Austrian-Jewish composer and conductor Gustav Mahler is noted for his 10 symphonies 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.
Mahler was the second of 12 children of an Austrian-Jewish tavern keeper living in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt), in the southwestern corner of the modern Czech Republic. Shortly after his birth the family moved to the nearby town of Jihlava (German: Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood and youth. Mahler was afflicted by the tensions of being an “other” 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 between his parents. His father 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. Furthermore, he inherited his mother’s weak heart, which was to cause his death at the age of 50. 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.
Mahler’s musical talent revealed itself early and significantly; around the age of four he began to reproduce military music and Czech folk music 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.
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 to become artistic director of the Vienna Court 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 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 and Franz Liszt, was essentially autobiographical—the musical expression of a personal view of the world, particularly through song and symphony.
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 Symphony No. 6 in F Major (Pastoral) and Hector Berlioz’s 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 firm command of symphonic structure. The program of the purely orchestral Symphony No. 1 in D Major (1888) is autobiographical of his youth: the joy of life becomes clouded over by an obsession with death. The five-movement Symphony No. 2 (1894; popular title Resurrection) begins with the death obsession and culminates in an avowal of the Christian belief in immortality, as projected in a huge finale portraying the Day of Judgment and 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, who bore him two daughters, in 1902 and 1904.
Giacomo Puccini
