Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler
(b Kalischt, nr Iglau [now Kaliště, Jihlava], Bohemia, 7 May 1860; d Vienna, 18 May 1911).

Austrian composer and conductor. He wrote large-scale symphonic works and songs (many with orchestra) and established a career as a powerful and innovatory conductor; while director of the Vienna Hofoper between 1897 and 1907 he provided a model of post-Wagnerian idealism for the German musical theatre. His compositions were initially regarded by some as eccentric, by others as novel expressions of the ‘New German’ modernism widely associated with Richard Strauss. Only during his last decade did they begin to enjoy the critical support and popular success that helped to ensure the posthumous survival of his reputation as a composer beyond the years of National Socialism in Germany and Austria. Mahler suffered the fate of innumerable banned composers of Jewish origin at a time when his music was still imperfectly known and understood outside the German-speaking countries of Europe. The centenary of his birth in 1960 inspired the popular rediscovery of his symphonies, particularly in England and the USA, where they rapidly gained a young and enthusiastic audience. The tension, passionate engagement and often cathartic power of his music acquired heightened resonance in a period marked by protest movements and critical experimentation with unconventional ideas and life styles. In the 1970s Mahler became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of symphonists, and his emerging historical role as a mediator between the Austro-German musical tradition and early 20th-century modernism, linked with the broad emotional range and energetically powerful effect of his music in performance, led to his symphonies acquiring canonic status. Historical and theoretical musicologists have found in them a persistently rich and provocative field of study; his continuing popularity and influence on other composers further justifies his description as one of the most important figures of European art music in the 20th century.