Assessment

      Modern critical opinion recognizes Mahler's powerful influence during a period of musical transition. In his works may be found pervasive elements foreshadowing the radical methods employed in the 20th century: these elements include “progressive tonality” (ending a work in a different key from the initial one); dissolution of tonality (obscuring the perception of key through the constant use of chromaticism or harmonies not belonging to that key); a breakaway from harmony produced by the entire orchestra in favour of a contrapuntal texture (based on interwoven melodies) for groups of solo instruments within the full orchestra; the principle of continually varying themes rather than merely restating them; ironic quotation of popular styles and of sounds from everyday life (bird calls, bugle signals, etc.); and, on the other hand, a new way of formally unifying the symphony through the adoption of techniques subtly derived from Liszt's “cyclic” method (the carrying over of themes from one movement of a work to others).

      In terms of the personal content of his art, it can be said of Mahler, more than of any other composer, that he lived out the spiritual torment of disinherited modern man in his art, and that the man is the music.

Deryck V. Cooke

Additional Reading

Two important memoirs are Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler (1958); and Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. and annotated by Peter Franklin (1980). The definitive biography (coupled with critical study) is Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, rev. and ed. by Paul Banks and David Matthews (1980), and Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (1975, reissued 1980). Other notable biographies include Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler (1973, reprinted 1991), a biographical portrait emphasizing Mahler's life and personality; and Edward Seckerson, Mahler: His Life and Times (1982). Less scholarly works for the general reader are Egon Gartenberg, Mahler: The Man and His Music (1978); and Michael Kennedy, Mahler, rev. ed. (1991), a concise treatment. Interpretations of his music include Henry A. Lea, Gustav Mahler: Man on the Margin (1985); Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music, 2nd ed. (1988), a collection of short essays on individual works; and Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985), focusing on the composer's vocal music.

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