80 Facts About Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation.

Gustav Mahler's œuvre is relatively limited; for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor.

The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955 to honour the composer's life and achievements.

Gustav Mahler family came from eastern Bohemia, and were of humble circumstances—the composer's grandmother had been a street pedlar.

Bohemia was then part of the Austrian Empire; the Gustav Mahler family belonged to a German-speaking minority among Bohemians, and was Jewish.

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Gustav Mahler bought a modest house in the village of Kaliste, and in 1857 married Marie Frank, the 19-year-old daughter of a local soap manufacturer.

In December 1860, Bernhard Gustav Mahler moved with his wife and infant son to the city of Jihlava, where Bernhard built up a successful distillery and tavern business.

When he was four years old, Gustav Mahler discovered his grandparents' piano and took to it immediately.

Gustav Mahler developed his performing skills sufficiently to be considered a local Wunderkind and gave his first public performance at the town theatre when he was ten years old.

Gustav Mahler sought to express his feelings in music: with the help of a friend, Josef Steiner, he began work on an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, as a memorial to his lost brother.

Bernhard Gustav Mahler supported his son's ambitions for a music career, and agreed that the boy should try for a place at the Vienna Conservatory.

Gustav Mahler made good progress in his piano studies with Epstein and won prizes at the end of each of his first two years.

Gustav Mahler attended occasional lectures by Anton Bruckner and, though never formally his pupil, was influenced by him.

Gustav Mahler left the Conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the silver medal given for outstanding achievement.

Gustav Mahler then enrolled in the University of Vienna and followed courses which reflected his developing interests in literature and philosophy.

From June to August 1880, Gustav Mahler took his first professional conducting job, in a small wooden theatre in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz.

The repertory was exclusively operetta; it was, in Carr's words "a dismal little job, " which Gustav Mahler accepted only after Julius Epstein told him he would soon work his way up.

The title concealed the reality that Gustav Mahler was subordinate to the theatre's Kapellmeister, Wilhelm Treiber, who disliked him and set out to make his life miserable.

Gustav Mahler directed a performance of his favourite opera, Weber's Der Freischutz, and 25 other operas.

An ardent, but ultimately unfulfilled, love affair with soprano Johanna Richter led Gustav Mahler to write a series of love poems which became the text of his song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen .

Unwilling to remain in Kassel for another year, Gustav Mahler resigned on 22 June 1885, and applied for, and through good fortune was offered a standby appointment as conductor at the Royal Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague by the theatre's newly appointed director, the famous Angelo Neumann.

Gustav Mahler's task was to help arrest this decline by offering high-quality productions of German opera.

Gustav Mahler enjoyed early success presenting works by Mozart and Wagner, composers with whom he would be particularly associated for the rest of his career, but his individualistic and increasingly autocratic conducting style led to friction, and a falling out with his more experienced fellow-conductor, Ludwig Slansky.

Nikisch's illness, from February to April 1887, meant that Gustav Mahler took charge of the whole cycle, and scored a resounding public success.

In Leipzig, Gustav Mahler befriended Captain Carl von Weber, grandson of the composer, and agreed to prepare a performing version of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos .

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Gustav Mahler transcribed and orchestrated the existing musical sketches, used parts of other Weber works, and added some composition of his own.

In February and March 1888 Gustav Mahler sketched and completed his First Symphony, then in five movements.

On 17 May 1888, Gustav Mahler suddenly resigned his Leipzig position after a dispute with the Stadttheater's chief stage manager, Albert Goldberg.

However, Gustav Mahler had secretly been invited by Angelo Neumann in Prague to conduct the premiere there of "his" Die drei Pintos, and later a production of Der Barbier von Bagdad by Peter Cornelius.

However, through the efforts of an old Viennese friend, Guido Adler, and cellist David Popper, Gustav Mahler's name went forward as a potential director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest.

Gustav Mahler was interviewed, made a good impression, and was offered and accepted the post from 1 October 1888.

The melodies for the second and fourth songs of the cycle were incorporated into the First Symphony, which Gustav Mahler finished in 1888, at the height of his relationship with Marion von Weber.

The intensity of Gustav Mahler's feelings is reflected in the music, which originally was written as a five-movement symphonic poem with a descriptive programme.

Aware of the delicate situation, Gustav Mahler moved cautiously; he delayed his first appearance on the conductor's stand until January 1889, when he conducted Hungarian-language performances of Wagner's Das Rheingold and Die Walkure to initial public acclaim.

In search of non-German operas to extend the repertory, Gustav Mahler visited in spring 1890 Italy where among the works he discovered was Mascagni's recent sensation Cavalleria rusticana .

On 18 February 1889, Bernhard Gustav Mahler died; this was followed later in the year by the deaths both of Gustav Mahler's sister Leopoldine and his mother .

From October 1889 Gustav Mahler took charge of his four younger brothers and sisters .

Gustav Mahler himself suffered poor health, with attacks of haemorrhoids and migraine and a recurrent septic throat.

Gustav Mahler was particularly distressed by the negative comments from his Vienna Conservatory contemporary, Viktor von Herzfeld, who had remarked that Gustav Mahler, like many conductors before him, had proved not to be a composer.

However, Gustav Mahler had foreseen that and had secretly been negotiating with Bernhard Pollini, the director of the Stadttheater Hamburg since summer and autumn of 1890, and a contract was finally signed in secrecy on 15 January 1891.

Now firmly under the influence of the Wunderhorn folk-poem collection, Gustav Mahler produced a stream of song settings at Steinbach, and composed his Second and Third Symphonies there.

On 27 October 1893, at Hamburg's Konzerthaus Ludwig, Gustav Mahler conducted a revised version of his First Symphony; still in its original five-movement form, it was presented as a Tondichtung under the descriptive name "Titan".

Gustav Mahler achieved his first relative success as a composer when the Second Symphony was well-received on its premiere in Berlin, under his own baton, on 13 December 1895.

At the Stadttheater Gustav Mahler's repertory consisted of 66 operas of which 36 titles were new to him.

Already at an early age Gustav Mahler had made it clear that his ultimate goal was an appointment in Vienna, and from 1895 onward was manoeuvring, with the help of influential friends, to secure the directorship of the Vienna Hofoper.

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Gustav Mahler overcame the bar that existed against the appointment of a Jew to this post by what may have been a pragmatic conversion to Catholicism in February 1897.

Gustav Mahler made his initial mark in May 1897 with much-praised performances of Wagner's Lohengrin and Mozart's Die Zauberflote.

Shortly after the Zauberflote triumph, Gustav Mahler was forced to take sick leave for several weeks, during which he was nursed by his sister Justine and his long-time companion, the viola player Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Early in 1902 Gustav Mahler met Alfred Roller, an artist and designer associated with the Vienna Secession movement.

In December 1903 Gustav Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff.

The anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society, long opposed to Gustav Mahler's appointment, continued to attack him relentlessly, and in 1907 instituted a press campaign designed to drive him out.

Gustav Mahler's departing message to the company, which he pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered over the floor.

Gustav Mahler's position was weakened when, in 1900, he took the orchestra to Paris to play at the Exposition Universelle.

The Paris concerts were poorly attended and lost money—Gustav Mahler had to borrow the orchestra's fare home from the Rothschilds.

Later that year, in November, Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, in Munich, and was on the rostrum for the first complete performance of the Third Symphony, at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein festival at Krefeld on 9 June 1902.

Immediately following this devastating loss, Gustav Mahler learned that his heart was defective, a diagnosis subsequently confirmed by a Vienna specialist, who ordered a curtailment of all forms of vigorous exercise.

Gustav Mahler made his New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 1 January 1908, when he conducted Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

On his return to Austria for the summer of 1908, Gustav Mahler established himself in the third and last of his composing studios, in the pine forests close to Toblach in Tyrol.

Gustav Mahler continued to make occasional guest appearances at the Met, his last performance being Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades on 5 March 1910.

Back in Europe for the summer of 1909, Gustav Mahler worked on his Ninth Symphony and made a conducting tour of the Netherlands.

Greatly distressed, Gustav Mahler sought advice from Sigmund Freud, and appeared to gain some comfort from his meeting with the psychoanalyst.

Gustav Mahler accepted this, and started to positively encourage her to write music, even editing, orchestrating and promoting some of her works.

In spite of the emotional distractions, during the summer of 1910 Gustav Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements.

On 22 May 1911 Gustav Mahler was buried in the Grinzing cemetery, as he had requested, next to his daughter Maria.

Gustav Mahler's married Walter Gropius in 1915, divorced him five years later, and married the writer Franz Werfel in 1929.

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The International Gustav Mahler Society was founded in 1955 in Vienna, with Bruno Walter as its first president and Alma Mahler as an honorary member.

Gustav Mahler initially gave the first three symphonies full descriptive programmes, all of which he later repudiated.

Gustav Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programmes and descriptive titles; he wanted to write "absolute" music that spoke for itself.

Gustav Mahler was a "late Romantic, " part of an ideal that placed Austro-German classical music on a higher plane than other types, through its supposed possession of particular spiritual and philosophical significance.

Gustav Mahler was one of the last major composers of a line which includes, among others, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner and Brahms.

The examples of Wagner and Bruckner encouraged Gustav Mahler to extend the scale of his symphonic works well beyond the previously accepted standards, to embrace an entire world of feeling.

Except for his juvenilia, little of which has survived, Gustav Mahler composed only in the media of song and symphony, with a close and complex interrelationship between the two.

The trite melody soon changes its character, and in due course re-emerges as one of the majestic Brucknerian chorales which Gustav Mahler uses to signify hope and the resolution of conflict.

Gustav Mahler first employed the device in an early song, Erinnerung, and thereafter used it freely in his symphonies.

The Sixth Symphony, unusually for Gustav Mahler, begins and ends in the same key, A minor, signifying that in this case the conflict is unresolved.

Gustav Mahler's music was performed during the Nazi era in Berlin in early 1941 and in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands by Jewish orchestras and for Jewish audiences alone; works performed included the Second Symphony, the First and Fourth Symphonies, and the Songs of a Wayfarer .

Deryck Cooke argues that Gustav Mahler's popularity escalated when a new, postwar generation of music-lovers arose, untainted by "the dated polemics of anti-romanticism" which had affected Gustav Mahler's reputation in the inter-war years.

Gustav Mahler's music influenced the trio's move from progressive tonalism to atonality ; although Gustav Mahler rejected atonality, he became a fierce defender of the bold originality of Schoenberg's work.

At the premiere of the latter's First String Quartet in February 1907, Gustav Mahler reportedly was held back from physically attacking the hecklers.

Gustav Mahler has influenced the film scores of John Williams and other Hollywood composers.