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 - Brahms: Alt-Rhapsodie
Symphonic Music - Released by Urania on Apr. 30, 2001
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Gustav Mahler: Liebst du um Schönheit (Rückert-Lieder)
Christian Elsner, Burkhard Kehring, Gustav Mahler
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Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
Classical - Released by Pipeline Music on Jun. 8, 2006
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Mahler Songs
Maria Forsström, Johannes Landgren, Gustav Mahler
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Mahler: Symphony No. 1 - Schumann: Oriental Pictures
USSR State Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow State Philharmonic
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Mahler: Symphony No. 6
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Mahler: Symphony No. 5
Radio Symphony Orchestra Ljubljana
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Gustav Mahler - Sinfonia No. 1
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The classic of Gustav Mahler & Jean Sibelius
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Classic Dreams: Gustav Mahler
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Clasicos de Siempre - Mahler
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Los Últimos Románticos, Mahler
Orquesta del Festival de Londres
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Electronic Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C minor
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Música del Mundo Vol.7 Amándote
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The Classical Greats Series, Vol.31: Mahler
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Mahler, Obras Escogidas
Classical - Released by ClassicalPirosDigital on Oct. 27, 2015
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Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Prague Festival Orchestra & Pavel Urbanek
Classical - Released by Cobra Entertainment LLC. on Dec. 15, 1998
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Mahler - Symphony Nº 1
Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
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Mahler: Symphony No. 6 "Tragic"
Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra & Hartmut Haenchen
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The Symphonies Of Gustav Mahler
Classical - Released by Ermitage Rc on Apr. 17, 2020
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Sinfonía No. 1 "Titán"
Orquesta Sinfónica de Lenningrado
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