Did you know that Gustave Mahler composed symphonies? Even with that, he was a great conductor!!! He was known all over just for his awsome cunducting skills! Mahler  decided to finnish his career in the United States.He did TEN symphonies (one of which was Das Lied von der Erde) and died leaving sketches. This information was written by Gabriel Engel
 

BIOGRAPHY
And now for his revealing biography!!!.
Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, on July 7, 1860. Mahler  was a Jew. His famous quote is: "I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.  Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed."(Meanig, because of his religion he was always rejected) But then again, the public considered Mahler to be a gifted conductor  who wrote really long symphonies, and he thought that he HAD to write them because he was an overworked composer.

Gustave Mahler is known, mostly, for the long and deep felt emotions of his work.. He loved nature and life, but he feared death because of his fearful childhood experiences.(family deaths, a suicide, and a brutal rape he witnessed). This emotion appears in almost all of his work(Especially in the Kindertotenlieder ["Songs on the Deaths of Children"], which are really about the deaths of poor innocent children.

Mahler's music is clear, difficult, and full of mixed emotions, from the great and religious, to the dark and doubtful.During his incredible symphonies he tries to portray all these emotions to the world.

Mahler was one of the most important and influential conductors of the period. Even though he studied piano and composition, he was  not great enough and his work was not good enough for him to win an award. So in the end, Mahler was forced into being a conductor career.

Mahler was very serious about his early courier and he spent all of his time in many opera houses (Hall in 1880, Laibach in 1881, Olmutz in 1882, Kassel in 1883, Prague in 1885, Liepzig in 1886-8, Budapest from 1886-8, and Hamburg from 1891-7), he was following a normal courrier path, until he became head of the Vienna Opera, in 1897.  Mahler ended some of the more slovenly performance practices of the past; he removed cuts that had been  made in Wagner's operas, he upgraded the expected level of performance for both vocalists and instrumentalists, added more songs ect, and introduced many new works.

 Mahler believed that opera was the highest form of art, not for pleasure or entertainment. A good examlpe of this is when he was conducting an opera(dress rehearsal in Vienna), and he invited the premier of Vienna to the opera(Charpentier), HE just criticized the whole thing. So with that, Gustave Mahler was willing to change everything to please the premier.

Mahler was once in an argument with the Censor and he explained "...in matters of art only the form and never the content is relevant, or at least should be relevant, from a serious viewpoint. How the subject matter is treated and carried out, not what the subject matter consists of to begin with-that is the only thing that matters. A work of art is to be considered as serious if the artist's dominant objective is to master the subject matter exclusively by artists means and resolve it perfectly to the 'form...'".(Meaning, if you are an artist of anysort you should take your work serously!).

Mahler had to spend most of the year conducting because he was forced to, he composed during the summer.  He conducted fall through spring, and then went to the country to compose. Eventhough Mahler had a thirty year long composing career, with all his works put together, he could have put them on fifteen or sixteen CDs.

Mahler loved to see new works and new composers! The younger composers in Vienna's composition circle (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, etc.)greatly appreciated his music (Schoenberg, at least, taking a while to do so), and, so, Mahler in turn encouraged their work.

Mahler's music drew heavily on Bach, Beethoven and Wagner (all three having more influence, most likely, than Bruckner, who is most consistently cited as being Mahler's main influence.)Mahler died in 1911, in poor health and exhausted from his New York battles. :-(
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here is where i found the biography. You should check it out.