Mahler, Gustav

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MAHLER, GUSTAV

MAHLER, GUSTAV (1860–1911), Bohemian-born composer and conductor.

Gustav Mahler is often thought to have brought the Austro-Germanic tradition of nineteenth-century music to its conclusion and to have ushered in aspects of musical modernism. Along with Arthur Nikisch and Arturo Toscanini, Mahler was one of the most important conductors of his day.

Brought up in a German-speaking Jewish community in Iglau, Moravia, Mahler was accepted in 1875 as a student to the Vienna Conservatory, where he identified himself as a Wagnerian (and thus, for the times, a modernist) and developed interests in socialism, pan-Germanicism, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was also close to the important lieder composer Hugo Wolf and attended some of the lectures of the composer Anton Bruckner, who was then teaching at the conservatory.

In 1880, Mahler began an incredibly successful career as a conductor that was to last his whole life; financial restrictions meant that he was never able to devote himself solely to composition, which had to be squeezed in during the summer months between the concert and opera seasons, when Mahler would retire to the countryside. Taking up the position of a conductor of operetta in Bad Hall, near Linz, Mahler then passed rapidly through a series of increasingly prestigious positions leading eventually in 1897 to one of Europe's most coveted posts: conductor and artistic director of the Imperial Court Opera in Vienna, whose orchestra was the famed Vienna Philharmonic. However, as a Jew in the deeply ingrained anti-Semitic culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, it was necessary for Mahler to convert to Roman Catholicism before he could take up the position.

His years at the opera in Vienna were full of controversy, in part because of the rife anti-Semitic atmosphere, but also because of the incredibly high standards that Mahler demanded of his performers, which he was often brutal and insensitive in achieving (Mahler was a seminal figure in the establishment of the twentieth-century paradigm of the conductor as tyrannical idealist). But they were also years when Mahler was responsible for some of the landmark productions of operatic history. Compositionally, the period saw Mahler developing toward more evidently modernist modes, starting with the Fifth Symphony (1901–1902), and briefly, as a result of connections produced by his marriage in 1902 to Alma Schindler, Mahler directly associated with the modernists and the next generation of radical composers, particularly Arnold Schoenberg. Eventually, in 1907, the strain of his conducting position at the opera would lead Mahler to resign, and later that year—after the tragic death of his daughter Maria, and the diagnosis of his own fatal heart condition—he would leave for New York. There he was to take up directorship of the Metropolitan Opera Company, and then the New York Philharmonic, before he finally returned to Europe in 1911 and died in Vienna on 18 May.

If Mahler's life was problematically split and suspended between the practical realities of life as a conductor and a man of the theater and the more seemingly idealistic world of composition, it is likewise true that his compositions also vacillate between idealism and realism and related pairings—for example, between the high and the low stylistically, and the organically fully formed and the open-ended and broken aesthetically. Furthermore, it has been common to interpret this bipolar split in Mahler's music as a profound illustration of similar tensions both within the Habsburg empire at the fin de siècle as it balanced precariously between the passing nineteenth century and the uncertainties of the century to come, and within pre–World War I Europe in general.

On the one hand, Mahler's music is symphonic in the nineteenth-century mold: primarily Beethovenian, but also Wagnerian, in its monumental drive toward totalizing synthesis and transcendent conclusions, particularly as witnessed in the Second (1888–1894, revised 1903), Third (1893–1896, revised 1906), Seventh (1904–1905), and Eighth Symphonies (1906–1907). Mahler's nineteenth-century inheritance also finds expression in the use of massive sonorities requiring enormous orchestral and often also vocal forces for their production, and in a tendency toward grand music-historical summation in the strong tradition of historicism within Austro-Germanic music since Beethoven—references abound not only to Beethoven and Wagner, but also Haydn and Mozart (for example, in the Fourth Symphony [1899–1900, revised 1901–1910]), the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (from around the time of the Fifth Symphony), and even eighth-century church music, with the use of the hymn-tune Veni, creator spiritus in the first movement of the Eighth Symphony. Finally, the deeply autobiographical element in Mahler's music, manifesting itself specifically in the network of telling self-quotations between works (for example, the famous quotation from his Kindertotenlieder [Songs on the death of children; 1901–1904] in the finale of the Ninth Symphony [1908–1909]), is reminiscent of the composer Robert Schumann and the tendency toward self-reference in Romantic music.

On the other hand, Mahler's music acts as a radical critique of this very inheritance. As Mahler famously asserted to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in 1907, the symphony "must be like a world. It must embrace everything"—by which he meant not just "everything" in its absolute, idealist sense, but also everything that has been excluded from nineteenth-century symphonic discourse by such idealist underpinnings. Thus, in line with then-emergent strains of modernism in the arts in general, Mahler's music acted to challenge various, particularly bourgeois, taboos regarding what was considered aesthetically appropriate, both formally and content-wise, in works of art. In doing so he was formative in the creation of one of the defining functions of twentieth-century musical art, which was to question our assumptions as to what constitutes music in the first place. From an expressive and formal perspective, in Mahler's music this manifested itself in violent disruptions to the expected unfolding of his music and also in the undermining of the usual narrative trajectory of symphonic music toward triumphant conclusions—as, for example, in the bleakly negative ending of the Sixth Symphony (1903–1904, revised 1906) or the diffuse endings of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde (The song of the earth; 1908–1909). From a stylistic perspective Mahler was to question his nineteenth-century inheritance through jarring and, in the elevated realm of symphonic composition, inappropriate juxtapositions of musical types; the slow movement of the First Symphony (1888) includes a bizarre reworking of the nursery tune Frère Jacques as a funeral march alongside deliberately crude-sounding street music and more traditional lyrical material. Such stylistic pluralism and formal disruptiveness and openendedness has led to Mahler being particularly valorized by postmodernists, who see in his music a reflection of their own discomfort with the values associated with idealist, nineteenth-century, Germanic decrees that works of art should be stylistically and formally self-contained, autonomous wholes, as if they were organisms. However, as Theodor Adorno and others have asserted, there is a critical aspect to Mahler's music and life, he is no mere revolutionary; like many other Viennese in the period preceding World War I, his relationship to the very traditions that were his seeming objects of criticism was dialectical and thus beholden unto them as well.