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1911 Gustav Mahler, Austrian composer and conductor, died of heart disease at the age of 50. From the article:
"Gustav Mahler (Composer, Arranger) - Short Biography
Born: July 7, 1860 - Kaliště (Kalischt), Bohemia
Died: May 18, 1911 - Vienna, Austria
Gustav Mahler was a Bohemian-born Austrian composer and conductor. He was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day. He has since come to be acknowledged as among the most important late-Romantic composers, although his music was never completely accepted by the musical establishment of Vienna while he was still alive. Mahler composed primarily symphonies and songs; however, his approach to genre often blurred the lines between orchestral Lied, symphony, and symphonic poem.
Life
Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, Ashkenazic Jewish family in Kaliště (in German, Kalischt), Bohemia, then in the Austrian Empire, today in the Czech Republic, the second of 14 children, of whom only six survived infancy. His parents soon moved to Jihlava (in German Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood. Having noticed the boy's talent at an early age, his parents arranged piano lessons for him when he was six years old.
In 1875, Mahler, then fifteen, was admitted to the Vienna Conservatoire where he studied piano under Julius Epstein, harmony with Robert Fuchs, and composition with Franz Krenn. Three years later Mahler attended Vienna University, where Anton Bruckner was lecturing. There he studied history and philosophy as well as music. While at the university, he worked as a music teacher and made his first major attempt at composition with the cantata Das klagende Lied. The work was entered in a competition where the jury was headed by Johannes Brahms, but failed to win a prize.
In 1880, Mahler began his career as a conductor with a job at a summer theatre at Bad Hall; in the years that followed, he took posts at successively larger opera houses: in Ljubljana in 1881, Olomouc in 1882, Vienna in 1883, Kassel also in 1883, Prague in 1885, Leipzig in 1886 and Budapest in 1888. In 1887, he took over conducting Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from an ill Arthur Nikisch, firmly establishing his reputation among critics and public alike. The year after, he made a complete performing edition of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos, the success of which brought financial rewards and contributed to his gradually growing fame. J. Brahms was greatly impressed by his conducting of Don Giovanni. His first long-term appointment was at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, where he stayed until 1897; it was while Mahler was at Hamburg that his youngest brother Otto, also a composer, committed suicide in 1895 at the age of 21. From 1893 to 1896, Mahler took summer vacations at Steinbach am Attersee in Upper Austria, where he revised his Symphony No. 1 (first heard in 1889), composed his Symphony No. 2, sketched his Symphony No. 3, and wrote most of the song collection Lieder aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (Songs from 'The Youth's Magic Horn'), based on a famous set of heavily redacted folk-poems.
In 1897, Gustav Mahler, then thirty-seven, was offered the directorship of the Vienna Opera, the most prestigious musical position in the Austrian Empire. This was an 'Imperial' post, and under Austro-Hungarian law, no such posts could be occupied by Jews. Mahler, who was never a devout or practising Jew, had, in preparation, converted to Roman Catholicism. As a child, he had been a chorister in a Catholic Church where he had also learned piano from the choir master. As the years passed Mahler found much to attract him in Catholicism, and Catholic influences are observable in his music, for example his use of the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus" in his Eighth Symphony. Still, there is ample evidence of a Jewish spirit manifest in his works, as in the Klezmer-like theme and textures of the third movement of the first symphony. In 1899 and 1910 he conducted his revised versions of Robert Schumann's Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4.
In ten years at the Vienna Opera, Gustav Mahler transformed the institution's repertoire and raised its artistic standards, bending both performers and listeners to his will. When he first took over the Opera, the most popular works were Lohengrin, Manon, and Cavalleria rusticana; the new director concentrated his energies on classic operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and, in collaboration with the painter Alfred Roller (Brno 1864-Vienna 1935), created shadowy, transfixing productions of Fidelio, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Ring des Nibelungen.
In Mahler's time, Vienna was one of the world’s biggest cities and the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was home to a lively artistic and intellectual scene. It was home to famous painters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Mahler knew many of these intellectuals and artists.
Gustav Mahler worked at the Opera for nine months of each year, with only his summers free for composing at various komponierhäuschen (composing huts). These summers he spent mainly at Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee and in that idyllic setting he composed his fifth through eighth symphonies, the Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), both based on poems by Friedrich Rückert, and Der Tamboursg'sell, the last of his 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' settings.
In June 1901, he moved into a new villa on the lake in Maiernigg, Carinthia. On March 9, 1902, Mahler married Alma Schindler (1879-1964), twenty years his junior and the stepdaughter of the noted Viennese painter Carl Moll. Alma was a musician and composer, but Mahler forbade her to engage in creative work, although she did make clean manuscript copies of his hand-written scores. Mahler did interact creatively with some women, such as viola-player Natalie Bauer-Lechner, two years his senior, whom he had met while studying in Vienna. But he told Alma that her role should only be to tend to his needs. Alma and Gustav had two daughters, Maria Anna ('Putzi'; 1902-1907), who died of diphtheria at the age of only four, and Anna Justine ('Gucki'; 1904-1988), who later became a sculptor.
The death of their first daughter left Mahler grief-stricken; but further blows were to come. That same year he was diagnosed by Dr. Emanuel Libman of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital with a heart disease (infective endocarditis) and was forced to limit his exercising and count his steps with a pedometer. At the Opera, his obstinacy in artistic matters had created enemies, and he was also increasingly subject to attacks in anti-Semitic portions of the press. His resignation from the Opera, in 1907, was hardly unexpected.
Gustav Mahler's own music aroused considerable opposition from music critics, who tended to hear his symphonies as 'potpourris' in which themes from "disparate" periods and traditions were indiscriminately mingled. Mahler's juxtaposition of material from both "high" and "low" cultures, as well as his mixing of different ethnic traditions, often outraged conservative critics at a time when workers' mass organizations were growing rapidly, and clashes between Germans, Czechs, Hungarians and Jews in Austro-Hungary were creating anxiety and instability. However, he always had vociferous admirers on his side. In his last years, Mahler began to score major successes with a wider public, notably with a Munich performance of the Second Symphony in 1900, with the first complete performance of the Third in Krefeld in 1902, with a valedictory Viennese performance of the Second in 1907, and, above all, with the Munich premiere of the gargantuan Eighth in 1910. The music he wrote after that, however, was not performed during his lifetime.
The final impetus for Mahler's departure from the Vienna Opera was a generous offer from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He conducted a season there in 1908, only to be set aside in favour of Arturo Toscanini; while he had been enormously with public and critics alike, he had fallen out of favor with the trustees of the board of the Met. Back in Europe, with his marriage in crisis and Alma's infidelity having been revealed, Mahler, in 1910, had a single (and apparently helpful) consultation with Sigmund Freud.
Having now signed a contract to conduct the long-established New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Mahler and his family travelled again to America. At this time, he completed his Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), and his Symphony No. 9, which would be his last completed work. In February 1911, during a long and demanding concert season in New York, Mahler fell seriously ill with a streptococcal blood infection, and conducted his last concert in a fever (the programme included the world premiere of Ferruccio Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque). Returning to Europe, he was taken to Paris, where a new serum had recently been developed. He did not respond, however, and was taken back to Vienna at his request. He died there from his infection on May 18, 1911 at the age of 50, leaving his Symphony No. 10 unfinished.
Mahler's widow reported that his last word was "Mozartl" (a diminutive, corresponding to 'dear little Mozart'). He was buried, at his request, beside his daughter, in Grinzing Cemetery outside Vienna. In obedience to his last wishes, he was buried in silence, with the gravestone bearing only the name "Gustav Mahler" and a simple Jugendstil monument. Mahler's good friend Bruno Walter describes the funeral: "On May 18, 1911, he died. Next evening we laid the coffin in the cemetery at Grinzing, a storm broke and such torrents of rain fell that it was almost impossible to proceed. An immense crowd, dead silent, followed the hearse. At the moment when the coffin was lowered, the sun broke through the clouds" (Bruno Walter 1957, 73).
Alma Mahler outlived Gustav by more than 50 years, and in their course, she was active in publishing material about his life and music. However, her accounts have been attacked as unreliable, false, and misleading. This became so problematic, it became known by musicologists and historians as the "Alma Problem". For example, she tampered with the couple's correspondence and, in her publications, Gustav is often portrayed more negatively than some historians might like.
Music
Mahler is generally recognized as the last great German symphonist. He sought to expand the scope and breadth of the symphony to the greatest possible extent, believing that the symphony should "take in the whole world." This expansion of scope can be seen not only the great length of his works, but also in the explosion of orchestral forces employed and in the aesthetic goal of maximum expressive impact. He saw himself in a line of Viennese symphonists extending from the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, L.v. Beethoven and Schubert to the Romantics Bruckner and J. Brahms; he also incorporated the ideas of non-Viennese Romantic composers like Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. The major influence on his work, however, was not a symphonic composer at all but rather that of Wagner, who was, according to Mahler, the only composer after L.v. Beethoven to truly have "development" (see Sonata form and History of sonata form) in his music.
With the exceptions of an early piano quartet, Das Klagende Lied, an early cantata, and Totenfeier, the original tone-poem version of the first movement of the second symphony, Mahler's entire output consists of only two genres: symphony and song. Besides the nine completed numbered symphonies, his principal works are the song cycles Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (usually rendered as 'Songs of a Wayfarer', but literally, 'Songs of a Travelling Journeyman') and Kindertotenlieder ('Songs on the Death of Children'), and the synthesis of symphony and song cycle that is Das Lied von der Erde ('The Song of the Earth').
However, much of Mahler's music generally expands and blurs the lines of these traditional genres. He originally described his Symphony No. 1 - the "Titan"- as a "symphonic poem." All the first period symphonies have some degree of programmatic content, in contrast to the ideal of "absolute music" espoused by Eduard Hanslick and exemplified in the symphonies of J. Brahms. Mahler's Symphonies 2-4 all employ vocal soloists and texts. The Symphony No. 8 pushes the limits of the definition of the symphony; with its 8 soloists, multiple choirs and combination of both sacred and secular texts, it is emblematic of Mahler's maximalist, inclusive conception of the symphony. In contrast, Das Lied von der Erde could also be considered a symphony, in that it is a multi-movement orchestral work, except that Mahler chooses not to label it as such.
The spirit of the Lied (German for song) constantly rests in his work. He followed Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann in developing the song cycle, but rather than write piano accompaniment, he orchestrated it instead. Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) is a set of four songs written as a rejected lover wandering alone along the earth; Mahler wrote the text himself, inspired by his unhappy love affair with a singer while conducting at Kassel.
Keenly aware of the colourations of the orchestra, the composer filled his symphonies with flowing melodies and expressive harmonies, achieving bright tonal qualities using the clarity of his melodic lines. Among his other innovations are expressive use of combinations of instruments in both large and small scale, increased use of percussion, as well as combining voice and chorus to symphony form, and extreme voice leading in his counterpoint. His orchestral style was based on counterpoint; two melodies would each start off the other seemingly simultaneously, choosing clarity over a mass of sound.
Often, his works involved the spirit of Austrian peasant song and dance. The Ländler - the Austrian folk-dance, which developed first into the minuet and then into the waltz - figures in several symphonies, as indeed do the minuet and the waltz. (All three historical stages - Ländler, minuet, and waltz - are represented in the 'dance movement' of the Ninth Symphony).
Mahler combined the ideas of Romanticism, including the use of program music, and the use of song melodies in symphonic works, with the resources that the development of the symphony orchestra had made possible. The result was to extend, and eventually break, the understanding of symphonic form, as he searched for ways to expand his music. He stated that a symphony should be an "entire world". As a result, he met with difficulties in presenting his works, and would continually revise the details of his orchestration until he was satisfied with the effect.
He was deeply spiritual and described his music in terms of nature very often. This resulted in his music being viewed as extremely emotional for a long time after his death. In addition to restlessly searching for ways of extending symphonic expression, he was also an ardent craftsman, which shows both in his meticulous working methods and careful planning, and in his studies of previous composers.
Mahler's harmonic writing was at times highly innovative, stretching the limits of conventional tonality. Still, tonality, as an expressive and constructional principle, was clearly of great importance to Mahler. This is shown most clearly by his approach to the issue of so-called 'progressive tonality'. While his First Symphony is clearly a D major work, his Second 'progresses' from a C minor first movement to an E-flat major conclusion; his Third moves from a first movement which begins in D minor and ends in F major to a finwhich ends in D major – while his Fourth in G major dies away in a serene E major. In harmonic theory; ending a composition a "third up" or a "third down" from its supposed key is known as "mediant/submediant relationship," so his first four symphonies were conventional to some degree however: things change with the fifth symphony; it moves from a C-sharp minor funeral march, through a desperately conflict-ridden A minor movement, a vigorous dance movement in D major, and a lyrical F major 'Adagietto', to a triumphant finale in D major – while the Sixth, very much by contrast, starts in A minor, ends in A minor, and juxtaposes a slow movement in E-flat major with a scherzo in A minor. The Seventh is tonally highly 'progressive', with a first movement that moves from a (possible) B minor start to an E major conclusion, and a finale that defines a celebratory C major. In the Eighth Symphony, the composer's expressive intentions led him to construct a work that both starts and ends in E-flat - whereas the 'valedictory' Ninth moves from a D major first movement to a D-flat major finale. The Tenth, insofar as we can be sure that Mahler's ultimate tonal intentions are discernible, was to start and end in F-sharp major.
Symphonies
Mahler's symphonic output is generally divided into three 'periods'. The 'first period', dominated by his reading of the Wunderhorn poems, comprises his first four symphonies. Within this group, the cross-fertilization from the world of Mahlerian song is considerable. His Symphony No. 1 uses a melodic idea from one of the Gesellen songs in its first movement, and employs a section of another in the central part of its third. (The third movement of the first symphony also contains a version of the round 'Bruder Martin' - known, in its French version, as 'Frère Jacques' - presented in a minor key.) The third movement of the Symphony No. 2 is a voice-less orchestral amplification and extension of a Wunderhorn song, and is followed by a Wunderhorn setting incorporated completely. The third movement of the Symphony No. 3 is another orchestral fantasia on a Wunderhorn song, while the fifth movement is a Wunderhorn setting composed especially for the symphony. In the Symphony No. 4, the finale is a pre-existing Wunderhorn setting (earlier considered as a possible finale for the Symphony No. 3), elements of which are prefiguratively inserted into the first three movements.
The symphonies of Mahler's 'second period', Nos. 5 to 7, manifest an increased severity of expression and a growing interest in non-standard instrumentation. Mahler used somewhat unusual instruments such as a post horn (in the third symphony) in his earlier symphonies. However, in the 'second period' his use of non-standard instruments became more striking with a whip in the Symphony No. 5; cowbells, deep bells and a hammer in the Symphony No. 6; and cowbells, cornet, tenor horn, mandolin and guitar in the Symphony No. 7.
Although the symphonies in the 'second period' have no vocal component, the world of Mahlerian song is hinted at in the first movement of the fifth and the slow movement of the sixth, in which phrases from one of the Kindertotenlieder are briefly heard, and in the finale of the fifth, which incorporates material from the 1896 Wunderhorn song 'Lob des hohen Verstandes.'
Mahler's symphonic 'third period' is marked by increasing polyphony and embraces Nos. 8, 9, and 10 (unfinished), as well as Das Lied von der Erde. Credible connections to freestanding songs are difficult to demonstrate in these works – perhaps, unsurprisingly, as Mahler's last non-symphonic songs were the Kindertotenlieder, completed in 1904. A striking example does come, however, with the intervallically exact reminiscence, on the final page of the Symphony No. 9, of the line 'The day is fine on yonder heights' from Kindertotenlieder No. 4.
Few composers freely interconnected their work so completely as did Gustav Mahler. Musical interconnections can be heard to exist between symphonies and symphonies, and between symphonies and songs, that seem to bind them together into a larger 'narrative.' For example, material heard in the third symphony recurs in the finale of the fourth symphony. A trumpet line from the first movement of the fourth opens the fifth symphony. And a 'tragic' harmonic gesture repeatedly heard in the sixth symphony (a major chord declining into a minor) makes a striking reappearance in the seventh symphony. The same gesture can 'prophetically' be heard at the end of the first movement of the second symphony. The rising melody line from the adagietto on the fifth symphony makes an appearance in its finale, and again in revised form in the finale of the seventh symphony. Furthermore, a theme heard in the first symphony is restated in the first movement of the ninth, the last complete symphony Mahler wrote."
"Gustav Mahler (Composer, Arranger) - Short Biography
Born: July 7, 1860 - Kaliště (Kalischt), Bohemia
Died: May 18, 1911 - Vienna, Austria
Gustav Mahler was a Bohemian-born Austrian composer and conductor. He was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day. He has since come to be acknowledged as among the most important late-Romantic composers, although his music was never completely accepted by the musical establishment of Vienna while he was still alive. Mahler composed primarily symphonies and songs; however, his approach to genre often blurred the lines between orchestral Lied, symphony, and symphonic poem.
Life
Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, Ashkenazic Jewish family in Kaliště (in German, Kalischt), Bohemia, then in the Austrian Empire, today in the Czech Republic, the second of 14 children, of whom only six survived infancy. His parents soon moved to Jihlava (in German Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood. Having noticed the boy's talent at an early age, his parents arranged piano lessons for him when he was six years old.
In 1875, Mahler, then fifteen, was admitted to the Vienna Conservatoire where he studied piano under Julius Epstein, harmony with Robert Fuchs, and composition with Franz Krenn. Three years later Mahler attended Vienna University, where Anton Bruckner was lecturing. There he studied history and philosophy as well as music. While at the university, he worked as a music teacher and made his first major attempt at composition with the cantata Das klagende Lied. The work was entered in a competition where the jury was headed by Johannes Brahms, but failed to win a prize.
In 1880, Mahler began his career as a conductor with a job at a summer theatre at Bad Hall; in the years that followed, he took posts at successively larger opera houses: in Ljubljana in 1881, Olomouc in 1882, Vienna in 1883, Kassel also in 1883, Prague in 1885, Leipzig in 1886 and Budapest in 1888. In 1887, he took over conducting Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from an ill Arthur Nikisch, firmly establishing his reputation among critics and public alike. The year after, he made a complete performing edition of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos, the success of which brought financial rewards and contributed to his gradually growing fame. J. Brahms was greatly impressed by his conducting of Don Giovanni. His first long-term appointment was at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, where he stayed until 1897; it was while Mahler was at Hamburg that his youngest brother Otto, also a composer, committed suicide in 1895 at the age of 21. From 1893 to 1896, Mahler took summer vacations at Steinbach am Attersee in Upper Austria, where he revised his Symphony No. 1 (first heard in 1889), composed his Symphony No. 2, sketched his Symphony No. 3, and wrote most of the song collection Lieder aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (Songs from 'The Youth's Magic Horn'), based on a famous set of heavily redacted folk-poems.
In 1897, Gustav Mahler, then thirty-seven, was offered the directorship of the Vienna Opera, the most prestigious musical position in the Austrian Empire. This was an 'Imperial' post, and under Austro-Hungarian law, no such posts could be occupied by Jews. Mahler, who was never a devout or practising Jew, had, in preparation, converted to Roman Catholicism. As a child, he had been a chorister in a Catholic Church where he had also learned piano from the choir master. As the years passed Mahler found much to attract him in Catholicism, and Catholic influences are observable in his music, for example his use of the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus" in his Eighth Symphony. Still, there is ample evidence of a Jewish spirit manifest in his works, as in the Klezmer-like theme and textures of the third movement of the first symphony. In 1899 and 1910 he conducted his revised versions of Robert Schumann's Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4.
In ten years at the Vienna Opera, Gustav Mahler transformed the institution's repertoire and raised its artistic standards, bending both performers and listeners to his will. When he first took over the Opera, the most popular works were Lohengrin, Manon, and Cavalleria rusticana; the new director concentrated his energies on classic operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and, in collaboration with the painter Alfred Roller (Brno 1864-Vienna 1935), created shadowy, transfixing productions of Fidelio, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Ring des Nibelungen.
In Mahler's time, Vienna was one of the world’s biggest cities and the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was home to a lively artistic and intellectual scene. It was home to famous painters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Mahler knew many of these intellectuals and artists.
Gustav Mahler worked at the Opera for nine months of each year, with only his summers free for composing at various komponierhäuschen (composing huts). These summers he spent mainly at Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee and in that idyllic setting he composed his fifth through eighth symphonies, the Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), both based on poems by Friedrich Rückert, and Der Tamboursg'sell, the last of his 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' settings.
In June 1901, he moved into a new villa on the lake in Maiernigg, Carinthia. On March 9, 1902, Mahler married Alma Schindler (1879-1964), twenty years his junior and the stepdaughter of the noted Viennese painter Carl Moll. Alma was a musician and composer, but Mahler forbade her to engage in creative work, although she did make clean manuscript copies of his hand-written scores. Mahler did interact creatively with some women, such as viola-player Natalie Bauer-Lechner, two years his senior, whom he had met while studying in Vienna. But he told Alma that her role should only be to tend to his needs. Alma and Gustav had two daughters, Maria Anna ('Putzi'; 1902-1907), who died of diphtheria at the age of only four, and Anna Justine ('Gucki'; 1904-1988), who later became a sculptor.
The death of their first daughter left Mahler grief-stricken; but further blows were to come. That same year he was diagnosed by Dr. Emanuel Libman of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital with a heart disease (infective endocarditis) and was forced to limit his exercising and count his steps with a pedometer. At the Opera, his obstinacy in artistic matters had created enemies, and he was also increasingly subject to attacks in anti-Semitic portions of the press. His resignation from the Opera, in 1907, was hardly unexpected.
Gustav Mahler's own music aroused considerable opposition from music critics, who tended to hear his symphonies as 'potpourris' in which themes from "disparate" periods and traditions were indiscriminately mingled. Mahler's juxtaposition of material from both "high" and "low" cultures, as well as his mixing of different ethnic traditions, often outraged conservative critics at a time when workers' mass organizations were growing rapidly, and clashes between Germans, Czechs, Hungarians and Jews in Austro-Hungary were creating anxiety and instability. However, he always had vociferous admirers on his side. In his last years, Mahler began to score major successes with a wider public, notably with a Munich performance of the Second Symphony in 1900, with the first complete performance of the Third in Krefeld in 1902, with a valedictory Viennese performance of the Second in 1907, and, above all, with the Munich premiere of the gargantuan Eighth in 1910. The music he wrote after that, however, was not performed during his lifetime.
The final impetus for Mahler's departure from the Vienna Opera was a generous offer from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He conducted a season there in 1908, only to be set aside in favour of Arturo Toscanini; while he had been enormously with public and critics alike, he had fallen out of favor with the trustees of the board of the Met. Back in Europe, with his marriage in crisis and Alma's infidelity having been revealed, Mahler, in 1910, had a single (and apparently helpful) consultation with Sigmund Freud.
Having now signed a contract to conduct the long-established New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Mahler and his family travelled again to America. At this time, he completed his Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), and his Symphony No. 9, which would be his last completed work. In February 1911, during a long and demanding concert season in New York, Mahler fell seriously ill with a streptococcal blood infection, and conducted his last concert in a fever (the programme included the world premiere of Ferruccio Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque). Returning to Europe, he was taken to Paris, where a new serum had recently been developed. He did not respond, however, and was taken back to Vienna at his request. He died there from his infection on May 18, 1911 at the age of 50, leaving his Symphony No. 10 unfinished.
Mahler's widow reported that his last word was "Mozartl" (a diminutive, corresponding to 'dear little Mozart'). He was buried, at his request, beside his daughter, in Grinzing Cemetery outside Vienna. In obedience to his last wishes, he was buried in silence, with the gravestone bearing only the name "Gustav Mahler" and a simple Jugendstil monument. Mahler's good friend Bruno Walter describes the funeral: "On May 18, 1911, he died. Next evening we laid the coffin in the cemetery at Grinzing, a storm broke and such torrents of rain fell that it was almost impossible to proceed. An immense crowd, dead silent, followed the hearse. At the moment when the coffin was lowered, the sun broke through the clouds" (Bruno Walter 1957, 73).
Alma Mahler outlived Gustav by more than 50 years, and in their course, she was active in publishing material about his life and music. However, her accounts have been attacked as unreliable, false, and misleading. This became so problematic, it became known by musicologists and historians as the "Alma Problem". For example, she tampered with the couple's correspondence and, in her publications, Gustav is often portrayed more negatively than some historians might like.
Music
Mahler is generally recognized as the last great German symphonist. He sought to expand the scope and breadth of the symphony to the greatest possible extent, believing that the symphony should "take in the whole world." This expansion of scope can be seen not only the great length of his works, but also in the explosion of orchestral forces employed and in the aesthetic goal of maximum expressive impact. He saw himself in a line of Viennese symphonists extending from the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, L.v. Beethoven and Schubert to the Romantics Bruckner and J. Brahms; he also incorporated the ideas of non-Viennese Romantic composers like Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. The major influence on his work, however, was not a symphonic composer at all but rather that of Wagner, who was, according to Mahler, the only composer after L.v. Beethoven to truly have "development" (see Sonata form and History of sonata form) in his music.
With the exceptions of an early piano quartet, Das Klagende Lied, an early cantata, and Totenfeier, the original tone-poem version of the first movement of the second symphony, Mahler's entire output consists of only two genres: symphony and song. Besides the nine completed numbered symphonies, his principal works are the song cycles Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (usually rendered as 'Songs of a Wayfarer', but literally, 'Songs of a Travelling Journeyman') and Kindertotenlieder ('Songs on the Death of Children'), and the synthesis of symphony and song cycle that is Das Lied von der Erde ('The Song of the Earth').
However, much of Mahler's music generally expands and blurs the lines of these traditional genres. He originally described his Symphony No. 1 - the "Titan"- as a "symphonic poem." All the first period symphonies have some degree of programmatic content, in contrast to the ideal of "absolute music" espoused by Eduard Hanslick and exemplified in the symphonies of J. Brahms. Mahler's Symphonies 2-4 all employ vocal soloists and texts. The Symphony No. 8 pushes the limits of the definition of the symphony; with its 8 soloists, multiple choirs and combination of both sacred and secular texts, it is emblematic of Mahler's maximalist, inclusive conception of the symphony. In contrast, Das Lied von der Erde could also be considered a symphony, in that it is a multi-movement orchestral work, except that Mahler chooses not to label it as such.
The spirit of the Lied (German for song) constantly rests in his work. He followed Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann in developing the song cycle, but rather than write piano accompaniment, he orchestrated it instead. Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) is a set of four songs written as a rejected lover wandering alone along the earth; Mahler wrote the text himself, inspired by his unhappy love affair with a singer while conducting at Kassel.
Keenly aware of the colourations of the orchestra, the composer filled his symphonies with flowing melodies and expressive harmonies, achieving bright tonal qualities using the clarity of his melodic lines. Among his other innovations are expressive use of combinations of instruments in both large and small scale, increased use of percussion, as well as combining voice and chorus to symphony form, and extreme voice leading in his counterpoint. His orchestral style was based on counterpoint; two melodies would each start off the other seemingly simultaneously, choosing clarity over a mass of sound.
Often, his works involved the spirit of Austrian peasant song and dance. The Ländler - the Austrian folk-dance, which developed first into the minuet and then into the waltz - figures in several symphonies, as indeed do the minuet and the waltz. (All three historical stages - Ländler, minuet, and waltz - are represented in the 'dance movement' of the Ninth Symphony).
Mahler combined the ideas of Romanticism, including the use of program music, and the use of song melodies in symphonic works, with the resources that the development of the symphony orchestra had made possible. The result was to extend, and eventually break, the understanding of symphonic form, as he searched for ways to expand his music. He stated that a symphony should be an "entire world". As a result, he met with difficulties in presenting his works, and would continually revise the details of his orchestration until he was satisfied with the effect.
He was deeply spiritual and described his music in terms of nature very often. This resulted in his music being viewed as extremely emotional for a long time after his death. In addition to restlessly searching for ways of extending symphonic expression, he was also an ardent craftsman, which shows both in his meticulous working methods and careful planning, and in his studies of previous composers.
Mahler's harmonic writing was at times highly innovative, stretching the limits of conventional tonality. Still, tonality, as an expressive and constructional principle, was clearly of great importance to Mahler. This is shown most clearly by his approach to the issue of so-called 'progressive tonality'. While his First Symphony is clearly a D major work, his Second 'progresses' from a C minor first movement to an E-flat major conclusion; his Third moves from a first movement which begins in D minor and ends in F major to a finwhich ends in D major – while his Fourth in G major dies away in a serene E major. In harmonic theory; ending a composition a "third up" or a "third down" from its supposed key is known as "mediant/submediant relationship," so his first four symphonies were conventional to some degree however: things change with the fifth symphony; it moves from a C-sharp minor funeral march, through a desperately conflict-ridden A minor movement, a vigorous dance movement in D major, and a lyrical F major 'Adagietto', to a triumphant finale in D major – while the Sixth, very much by contrast, starts in A minor, ends in A minor, and juxtaposes a slow movement in E-flat major with a scherzo in A minor. The Seventh is tonally highly 'progressive', with a first movement that moves from a (possible) B minor start to an E major conclusion, and a finale that defines a celebratory C major. In the Eighth Symphony, the composer's expressive intentions led him to construct a work that both starts and ends in E-flat - whereas the 'valedictory' Ninth moves from a D major first movement to a D-flat major finale. The Tenth, insofar as we can be sure that Mahler's ultimate tonal intentions are discernible, was to start and end in F-sharp major.
Symphonies
Mahler's symphonic output is generally divided into three 'periods'. The 'first period', dominated by his reading of the Wunderhorn poems, comprises his first four symphonies. Within this group, the cross-fertilization from the world of Mahlerian song is considerable. His Symphony No. 1 uses a melodic idea from one of the Gesellen songs in its first movement, and employs a section of another in the central part of its third. (The third movement of the first symphony also contains a version of the round 'Bruder Martin' - known, in its French version, as 'Frère Jacques' - presented in a minor key.) The third movement of the Symphony No. 2 is a voice-less orchestral amplification and extension of a Wunderhorn song, and is followed by a Wunderhorn setting incorporated completely. The third movement of the Symphony No. 3 is another orchestral fantasia on a Wunderhorn song, while the fifth movement is a Wunderhorn setting composed especially for the symphony. In the Symphony No. 4, the finale is a pre-existing Wunderhorn setting (earlier considered as a possible finale for the Symphony No. 3), elements of which are prefiguratively inserted into the first three movements.
The symphonies of Mahler's 'second period', Nos. 5 to 7, manifest an increased severity of expression and a growing interest in non-standard instrumentation. Mahler used somewhat unusual instruments such as a post horn (in the third symphony) in his earlier symphonies. However, in the 'second period' his use of non-standard instruments became more striking with a whip in the Symphony No. 5; cowbells, deep bells and a hammer in the Symphony No. 6; and cowbells, cornet, tenor horn, mandolin and guitar in the Symphony No. 7.
Although the symphonies in the 'second period' have no vocal component, the world of Mahlerian song is hinted at in the first movement of the fifth and the slow movement of the sixth, in which phrases from one of the Kindertotenlieder are briefly heard, and in the finale of the fifth, which incorporates material from the 1896 Wunderhorn song 'Lob des hohen Verstandes.'
Mahler's symphonic 'third period' is marked by increasing polyphony and embraces Nos. 8, 9, and 10 (unfinished), as well as Das Lied von der Erde. Credible connections to freestanding songs are difficult to demonstrate in these works – perhaps, unsurprisingly, as Mahler's last non-symphonic songs were the Kindertotenlieder, completed in 1904. A striking example does come, however, with the intervallically exact reminiscence, on the final page of the Symphony No. 9, of the line 'The day is fine on yonder heights' from Kindertotenlieder No. 4.
Few composers freely interconnected their work so completely as did Gustav Mahler. Musical interconnections can be heard to exist between symphonies and symphonies, and between symphonies and songs, that seem to bind them together into a larger 'narrative.' For example, material heard in the third symphony recurs in the finale of the fourth symphony. A trumpet line from the first movement of the fourth opens the fifth symphony. And a 'tragic' harmonic gesture repeatedly heard in the sixth symphony (a major chord declining into a minor) makes a striking reappearance in the seventh symphony. The same gesture can 'prophetically' be heard at the end of the first movement of the second symphony. The rising melody line from the adagietto on the fifth symphony makes an appearance in its finale, and again in revised form in the finale of the seventh symphony. Furthermore, a theme heard in the first symphony is restated in the first movement of the ninth, the last complete symphony Mahler wrote."
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Keeping Score | Gustav Mahler: Origins (FULL DOCUMENTARY AND CONCERT)
The first of two episodes explores the roots of Gustav Mahler’s music. SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas journeys to rural Bohemia to rediscover the i...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on May 18, 1911 Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler died of heart disease at the age of 50.
Keeping Score | Gustav Mahler: Origins (FULL DOCUMENTARY AND CONCERT)
"The first of two episodes explores the roots of Gustav Mahler’s music. SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas journeys to rural Bohemia to rediscover the inspirations of Mahler’s music, and traces Mahler’s life through the premiere of his first symphony in 1888. It shocked the contemporary audience, but as MTT and the San Francisco Symphony reveal, on location and in performance, this ground-breaking symphony contains elements of everything else that Mahler composed. Shot on location in the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and in performance in San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DfYcT5icY
Images:
1. Alma and Gustav Mahler
2. Gustav Mahler as a child
3. Gustav Mahler - pensive
4. Alma Mahler with their daughters, Maria Anna and Anna Justine
Biographies
1. classicfm.com/composers/mahler/guides/discovering-great-composers-gustav-mahler
2. kulturzentrum-toblach.eu/en/gustav-mahler-music-weeks/gustav-mahler-in-toblach/biography-of-gustav-mahler
1. Background from {[https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mahler/guides/discovering-great-composers-gustav-mahler/]}
"Gustav Mahler: A Life
The neurotic composer Gustav Mahler triumphed over appalling childhood memories and an obsession with mortality to become the last great Romantic symphonist.
Mahler’s lifetime spanned the most crucial period in musical history. Behind him lay the rich, Romantic pastures of Bruckner and Brahms, and ahead the “alien” musical landscapes of Schoenberg and Boulez and the harrowing emotional terrain of Shostakovich and Britten. Such was Gustav Mahler’s all-embracing vision that he earned the respect and admiration of all these composers.
During a conversation with Jean Sibelius, Mahler insisted that his symphonies were “whole worlds” embracing his literary tastes, his neuroses, responses to nature and, most especially, the inexorable cycle of life and death.
His four great song collections – Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn), Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs Of A Wayfarer), Kindertotenlieder (Songs On The Death Of Children) and the five Rückert Lieder – all dwell on these very subjects, and also acted as a vital melodic repository for his symphonies.
Right at the end of his life Mahler fused song and symphonic form together in an epic Lieder-symphony entitled Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song Of The Earth).
Each of Mahler’s nine symphonies (and the unfinished Tenth) requires the highest degree of orchestral virtuosity and sensitivity. He expanded the scale of music to near-bursting point – there are single movements in his works that last longer than an entire symphony by Mozart or Haydn.
He also stretched the traditional system of major and minor keys to its limits, taking music to the very brink of atonality (keylessness). Even 40 years ago, Mahler was still dismissed by many as a “fringe” composer, but now he is widely considered the last great symphonist in the tradition of Beethoven.
Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, to a poor family of Moravian Jews. His father, Bernhard, ran a ramshackle distillery, and regularly thrashed his children and Mahler’s mother, Marie. She bore Bernhard 14 children in all and, despite suffering from a limp since birth and a heart condition, was made to work like a slave.
During a session with the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the deeply traumatised Mahler recalled running screaming from the house in agony to the strains of a hurdy-gurdy playing outside.
It is somewhat ironic that the physical scars left by his father amounted to little more than a severe bruising, whereas those left by his mother were to plague him to the end of his days. He suffered from a psychosomatic nervous tic in his right leg, which made his movements slightly ungainly, and he inherited his mother’s heart defect, the deciding factor in his death.
Although Mahler’s performance was only average in most of his school subjects, by his early teens he was already marked out as a pianist prodigy. At 13, he gave a sensational public recital that included a virtuoso note-spinner by Thalberg, and as a student at the Vienna Conservatory he performed Scharwenka’s ferociously difficult Piano Concerto No.1, apparently without batting an eyelid.
Mahler’s blazing talent unwittingly contributed to the great Lieder composer Hugo Wolf’s decline. The two shared lodgings as students, and formed a kind of mutual admiration society.
Sadly, by the end of his life, Wolf’s unstinting admiration for Mahler had dissolved into spiteful resentment at the latter’s success. Wolf’s descent into madness was marked by his wild claim that he had been appointed Director of the Vienna Opera and that his first job was to sack Mahler (by now the real director). Following a bungled suicide attempt, he spent the rest of his life in a Vienna lunatic asylum.
For a while, it seemed as though Mahler would make his way in the world as a concert pianist yet, following a series of whirlwind appointments in the provinces, he emerged as a conductor of visionary genius. His pioneering methods of concert preparation and opera production were to set the standard for the rest of the 20th century, exerting a profound influence on conductors from Herbert von Karajan to Leonard Bernstein.
Meticulous down to the last detail, a performance under Mahler was – like his music – all-encompassing. During his tenure at the Vienna Opera (1897-1908), he presided over 52 new productions of established repertoire, and introduced no fewer than 32 new works, including Puccini’s La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. As a result, composing became a part-time activity during the summer months between concert seasons.
Yet, if Mahler was universally hailed as a conductor, his music excited bewilderingly contrasting reactions, ranging from idolatry to near-revulsion. As early as the 1889 premiere of his First Symphony, opinion was already sharply divided.
A report that appeared in the Nemzet newspaper positively glows with enthusiasm: “This symphony is the impassioned work of a youthful, unquenchable talent, barely containing its seemingly inexhaustible ideas within a traditional framework... wild applause broke out at the end of every movement.”
Yet the New Pest Journal was altogether less enthusiastic, suggesting that audiences will “always be pleased to see him [Mahler] with baton in hand, just as long as he’s not conducting one of his own works”.
If the First Symphony caused problems, many of the following eight symphonies left audiences aghast – most particularly the Sixth with its chilling hammer blows of fate from the timpani.
Following the premiere, one critic noted painfully: “Where music falls short, the hammer falls.”
Yet not all was doom and gloom, by any means. The Resurrection Symphony No.2 won many fervent admirers, while the 1910 Munich premiere of the massive Eighth, the so-called Symphony Of A Thousand, was perhaps the single greatest triumph of Mahler’s career: “There was this extraordinary moment when, with thundering applause all around him, Mahler appeared in front of a thousand performers,” recalled the conductor Bruno Walter in his 1936 biography of the composer. “He mounted the steps of the auditorium towards where the children’s chorus was positioned... and shook every one of them personally by the hand.”
Other successes included an early Berlin performance of the enchanting Fourth Symphony, which Mahler himself conducted. Richard Strauss was so in awe of it that he sent Mahler his complete published works.
Mahler’s Fifth – from which the famous Adagietto comes – took longer to establish itself, but finally enjoyed an ovation in St Petersburg during Mahler’s tour of 1907. In the audience that night was the young Igor Stravinsky, himself on the verge of creating a sensation with the first of his great ballets, The Firebird.
Having conquered Europe, towards the end of his life Mahler was appointed Music Director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His constant battle with bouts of depression and neurosis had recently placed an appalling strain on his marriage to Alma, who was 19 years his junior, and he had never recovered from the death of their first daughter, Maria Anna, at the tender age of five.
Yet his new-found acclaim had a positive effect on Mahler almost immediately, and he began living for every hour.
In February 1909, Mahler agreed to revive the New York Philharmonic as a full-time professional outfit, typically insisting on the highest playing standards. On April 1, he conducted its inaugural concert, including a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that had the critics in raptures. He was immediately signed up as director, and given carte blanche to hire and fire.
Just as it seemed that Mahler might at last be coming to terms with the psychological problems that had plagued him all his life, he was diagnosed with a serious bacterial infection. The combination of his heart condition and the lack of antibiotics in those days meant there was no hope of recovery.
Mahler expressed a wish to die in Vienna and, having only just survived the transatlantic boat crossing, travelled by train to Vienna on a stretcher. Five days later he died, six weeks short of his 51st birthday. His last words, according to his wife Alma, were “Mozart – Mozart!”
He never saw Das Lied Von Der Erde or the Ninth Symphony performed and, despite the fame he had won against all the odds, he reflected despondently: “I am condemned to homelessness thrice over: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.”
DEFINING MOMENT
Mahler launches the main section of his First Symphony with this delightful melody, adapted from his Songs Of A Wayfarer. It is a classic example of how to compose a theme.
Mahler deliberately contrasts the opening six staccato (“detached”) notes with the legato (“smooth”) phrases that follow. But, out of contrast, he finds unity by deriving the downward scale [B] from the opening rising scale [A], and then repeating it a note lower. He returns to the little four-note figure [C] and repeats it three times [D], each time higher than the last. Yet it all sounds so simple!"
2. Background from {[http://www.kulturzentrum-toblach.eu/en/gustav-mahler-music-weeks/gustav-mahler-in-toblach/biography-of-gustav-mahler/]}
"Gustav Mahler
Born in Kaliste, Bohemia on the 7 July 1860 to a distillery manager father and a homemaker mother, Gustav Mahler was the second of fourteen children. Five of his siblings died in infancy while three others did not live till mature adulthood. From his early childhood, Gustav witnessed constant conflicts between his browbeating father and his frail mother. This perhaps influenced his compositional style as they always reflected such themes which depicted a struggle between good and evil, happy and sad, strong and weak. Mahler musical aptitudes were obvious at very early stages and by the time Gustav turned eight, he was already composing music. Gustav’s parents encouraged his musical pursuits and sent him to private tutors to learn his first lessons. Young Mahler then tried for Vienna Conservatory where he studied 1875 to 1878. Though Mahler's studies at the Conservatory got off to a slow start, the final year fetched him many composition awards. In 1878, Mahler graduated from the conservatory, but failed to earn the silver medal, bestowed for outstanding achievements. Mahler then joined the Vienna University and pursued his interest in literature and Philosophy.
Career
After leaving the university in 1879, Mahler made some earnings as a piano teacher and in 1880, finished his dramatic cantata "Das klagende Lied" ("The Song of Lamentation"). Mahler developed a keen interest in German philosophy. One of his friends Siegfried Lipiner introduced him to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. The influence of these philosophers persisted which was evident in Mahler’s music long after his student days were over. Mahler took his first professional conducting job in a small wooden theatre in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz during the summers of 1880 at the behest of Julius Epstein who promised to work Gustav’s way up. At Landestheater in Laibach (modern day Ljubljana, in Slovenia) in 1881, Mahler associated himself with a resourceful company which was on its course to attempt ambitious works. Mahler got the first opportunity to conduct his first full-scale opera, ‘Verdi's Il trovatore’, which was among his 50 such works, which he presented during his time in Laibach. However, after the completion of his six-month term, Mahler returned to Vienna where at the Vienna Carltheater, he worked as part-time chorus-master. Later in January 1883, Mahler was appointed as the conductor at a run-down theatre in Olmütz (present day Olomouc). Even though Mahler didn’t share very amicable relations with the members of the orchestra, yet he was successful in bringing up five new operas to the theatre, one of which was Bizet's Carmen. Soon Mahler received warm and enthusiastic reviews from the critic, which until then had been hostile. After a week's trial at the Royal Theatre in the Hessian town of Kassel, Mahler was appointed from August 1883 as the "Musical and Choral Director" of the theater.
Here Mahler conducted his most preferent opera, Weber's Der Freischütz. On 23 June 1884, Gustav conducted his own incidental music to Joseph Victor von Scheffel's play Der Trompeter von Säkkingen ("The Trumpeter of Säkkingen"), which was the first professional public performance of his own work. Passionate yet unfulfilled love affair with soprano Johanna Richter inspired Mahler to write a series of love poems, which eventually became the text of his song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer"). In July, Mahler resigned from the position and was offerd the position of an assistant conductor at the Neues Deutsches Theater (New German Theatre) in Prague. Mahler left Prague in April 1886 for Leipzig, where he was offered a position at the Neues Stadttheater. However, the position accompanied a bitter rivalry with his senior colleague Arthur Nikisch, primarily over the share of conducting duties for the theatre's new production of Wagner's Ring cycle. But later, in January 1887, due to Nikisch's illness, Mahler took charge of the whole cycle and experienced an exceptional public success. In spite of this, his relationship with his orchestra remained resentful, who deplored his tyrannical ways and heavy rehearsal schedules.
In Leipzig, Mahler met Carl von Weber and agreed to work on a performing version of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos ("The Three Pintos"). Mahler added some composition of his own and the work was premiered, in January 1888 at the Stadttheater. This work was immensely successful which brought both critical acclaim and financial rewards. However the relationship with Weber family was scarred by a romantic involvement to Carl von Weber's wife Marion. Though, equally passionate on both sides, this romantic attachment led to nowhere.
Mahler was appointed the director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest from October 1888. In May 1891, he resigned from his Budapest post as he was offered the position of the chief conductor at Hamburg Stadttheater. While at Stadttheater, Mahler introduced several new operas, such as Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, Verdi's Falstaff and works by Smetana. However soon he was compelled to resign from his post with the subscription concerts in the wake of financial failures and an ill-received interpretation of his re-scored Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Since 1895 Mahler had been trying to attain the directorship of the Vienna Hofoper. However the appointment of a Jew to this position was barred which he overcame by converting to Roman Catholicism in February 1897. A couple of months later Mahler was appointed to the Hofoper, provisionally as a staff conductor with the title of Kapellmeister.
Though in Vienna Gustav experienced several theatrical triumphs yet his days in Vienna years were full of hardships. His conflicts with the singers and the house administration persisted throughout his tenure. Mahler was immensely successful in raising the standards, yet his tyrannical style was resented by both orchestra members and singers. In December 1903, Mahler rejected the demands of the stagehands suspecting that the extremists were manipulating his staff. However, the anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society launched a press campaign in 1907, which was intended to drive Gustav out. On November 24, after conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony, Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December.
Personal Life
At a social gathering in November 1901, Gustav met Alma Schindler who was the stepdaughter of painter Carl Moll. Though she initially denied meeting Mahler, the two engaged in a debate over a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma was one of Zemlinsky's pupils), and agreed to meet at the Hofoper the next day. Soon both fell in love and on 9 March 1902, they got married at a private ceremony. By that time Alma was already pregnant with her first child, a daughter Maria, who was born on 3 November 1902. She gave birth to a second daughter Anna, in 1904. Mahler, much dejected by the campaign launched against him in Vienna, took his family to Maiernigg in the summer of 1907. After their arrival at Maiernigg, both his daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered but Maria succumbed after a fortnight's struggle on 12 July.
Death
Even in the face of emotional turmoil during the summers of 1910 Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements. In November 1910, Mahler and Alma returned to New York, where Mahler busied himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Mahler began suffering from a persistent sore throat round Christmas 1910. On 21 February 1911, Mahler performed his last concert at the Carnegie Hall. After being bedridden for weeks, he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis. Mahler fought with courage and took a keen interest when one of Alma's compositions was sung on the 3rd of March at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda. The Mahler family along with a permanent nurse left New York on board SS Amerika bound for Europe on 8 April. Ten days later they arrived at Paris, where Mahler was admitted to a clinic at Neuilly, but there was no improvement. He then travelled by train to the Lŏw sanatorium in Vienna on the 11 May, where he left for the heavenly abode on 18. According to Mahler’s wish he was buried in the Grinzing cemetery on 22 May, 1911. Doctor’s advised Alma to be absent. Among the mourners at the funeral were Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as "the holy Gustav Mahler"), the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller and representatives from many of the great European opera houses."
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Keeping Score | Gustav Mahler: Origins (FULL DOCUMENTARY AND CONCERT)
"The first of two episodes explores the roots of Gustav Mahler’s music. SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas journeys to rural Bohemia to rediscover the inspirations of Mahler’s music, and traces Mahler’s life through the premiere of his first symphony in 1888. It shocked the contemporary audience, but as MTT and the San Francisco Symphony reveal, on location and in performance, this ground-breaking symphony contains elements of everything else that Mahler composed. Shot on location in the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and in performance in San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DfYcT5icY
Images:
1. Alma and Gustav Mahler
2. Gustav Mahler as a child
3. Gustav Mahler - pensive
4. Alma Mahler with their daughters, Maria Anna and Anna Justine
Biographies
1. classicfm.com/composers/mahler/guides/discovering-great-composers-gustav-mahler
2. kulturzentrum-toblach.eu/en/gustav-mahler-music-weeks/gustav-mahler-in-toblach/biography-of-gustav-mahler
1. Background from {[https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mahler/guides/discovering-great-composers-gustav-mahler/]}
"Gustav Mahler: A Life
The neurotic composer Gustav Mahler triumphed over appalling childhood memories and an obsession with mortality to become the last great Romantic symphonist.
Mahler’s lifetime spanned the most crucial period in musical history. Behind him lay the rich, Romantic pastures of Bruckner and Brahms, and ahead the “alien” musical landscapes of Schoenberg and Boulez and the harrowing emotional terrain of Shostakovich and Britten. Such was Gustav Mahler’s all-embracing vision that he earned the respect and admiration of all these composers.
During a conversation with Jean Sibelius, Mahler insisted that his symphonies were “whole worlds” embracing his literary tastes, his neuroses, responses to nature and, most especially, the inexorable cycle of life and death.
His four great song collections – Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn), Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs Of A Wayfarer), Kindertotenlieder (Songs On The Death Of Children) and the five Rückert Lieder – all dwell on these very subjects, and also acted as a vital melodic repository for his symphonies.
Right at the end of his life Mahler fused song and symphonic form together in an epic Lieder-symphony entitled Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song Of The Earth).
Each of Mahler’s nine symphonies (and the unfinished Tenth) requires the highest degree of orchestral virtuosity and sensitivity. He expanded the scale of music to near-bursting point – there are single movements in his works that last longer than an entire symphony by Mozart or Haydn.
He also stretched the traditional system of major and minor keys to its limits, taking music to the very brink of atonality (keylessness). Even 40 years ago, Mahler was still dismissed by many as a “fringe” composer, but now he is widely considered the last great symphonist in the tradition of Beethoven.
Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, to a poor family of Moravian Jews. His father, Bernhard, ran a ramshackle distillery, and regularly thrashed his children and Mahler’s mother, Marie. She bore Bernhard 14 children in all and, despite suffering from a limp since birth and a heart condition, was made to work like a slave.
During a session with the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the deeply traumatised Mahler recalled running screaming from the house in agony to the strains of a hurdy-gurdy playing outside.
It is somewhat ironic that the physical scars left by his father amounted to little more than a severe bruising, whereas those left by his mother were to plague him to the end of his days. He suffered from a psychosomatic nervous tic in his right leg, which made his movements slightly ungainly, and he inherited his mother’s heart defect, the deciding factor in his death.
Although Mahler’s performance was only average in most of his school subjects, by his early teens he was already marked out as a pianist prodigy. At 13, he gave a sensational public recital that included a virtuoso note-spinner by Thalberg, and as a student at the Vienna Conservatory he performed Scharwenka’s ferociously difficult Piano Concerto No.1, apparently without batting an eyelid.
Mahler’s blazing talent unwittingly contributed to the great Lieder composer Hugo Wolf’s decline. The two shared lodgings as students, and formed a kind of mutual admiration society.
Sadly, by the end of his life, Wolf’s unstinting admiration for Mahler had dissolved into spiteful resentment at the latter’s success. Wolf’s descent into madness was marked by his wild claim that he had been appointed Director of the Vienna Opera and that his first job was to sack Mahler (by now the real director). Following a bungled suicide attempt, he spent the rest of his life in a Vienna lunatic asylum.
For a while, it seemed as though Mahler would make his way in the world as a concert pianist yet, following a series of whirlwind appointments in the provinces, he emerged as a conductor of visionary genius. His pioneering methods of concert preparation and opera production were to set the standard for the rest of the 20th century, exerting a profound influence on conductors from Herbert von Karajan to Leonard Bernstein.
Meticulous down to the last detail, a performance under Mahler was – like his music – all-encompassing. During his tenure at the Vienna Opera (1897-1908), he presided over 52 new productions of established repertoire, and introduced no fewer than 32 new works, including Puccini’s La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. As a result, composing became a part-time activity during the summer months between concert seasons.
Yet, if Mahler was universally hailed as a conductor, his music excited bewilderingly contrasting reactions, ranging from idolatry to near-revulsion. As early as the 1889 premiere of his First Symphony, opinion was already sharply divided.
A report that appeared in the Nemzet newspaper positively glows with enthusiasm: “This symphony is the impassioned work of a youthful, unquenchable talent, barely containing its seemingly inexhaustible ideas within a traditional framework... wild applause broke out at the end of every movement.”
Yet the New Pest Journal was altogether less enthusiastic, suggesting that audiences will “always be pleased to see him [Mahler] with baton in hand, just as long as he’s not conducting one of his own works”.
If the First Symphony caused problems, many of the following eight symphonies left audiences aghast – most particularly the Sixth with its chilling hammer blows of fate from the timpani.
Following the premiere, one critic noted painfully: “Where music falls short, the hammer falls.”
Yet not all was doom and gloom, by any means. The Resurrection Symphony No.2 won many fervent admirers, while the 1910 Munich premiere of the massive Eighth, the so-called Symphony Of A Thousand, was perhaps the single greatest triumph of Mahler’s career: “There was this extraordinary moment when, with thundering applause all around him, Mahler appeared in front of a thousand performers,” recalled the conductor Bruno Walter in his 1936 biography of the composer. “He mounted the steps of the auditorium towards where the children’s chorus was positioned... and shook every one of them personally by the hand.”
Other successes included an early Berlin performance of the enchanting Fourth Symphony, which Mahler himself conducted. Richard Strauss was so in awe of it that he sent Mahler his complete published works.
Mahler’s Fifth – from which the famous Adagietto comes – took longer to establish itself, but finally enjoyed an ovation in St Petersburg during Mahler’s tour of 1907. In the audience that night was the young Igor Stravinsky, himself on the verge of creating a sensation with the first of his great ballets, The Firebird.
Having conquered Europe, towards the end of his life Mahler was appointed Music Director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His constant battle with bouts of depression and neurosis had recently placed an appalling strain on his marriage to Alma, who was 19 years his junior, and he had never recovered from the death of their first daughter, Maria Anna, at the tender age of five.
Yet his new-found acclaim had a positive effect on Mahler almost immediately, and he began living for every hour.
In February 1909, Mahler agreed to revive the New York Philharmonic as a full-time professional outfit, typically insisting on the highest playing standards. On April 1, he conducted its inaugural concert, including a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that had the critics in raptures. He was immediately signed up as director, and given carte blanche to hire and fire.
Just as it seemed that Mahler might at last be coming to terms with the psychological problems that had plagued him all his life, he was diagnosed with a serious bacterial infection. The combination of his heart condition and the lack of antibiotics in those days meant there was no hope of recovery.
Mahler expressed a wish to die in Vienna and, having only just survived the transatlantic boat crossing, travelled by train to Vienna on a stretcher. Five days later he died, six weeks short of his 51st birthday. His last words, according to his wife Alma, were “Mozart – Mozart!”
He never saw Das Lied Von Der Erde or the Ninth Symphony performed and, despite the fame he had won against all the odds, he reflected despondently: “I am condemned to homelessness thrice over: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.”
DEFINING MOMENT
Mahler launches the main section of his First Symphony with this delightful melody, adapted from his Songs Of A Wayfarer. It is a classic example of how to compose a theme.
Mahler deliberately contrasts the opening six staccato (“detached”) notes with the legato (“smooth”) phrases that follow. But, out of contrast, he finds unity by deriving the downward scale [B] from the opening rising scale [A], and then repeating it a note lower. He returns to the little four-note figure [C] and repeats it three times [D], each time higher than the last. Yet it all sounds so simple!"
2. Background from {[http://www.kulturzentrum-toblach.eu/en/gustav-mahler-music-weeks/gustav-mahler-in-toblach/biography-of-gustav-mahler/]}
"Gustav Mahler
Born in Kaliste, Bohemia on the 7 July 1860 to a distillery manager father and a homemaker mother, Gustav Mahler was the second of fourteen children. Five of his siblings died in infancy while three others did not live till mature adulthood. From his early childhood, Gustav witnessed constant conflicts between his browbeating father and his frail mother. This perhaps influenced his compositional style as they always reflected such themes which depicted a struggle between good and evil, happy and sad, strong and weak. Mahler musical aptitudes were obvious at very early stages and by the time Gustav turned eight, he was already composing music. Gustav’s parents encouraged his musical pursuits and sent him to private tutors to learn his first lessons. Young Mahler then tried for Vienna Conservatory where he studied 1875 to 1878. Though Mahler's studies at the Conservatory got off to a slow start, the final year fetched him many composition awards. In 1878, Mahler graduated from the conservatory, but failed to earn the silver medal, bestowed for outstanding achievements. Mahler then joined the Vienna University and pursued his interest in literature and Philosophy.
Career
After leaving the university in 1879, Mahler made some earnings as a piano teacher and in 1880, finished his dramatic cantata "Das klagende Lied" ("The Song of Lamentation"). Mahler developed a keen interest in German philosophy. One of his friends Siegfried Lipiner introduced him to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. The influence of these philosophers persisted which was evident in Mahler’s music long after his student days were over. Mahler took his first professional conducting job in a small wooden theatre in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz during the summers of 1880 at the behest of Julius Epstein who promised to work Gustav’s way up. At Landestheater in Laibach (modern day Ljubljana, in Slovenia) in 1881, Mahler associated himself with a resourceful company which was on its course to attempt ambitious works. Mahler got the first opportunity to conduct his first full-scale opera, ‘Verdi's Il trovatore’, which was among his 50 such works, which he presented during his time in Laibach. However, after the completion of his six-month term, Mahler returned to Vienna where at the Vienna Carltheater, he worked as part-time chorus-master. Later in January 1883, Mahler was appointed as the conductor at a run-down theatre in Olmütz (present day Olomouc). Even though Mahler didn’t share very amicable relations with the members of the orchestra, yet he was successful in bringing up five new operas to the theatre, one of which was Bizet's Carmen. Soon Mahler received warm and enthusiastic reviews from the critic, which until then had been hostile. After a week's trial at the Royal Theatre in the Hessian town of Kassel, Mahler was appointed from August 1883 as the "Musical and Choral Director" of the theater.
Here Mahler conducted his most preferent opera, Weber's Der Freischütz. On 23 June 1884, Gustav conducted his own incidental music to Joseph Victor von Scheffel's play Der Trompeter von Säkkingen ("The Trumpeter of Säkkingen"), which was the first professional public performance of his own work. Passionate yet unfulfilled love affair with soprano Johanna Richter inspired Mahler to write a series of love poems, which eventually became the text of his song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer"). In July, Mahler resigned from the position and was offerd the position of an assistant conductor at the Neues Deutsches Theater (New German Theatre) in Prague. Mahler left Prague in April 1886 for Leipzig, where he was offered a position at the Neues Stadttheater. However, the position accompanied a bitter rivalry with his senior colleague Arthur Nikisch, primarily over the share of conducting duties for the theatre's new production of Wagner's Ring cycle. But later, in January 1887, due to Nikisch's illness, Mahler took charge of the whole cycle and experienced an exceptional public success. In spite of this, his relationship with his orchestra remained resentful, who deplored his tyrannical ways and heavy rehearsal schedules.
In Leipzig, Mahler met Carl von Weber and agreed to work on a performing version of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos ("The Three Pintos"). Mahler added some composition of his own and the work was premiered, in January 1888 at the Stadttheater. This work was immensely successful which brought both critical acclaim and financial rewards. However the relationship with Weber family was scarred by a romantic involvement to Carl von Weber's wife Marion. Though, equally passionate on both sides, this romantic attachment led to nowhere.
Mahler was appointed the director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest from October 1888. In May 1891, he resigned from his Budapest post as he was offered the position of the chief conductor at Hamburg Stadttheater. While at Stadttheater, Mahler introduced several new operas, such as Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, Verdi's Falstaff and works by Smetana. However soon he was compelled to resign from his post with the subscription concerts in the wake of financial failures and an ill-received interpretation of his re-scored Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Since 1895 Mahler had been trying to attain the directorship of the Vienna Hofoper. However the appointment of a Jew to this position was barred which he overcame by converting to Roman Catholicism in February 1897. A couple of months later Mahler was appointed to the Hofoper, provisionally as a staff conductor with the title of Kapellmeister.
Though in Vienna Gustav experienced several theatrical triumphs yet his days in Vienna years were full of hardships. His conflicts with the singers and the house administration persisted throughout his tenure. Mahler was immensely successful in raising the standards, yet his tyrannical style was resented by both orchestra members and singers. In December 1903, Mahler rejected the demands of the stagehands suspecting that the extremists were manipulating his staff. However, the anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society launched a press campaign in 1907, which was intended to drive Gustav out. On November 24, after conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony, Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December.
Personal Life
At a social gathering in November 1901, Gustav met Alma Schindler who was the stepdaughter of painter Carl Moll. Though she initially denied meeting Mahler, the two engaged in a debate over a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma was one of Zemlinsky's pupils), and agreed to meet at the Hofoper the next day. Soon both fell in love and on 9 March 1902, they got married at a private ceremony. By that time Alma was already pregnant with her first child, a daughter Maria, who was born on 3 November 1902. She gave birth to a second daughter Anna, in 1904. Mahler, much dejected by the campaign launched against him in Vienna, took his family to Maiernigg in the summer of 1907. After their arrival at Maiernigg, both his daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered but Maria succumbed after a fortnight's struggle on 12 July.
Death
Even in the face of emotional turmoil during the summers of 1910 Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements. In November 1910, Mahler and Alma returned to New York, where Mahler busied himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Mahler began suffering from a persistent sore throat round Christmas 1910. On 21 February 1911, Mahler performed his last concert at the Carnegie Hall. After being bedridden for weeks, he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis. Mahler fought with courage and took a keen interest when one of Alma's compositions was sung on the 3rd of March at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda. The Mahler family along with a permanent nurse left New York on board SS Amerika bound for Europe on 8 April. Ten days later they arrived at Paris, where Mahler was admitted to a clinic at Neuilly, but there was no improvement. He then travelled by train to the Lŏw sanatorium in Vienna on the 11 May, where he left for the heavenly abode on 18. According to Mahler’s wish he was buried in the Grinzing cemetery on 22 May, 1911. Doctor’s advised Alma to be absent. Among the mourners at the funeral were Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as "the holy Gustav Mahler"), the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller and representatives from many of the great European opera houses."
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Welcome to visit Classical Museum to enjoy the Classical Music: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/classical-museum-lite/id871121647?l=zh&ls=1&mt=8 Gustav Mahle...
《BBC Great Composer》：Mahler
"Gustav Mahler (German: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; 7 July 1860 -- 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. A Jew, he was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. His family later moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava), where Mahler grew up.
As a composer, Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became a frequently performed and recorded composer, a position he has sustained into the 21st century."
https://youtu.be/OnBNFRzdkIM?t=28
Image:Gustav Mahler with his sister Justine Mahler in 1889
FYI Maj Robert Thornton CWO3 Dennis M. SFC William Farrell Cynthia Croft SSG William JonesSP5 Jesse EngelSPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant1stsgt Glenn Brackin Sgt Kelli Mays SGT Gregory Lawritson LTC (Join to see) SGT (Join to see)PO3 Bob McCordSPC Randy ZimmermanSSG Pete Fish1SG John Highfill1SG Joseph DarteyLT Ed SkibaMaj Scott Kiger, M.A.S.
"Gustav Mahler (German: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; 7 July 1860 -- 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. A Jew, he was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. His family later moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava), where Mahler grew up.
As a composer, Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became a frequently performed and recorded composer, a position he has sustained into the 21st century."
https://youtu.be/OnBNFRzdkIM?t=28
Image:Gustav Mahler with his sister Justine Mahler in 1889
FYI Maj Robert Thornton CWO3 Dennis M. SFC William Farrell Cynthia Croft SSG William JonesSP5 Jesse EngelSPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant1stsgt Glenn Brackin Sgt Kelli Mays SGT Gregory Lawritson LTC (Join to see) SGT (Join to see)PO3 Bob McCordSPC Randy ZimmermanSSG Pete Fish1SG John Highfill1SG Joseph DarteyLT Ed SkibaMaj Scott Kiger, M.A.S.
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