Gustav Mahler
"Imagine the universe beginning to sing and resound," Mahler wrote of his Symphony No. 8, the "Symphony of a Thousand." "It is no longer human voices; it is planets and suns revolving." Mahler was late Romantic music's ultimate big thinker. In his own lifetime he was generally regarded as a conductor who composed on the side, producing huge, bizarre symphonies accepted only by a cult following.
Born in 1860 in Kalischt, Bohemia, he came from a middle-class family. He entered the Vienna Conservatory in 1875, studying piano, harmony, and composition in a musically conservative atmosphere. Nevertheless, he became a supporter of Wagner and Bruckner, both of whose works he would later conduct frequently, and became part of a social circle interested in socialism, Nietzschean philosophy, and pan-Germanism. Around 1880, he began conducting and wrote his first mature work, Das klagende Lied. Mahler's conducting career advanced rapidly, moving him from Kassel to Prague to Leipzig to Budapest; he was usually either greatly respected or thoroughly despised by the performers for his exacting rehearsals and perfectionism. In 1897 he became music director of the Vienna Court Opera and then, a year later, of the Vienna Philharmonic. Mahler's conducting career permitted composition only during the summers, in a series of "composing huts" he had built in picturesque rural locations. He reserved this time for symphonies, all of them large-scale works, and song cycles. He completed his first symphony in 1888, but it met with utter audience incomprehension. In Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), he merged the two forms into an immense song-symphony. The Viennese public largely failed to understand his music, but Mahler took their reactions calmly, accurately predicting that "My time will yet come." Meanwhile, his autocratic ways as a conductor alienated musicians. In 1901, the press and the musicians essentially forced his resignation from the Philharmonic. He married a young composition student, Alma Schindler in 1902, and they soon had two daughters. By 1907 Mahler was increasingly away from Vienna, conducting his own works, and thus he resigned from the opera as well. Just after accepting the position of principal conductor of New York's Metropolitan Opera, but before leaving Vienna, Mahler's older daughter, age four, died from scarlet fever and diphtheria, and he learned he himself had a defective heart valve. In New York, he was impressed by the caliber of talent and quickly gained audience approval. In 1909 he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic, which he found much more agreeable than opera work by this time. The following year, he had a triumphant premiere of his massive Symphony No. 8 in Munich. Despite the professional successes, his personal life suffered another blow when his and Alma's marriage began to deteriorate. They stayed together, and after he became ill in February 1911, she saw to it that he made it back to Vienna, where he died on May 18.
The conductors Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Willem Mengelberg, and Maurice Abravanel kept Mahler's legacy alive, and Mahler's are now among the most often recorded of any symphonies. His frequent incorporation of vocal elements into symphonic writing brought to full fruition a process that had begun with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, demonstrating his music's firm roots in the Germanic classical tradition. However, it was his huge tapestries of shifting moods and tones, ranging from tragedy to bitter irony (often explicitly indicated in performance directions), from café music to evocations of the sublime, that portended a century in which multiplicity ruled.
© Rovi Staff /TiVo
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Mahler: Symphony No. 4
Classical - Released by Black Sheep Music on 20 Dec 2012
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Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kerstin Thorborg, Carl Martin Ohmann
Classical - Released by Int - Bertus on 11 Oct 2016
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Symphony No. 4, Adagio from Symphony No. 10
Classical - Released by Pipeline Music on 9 Jun 2006
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Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 4 In G
Classical - Released by Classical.com Music on 16 Feb 2009
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Mahler: Symphony Nos. 5 & 7 "The Song of the Night " (Gustav Mahler, Kyril Kondrashin, Moscow RTV Large Symphony Orchestra)
Classical - Released by Denon on 1 Jan 2009
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Symphony No.1 In D Major, "Titan"
The Ljubljana Symphony Orchestra
Symphonic Music - Released by Stradivari Classics on 1 Jan 1987
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Mahler
Classical - Released by Cobra Entertainment LLC. on 26 Nov 2013
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Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D Major "Titan" & Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Gustav Mahler, Igor Markevitch, Orchestre National de France, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI di Torino, Eugenia Zareska, Carl Schuricht
Classical - Released by Stradivarius on 30 Jan 1989
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Mahler: The Song of The Earth
Classical - Released by Tuxedo Music on 4 Apr 2013
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Mahler: Lieder
Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Rückert, Hermine Haselbock, Russell Ryan
Classical - Released by Bridge Records on 9 Aug 2011
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Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Prague Symphony Orchestra, Libor Pešek
Classical - Released by Clarton, Edit, Music Vars Corporation, s. r. o. on 15 Dec 1998
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Classically Mahler
Classical - Released by UME - Global Clearing House on 11 Jan 2021
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Kubelik Conducts Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Classical - Released by Urania on 21 Apr 2022
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Mahler: Kindertotenlieder, Prokofiev: Symphony No. 3
Classical - Released by Pipeline Music on 28 Nov 2006
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Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 In D (Titan)
Classical - Released by Classical.com Music on 16 Feb 2009
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Mahler: Symphonies 1 & 3
Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra
Classical - Released by BPO Live on 6 Jun 2005
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Gustav Mahler, Los Grandes de la Música Clásica
Classical - Released by Piros - Lucas on 2 Jul 2015
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Mahler: Symphony No. 5 (Studio)
Classical - Released by Phoenix USA on 1 Nov 1988
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Classical Creations: Mahler
Classical - Released by UME - Global Clearing House on 9 Sep 2022
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Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Radio Symphony Orchestra Ljubljana, Zeger Vandersteene, Glenys Linos
Classical - Released by Blaricum CD Company (B.C.D.) B.V. on 17 Mar 2014
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Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 In D ('Titan')
Classical - Released by Classical.com Music on 16 Feb 2009
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