Gustav composer11/14/2022 ![]() Mahler began work on this in the year he both met his future wife, the beautiful and talented Alma Schindler, and survived a near-fatal haemorrhage. The theme of threatened innocence emerges more powerfully the grief-saturated Kindertotenlieder (‘Songs on the Deaths of Children’, 1901–04). Supposedly a depiction of a child’s idea of heaven, the finale of the Fourth is classically Mahlerian in its rich ambiguity, tenderly capturing the child’s delight while hinting at darker things beneath the surface. His first four symphonies are closely intertwined with his songs, sometimes reworking a Wunderhorn song as a whole movement, as in the Fourth Symphony (1899–1900). His first important works were songs and song-cycles, notably Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’, 1884) and the settings of folk-inspired lyrics from the popular 19th-century collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘Youth’s Magic Horn’, 1888–99). He composed whenever he could, usually during his summer holidays and at breathtaking rate. But his evident talent led to successive appointments at Olmütz, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg and, in 1897, the Vienna Court Opera. His career began unpromisingly with a summer season conducting operetta at the Austrian provincial theatre of Bad Hall in 1880. For most of his life Mahler supported himself by conducting, and grew to be acknowledged as one of the greatest conductors of his age. In 1878, his final year at the conservatory, he began his first major work, Das klagende Lied (‘The Song of Sorrow’), in which many of the distinctive features of his mature style can already be heard: ardent lyricism, a fascination with nature, and sombre funereal rhythms. Though successful in his piano studies, Mahler soon realised that composing was his destiny. He joined the circle of supporters of Anton Bruckner, whose Third Symphony made a powerful impression on the 17-year-old student. Accepted into the conservatory, Mahler made friends with brilliant fellow students, including the hugely talented but ill-fated Hans Rott and the great song composer Hugo Wolf. Epstein pronounced the 15-year-old ‘a born musician’. Gustav gave his first piano recital at the age of 10, and five years later was taken to the Vienna Conservatory to play for pianist and teacher Julius Epstein. Mahler’s father may have treated his wife harshly, but he did recognise and encourage his son’s musical talents. Indeed his first composition, written when he was 10, was a Funeral March with Polka, a combination that would typify his work as an adult composer. Few of his major works do not feature at least a hint of a funeral march. Death was a presence in the house from early on: six of Mahler’s siblings died in infancy. Mahler remembered violent arguments between them, and was an introspective child. He was the second of 14 children of a Jewish distillery owner. He was also a great composer of songs, and in these smaller forms he distilled the essence of intense human emotions, developing and enriching his exquisite melodic gift in the process. It must embrace everything.’ Mahler’s symphonies are often conceived on an immense scale, with immense philosophical subjects: love and hate, joy in life and terror of death, the beauty of nature, innocence and bitter experience. ‘The symphony,’ he insisted to fellow composer Jean Sibelius, ‘must be like the world. ‘I am,’ wrote Gustav Mahler, ‘three times homeless: a native of Bohemia in Austria an Austrian among Germans a Jew throughout the world.’ Mahler’s sense of being an outsider, coupled with penetrating intelligence and an extraordinary talent for depicting his surroundings in music, made him a restless and acutely self-critical artist. ![]()
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