Gustav Mahler

Mahler characterized his Symphony No. 8, the "Symphony of a Thousand," by declaring, "Imagine the universe beginning to sing and resound." He added, "It is no longer human voices; it is planets and suns revolving." The era's foremost expansive visionary in late Romantic music, Mahler was seen chiefly as a conductor who composed incidentally, generating vast, eccentric symphonies embraced only by a narrow circle of admirers.

Born into a middle-class household in Kalischt, Bohemia, in 1860, he enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory in 1875 to study piano, harmony, and composition within a musically traditional setting. Even so, he championed Wagner and Bruckner, whose pieces he would conduct often afterward, and joined a circle drawn to socialism, Nietzschean philosophy, and pan-Germanism. Conducting work began around 1880 alongside completion of his first mature piece, Das klagende Lied. His rise as a conductor took him swiftly from Kassel to Prague to Leipzig to Budapest, where performers either admired or detested him for rigorous rehearsals and exacting standards. In 1897 he assumed the post of music director at the Vienna Court Opera, followed a year later by leadership of the Vienna Philharmonic.

Composition remained confined to summers in specially constructed "composing huts" amid scenic countryside, time he devoted exclusively to large-scale symphonies and song cycles. His First Symphony reached completion in 1888 yet encountered total audience incomprehension. In Das Lied von der Erde he fused the two genres into a monumental song-symphony. Though Viennese listeners largely misunderstood his music, Mahler responded with composure, foreseeing accurately that "My time will yet come." His uncompromising conduct as a conductor nevertheless estranged players, leading the press and musicians to compel his resignation from the Philharmonic in 1901. That same year he wed composition student Alma Schindler, and the couple soon welcomed two daughters. Increasingly occupied with performances of his own works outside Vienna, Mahler resigned from the opera in 1907 as well. Shortly after accepting the principal conductor role at New York's Metropolitan Opera but before departing Vienna, his four-year-old daughter succumbed to scarlet fever and diphtheria, and he discovered his own heart valve was defective.

In New York he admired the exceptional talent available and swiftly earned public favor. He took the podium of the New York Philharmonic in 1909, finding the post far more congenial than opera by then. The next year brought a triumphant premiere of his monumental Symphony No. 8 in Munich. Professional achievements notwithstanding, personal life suffered further when his marriage to Alma began to fray. They remained together, and when illness struck in February 1911 she ensured his return to Vienna, where he died on May 18.

Conductors Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Willem Mengelberg, and Maurice Abravanel sustained Mahler's legacy, and his symphonies now rank among the most frequently recorded. By integrating vocal elements into symphonic form he brought to fruition a development initiated by Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, underscoring his music's deep grounding in the Germanic classical tradition. Yet the expansive canvases of fluctuating moods and tones—spanning tragedy to bitter irony, often marked explicitly in performance directions, and café music to evocations of the sublime—anticipated a century dominated by multiplicity.