Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in Kaliště, a village in Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic. He was the second of fourteen children, and about half of them died young. When he was a few months old, the family moved to the nearby town of Iglau. His father had started out driving a goods wagon, and he worked his way up to his own inn, where he also made and sold spirits. He was a hard, driven man. His mother was gentle and often ill. Mahler later said that his parents fitted each other “like fire and water.”

As a small child Gustav found a piano at his grandparents’ house and would not leave it, not even for meals. In the streets of Iglau he heard folk songs, dance tunes and the marches of the army band, and these sounds stayed in his music all his life. At 10 he gave his first concert as a pianist. When he was 14, his younger brother Ernst, who was closest to him, died after a long illness. Gustav began an opera in his memory, but he never finished it.

In 1875, at 15, his father took him to a famous piano teacher in Vienna and asked whether the boy had talent. The teacher listened for a few minutes and said, “He is a born musician.” That autumn Gustav entered the Vienna Conservatory, where Hugo Wolf was a fellow student and friend. He won first prizes in his first year.

At 20 Mahler entered a big composition prize with his first large work. Brahms was on the jury, and the prize went to someone else. Mahler said later that this changed his whole life. Without the prize money he had to take a job in a theatre, and from then on he conducted for a living, when what he wanted was to compose. His first posts were in small town theatres. At 22 he wrote to a friend that in such a small theatre he felt like a racehorse that was made to pull a farm cart.

In 1889, within eight months, his father, his older sister and his mother all died. Mahler was 29. He took charge of his four younger brothers and sisters, moved them to Vienna and paid for them for years.

As a conductor he rose fast, from small theatres to Prague, Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg. In 1890 Brahms came to Budapest to hear him conduct Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is said that Brahms did not want to go, because he had never heard a good performance of the opera, but by the end of the first act he was shouting with delight. Mahler wrote that from then on Brahms was his warmest friend and supporter. In 1892 Tchaikovsky came to Hamburg to conduct his own opera Eugene Onegin. The opera was sung in German, and at the only rehearsal he lost his place, so he gave up. He wrote home that the conductor there, Mahler, was “positively a genius” and wanted very much to conduct the first night. So Mahler conducted it.

But nobody wanted his own music. In Hamburg the famous conductor Hans von Bülow admired his conducting, but when Mahler played him the first movement of his own Second Symphony, Bülow covered his ears and said that compared with this piece, Wagner’s Tristan was as simple as a Haydn symphony. His music was so complex that people needed a long time to understand it.

What changed things was the help of a friend. Richard Strauss, four years younger but already famous, got Mahler’s First Symphony into a music festival in 1894, and in 1895 he put part of the Second into his own concert in Berlin. In December 1895 Mahler conducted the whole Second Symphony in Berlin, and it was his first real success as a composer. He never forgot that Strauss “gave the first push.”

Conducting filled his year, so he composed only in the summer. From 1893 he spent his summers by a lake in the Austrian mountains, and in his first summer there, at 33, he wrote Rheinlegendchen (A Little Rhine Legend). The next year he had a hut built in a meadow by the water, with a table, a chair, a stove and a piano. Everything around it had to be silent. Children were kept away with sweets, street musicians were paid to stop playing, and a hen that would not keep quiet was bought and eaten.

In 1897, at 37, Mahler became director of the Vienna Court Opera, the most important post in the musical world. A Jew could not hold it, so a few months earlier he had been baptised a Catholic. He ran the Opera for ten years and changed how opera was performed. The lights went down when the music began, latecomers had to wait outside, and the men who were paid to clap were thrown out. Singers had to act, and nothing was cut. After hearing Mahler’s first complete Ring, Hugo Wolf said that for the first time he had heard what he had only ever seen in the printed score. Mahler himself was never satisfied. He shaved off his beard so that players and singers could read every movement of his lips. He hated applause for himself, so at his first night as director he raised his baton before the audience could begin to clap.

In 1902, at 41, he married Alma Schindler, who was 19 years younger and a composer herself. Before the wedding he asked her to give up composing, and she did. They had two daughters. In the summer of 1907 the elder girl, Maria, died of scarlet fever at four. Days later a doctor found that Mahler’s heart was weak, and he was told to stop the mountain walks, the cycling and the swimming that he loved. That autumn he left the Vienna Opera, and in December he set off for New York. About two hundred friends came to the station to see him off, among them the young Schoenberg and Berg.

From 1908 he conducted in New York, first at the Metropolitan Opera and then the Philharmonic. In 1910 his Eighth Symphony, with about a thousand singers and players, was performed in Munich. It was the greatest success of his life. In February 1911 he conducted his last concert in New York with a high fever. The illness was an infection of the heart, which no doctor could cure then. He went home to Vienna, and he died there in May 1911, at 50. He had asked for a funeral with no speeches and no music, beside his daughter, and a gravestone with nothing on it but his name. “Those who come looking for me will know who I was,” he said, “and the others do not need to know.”

Mahler was small and thin, but far stronger than he looked. He was hard on everyone, above all on himself, and he was practical: whatever helped the music, he did, from shaving off his beard to buying a noisy hen. In 1902 he wrote to Alma that one day people would tell good music from bad, and that then his time would come. He saw only the beginning of it. Today orchestras all over the world play his symphonies. He once said that to write a symphony was to build a world with everything he had. His symphonies mix folk tunes and marches with music of great size and depth. They are long and complex, and they demand a lot from the players, and from the listeners as well. They stand between the Romantic music of the 19th century and the new music of the 20th.