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
Artistas semelhantes
-
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kerstin Thorborg, Carl Martin Ohmann
Classical - Lançado por Int - Bertus em 11/10/2016
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Symphony No. 4, Adagio from Symphony No. 10
Classical - Lançado por Pipeline Music em 09/06/2006
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony Nos. 5 & 7 "The Song of the Night " (Gustav Mahler, Kyril Kondrashin, Moscow RTV Large Symphony Orchestra)
Classical - Lançado por Denon em 01/01/2009
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler
Classical - Lançado por Cobra Entertainment LLC. em 26/11/2013
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
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 - Lançado por Stradivarius em 30/01/1989
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Lieder
Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Rückert, Hermine Haselbock, Russell Ryan
Classical - Lançado por Bridge Records em 09/08/2011
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Prague Symphony Orchestra, Libor Pešek
Classical - Lançado por Clarton, Edit, Music Vars Corporation, s. r. o. em 15/12/1998
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Classically Mahler
Classical - Lançado por UME - Global Clearing House em 11/01/2021
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder, Prokofiev: Symphony No. 3
Classical - Lançado por Pipeline Music em 28/11/2006
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphonies 1 & 3
Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra
Classical - Lançado por BPO Live em 06/06/2005
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Brahms, Mahler: Lieder
Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Alma Maria Mahler-werfel
Classical - Lançado por UME - Global Clearing House em 22/05/2021
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 5 (Studio)
Classical - Lançado por Phoenix USA em 01/11/1988
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Classical Creations: Mahler
Classical - Lançado por UME - Global Clearing House em 09/09/2022
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 In D ('Titan')
Classical - Lançado por Classical.com Music em 16/02/2009
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Electronic Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C minor
Classical - Lançado por Al Goranski em 01/12/2022
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Classical Greats Series, Vol.31: Mahler
Classical - Lançado por Global Journey em 18/06/2013
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gustav Mahler: Liebst du um Schönheit (Rückert-Lieder)
Christian Elsner, Burkhard Kehring, Gustav Mahler
Classical - Lançado por Rondeau Production em 04/11/2022
24-Bit 48.0 kHz - Stereo -
Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
Classical - Lançado por Pipeline Music em 08/06/2006
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler Songs
Maria Forsström, Johannes Landgren, Gustav Mahler
Classical - Lançado por Musica Rediviva em 01/01/2008
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gustav Mahler - Sinfonia No. 1
Classical - Lançado por ClassicalPirosDigital em 16/06/2015
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The classic of Gustav Mahler & Jean Sibelius
Classical - Lançado por Ermitage Rc em 23/04/2020
Qualidade de CD de 16 bits 44.1 kHz - Stereo