Gustav Mahler

An Unmusical Start

Mahler was born into a Jewish family in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire. His father was a coachman and later an innkeeper, his mother the daughter of a soap-maker. Of the couple’s 14 children, seven survived into adulthood and two became musicians — Gustav and his younger brother Otto.

Early Development

Mahler’s father was ambitious for his children. When it became obvious that Gustav was musically talented, he was sent for local piano lessons and then to the Gymnasium in Prague. He gave his first piano recital aged just ten, and first attempted to compose opera when he was 15. He went on to study piano and composition at the Vienna Conservatory, and enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Vienna for a year.

Conducting

In his lifetime, Mahler was better known as a conductor than as a composer. His conducting career began in 1880, with a job in a spa town leading light opera. He quickly worked his way up through jobs in provincial theatres, often having to improvise creative solutions to a lack of instruments and resources — an experience that would shape his own imaginative approach to instrumentation. By 1885 he was appointed conductor at the prestigious Neue Deutsches Theater in Prague for a year, and in 1886 took up a post at the similarly renowned Neues Stadttheater in Leipzig. He composed his First Symphony while in Leipzig, and conducted the premiere himself in Budapest, where he had been appointed director of the Royal Hungarian Opera.

Artistic Maturity

Mahler’s exacting standards and passionate interpretations earned him a reputation as one of the most innovative conductors of his day. In 1897 he was appointed Director of the Vienna Court Opera. He would stay in the city for a decade, also later accepting the post of Principal Conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Viennese life was artistically enriching, bringing Mahler into contact with leading artistic figures and a composer who would become his wife, Alma Schindler. But his sought-after positions also came with a great deal of conflict and stress, and Mahler additionally had to endure vicious antisemitic criticism. He and his family spent summers away from the city, and he composed the majority of his work from the Fourth Symphony onwards during these retreats. In the last years of his life Mahler spent increasing time in the US, where his career might have taken him permanently had he not died prematurely in 1911, aged just 50.

Before he studied music formally, Mahler was influenced by the folk tunes and military band marches that he heard in his childhood city. They surface in many of his works — the slow movement of his First Symphony is a funeral march based on the children’s song Frère Jacques.

Composer Anton Bruckner was a major influence on teenage Mahler. They met while Mahler was studying at the Vienna Conservatory, and became good friends. He encouraged Mahler’s enthusiasm for the opera composer Richard Wagner, whose boundary-pushing harmonies and ideas about all-encompassing works of art had a profound impact on the young musician. ‘The symphony is the world!’, Mahler would later say. ‘The symphony must embrace everything.’

Among Mahler’s predecessors, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart were especially influential. He admired the way they reinvented the traditions they inherited, and the clarity of their compositional visions.

All of Mahler’s major works are for orchestra: nine complete symphonies, an unfinished tenth, and songs for voice and orchestra. Together, these works transformed what the symphony could be and what it could do, bringing the genre from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

Mahler’s style is inherently theatrical. His experience as one of the leading opera conductors of the day certainly shaped his compositional style, and made his music a bridge between theatre music and the emerging genre of film music. His scores are filled with theatrical effects like scraping basses, brass growls and off-stage fanfares, which were widely used in the theatre and are still used in film scores today. He also expanded the percussion section with objects and instruments like cowbells, twigs and hammers to create new and distinctive sound effects, encouraging future composers to widen their ideas about what could be an ‘instrument’.

The other most distinctive aspect of Mahler’s music is the way he mixes different styles and genres to create a feeling of parody and irony. Can music express a sense of humour? Mahler’s music can — and it’s a very bleak sense of humour. In the third movement of the Ninth Symphony, which Mahler calls a ‘burlesque’, the main theme is passed among different instruments. The interruptions and contrasting timbres make it seem as though the players are mocking one another, and the orchestra eventually collapses in a frenzy.

The LSO has performed Mahler’s work for nearly 100 years, with our first performance of a selection of the composer’s songs taking place at the Queens Hall in 1930, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. More recently, Michael Tilson Thomas performed Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies during his final concerts with the Orchestra.

Perhaps the most significant Mahler performances in the LSO’s history took place at Ely Cathedral in 1973, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No 2, ‘Resurrection’. These iconic performances were recreated for the 2023 film Maestro staring Bradley Cooper, and featured the modern-day LSO performing as their 1973 counterparts.

Living in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, Mahler was connected to many of the most significant cultural figures of the time. His brother-in-law was the violinist Arnold Rosé, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and founder of the Rosé Quartet, who premiered important new works like Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.

Mahler had an intense and tempestuous friendship with Schoenberg. The two composers had very different visions for the future of music, and frequently disagreed (vehemently) about aesthetics. But no matter their differences, they appreciated what they were trying to do, recognising the brilliance of each other’s work even when they didn’t fully understand it. ‘I saw your very soul naked, stark naked,’ Schoenberg wrote to Mahler after hearing the Third Symphony. ‘I saw the forces of good and evil wrestling with each other; I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony.’

Among Mahler’s many other musical connections were the composer Richard Strauss, another individual with whom he had a complicated relationship. ‘Strauss and I are digging our tunnels from different sides of the mountain,’ Mahler explained. ‘We shall surely meet some day.’ Alexander Zemlinsky was another acquaintance — although his relationship with Mahler cooled when Mahler married the woman Zemlinsky was desperately in love with, the composer Alma Schindler.

Alma was one of Mahler’s most important relationships. By the time she and Mahler married in 1902, she was a famous and well-connected society beauty. She became his muse, and inspired many of his later compositions. This came at a considerable cost to Alma, though. When they got engaged he insist she give up her own composing, and dedicate herself entirely to him and his work. ‘It left a nagging wound which never completely healed’, she later wrote. He only repealed this ban in 1910, a year before his death, after Alma embarked on an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.

Beyond music, Mahler loved literature and art. He counted many cultural figures among his circle, including artists Gustav Klimt and Alfred Roller, poet Siegfried Lipiner, and authors Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig.