Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler conducted for a living, composed in the summers, and said his time would come, which took about fifty years. He was born to a Jewish family in Bohemia, one of fourteen children of whom eight died young, and went to the Vienna Conservatory at fifteen. Conducting was the trade: Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and from 1897 the Vienna Court Opera, which required his conversion to Catholicism because the post was closed to Jews. He ran it for ten years with a discipline that made him hated and raised standards permanently - he darkened the house, locked out latecomers, and refused the cuts singers expected. The nine completed symphonies were written in composing huts in summer holidays. They are enormous, take in military bands, folk tunes, cowbells and funeral marches without apology, and were mostly received as formless. Das Lied von der Erde sets Chinese poems for two voices and orchestra. In 1907 his elder daughter died of scarlet fever, he was forced out of the Opera, and a heart defect was diagnosed, all in one summer. He went to New York, conducted the Philharmonic, and died at fifty. He superstitiously avoided numbering Das Lied von der Erde as his ninth symphony, having noticed that Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner all died after theirs, and then died with the tenth unfinished anyway. His wife Alma had been made to give up composing as a condition of the marriage, and after discovering her affair with Walter Gropius he consulted Freud in Leiden in 1910 during a single long walk. Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, both his assistants, carried the symphonies through the twentieth century, and the Mahler revival dates from Bernstein s cycle in the 1960s.

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