Mahler, Gustav

(1860-1911)

 Austrian composer and conductor, whose works mark the culmination of late-Romantic development of the symphony and were a major influence on such 20th-century composers as the Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.

Mahler was born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt in what is now the Czech Republic. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and in 1880 became assistant conductor at Bad Hall, Austria. He subsequently held posts as a conductor of opera in several central European cities. In 1897 he became artistic director of the Imperial Opera in Vienna. Through his efforts Vienna attained world prestige as an operatic center in the ensuing decade. In 1907 Mahler went to New York City, where he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1910 and with the New York Philharmonic in 1910-1911. He died in Vienna on May 18, 1911.

Of Mahler's symphonies, the unnumbered Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth, 1908) and four of the nine numbered symphonies include solo voices with or without chorus. The song cycles Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children, 1902) and the collection of songs called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn, 1888) exist in alternative versions with piano or orchestral accompaniment; Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1883) is orchestrally accompanied. Mahler also composed songs for voice and piano and left an unfinished tenth symphony.

In his symphonies, he was the heir of Beethoven and Brahms as well as Wagner and Bruckner. Mahler's use of choral and solo vocal music in the symphony continues the implications of Beethoven's similar procedure in his Ninth Symphony and also achieves a musical and dramatic union akin to that sought by Wagner in his music dramas.

 Like Wagner and Bruckner, he employed vast orchestral resources; but his orchestration anticipated the 20th century in its emphasis on the color of individual instruments and small combinations of instruments, and its inclusion of unusual instruments such as the mandolin and harmonium. The texture of his music is always contrapuntal, and orchestration was for him a tool for making the different musical lines sound with the greatest possible clarity.

Mahler's work shows the late-Romantic expansion of the symphony at its greatest extent. The shortest symphonies (Nos. 1 and 4) are over an hour in length, and the longest (No. 3, in six movements) is more than an hour and a half, with a first movement alone of 35 minutes. At the same time—the first decade of the 20th century—Sibelius was also reinvigorating the form of the symphony, but in the opposite direction: by compressing and distilling the musical material.

Using the freedom that allowed Wagner and Bruckner to push almost to the limits of the traditional system of keys and chords, Mahler remained within that system, but he altered its basic premise so that most of his symphonies have progressive tonal schemes that end in a key different from the beginning. The symphonies also represent a journey psychologically, usually in the form of a titanic struggle between optimism and a despair that expresses itself in mocking irony. This inextricable mixing of joy and despair, rooted in the unhappy circumstances of his childhood, was identified by Freud as a central facet of Mahler's character when the composer went to him for analysis. However, all the symphonies except No. 6 end either joyfully or in a mood of serene resignation. It is perhaps the combination of human vulnerability and consummate musicianship that accounts for the lasting appeal of his music.