Download Gustav Mahler - Kettering City School District

Gustav Mahler
Born: July 7, 1860, Kaliste, The Czech Republic
Died: May 18, 1911, Vienna
 Czech-born Austrian composer and
conductor. Mahler's music stands at the
point of transition between nineteenthcentury romanticism and twentieth-century
modernism.
Mahler
 Gustav Mahler's career reflects the artistic
ambivalence of the end of the nineteenth century.
As a conductor, Mahler's aim was to preserve the
tradition of composers of the past, and he was a
tireless champion of Beethoven, Brahms, and
Wagner. In his composition, on the other hand, he
embodied many of the new ideas of modernism
and fostered the music of his more radical
contemporaries, such as Arnold Schoenberg. In the
end, his music was overshadowed by these new
currents, but has been revived and reevaluated in
the last three decades.
Mahler
 Mahler was born in a small Bohemian town, where he
studied music with local teachers. In 1875 he went to
Vienna to study at the conservatory, where he remained
until 1878. Upon finishing his studies, he took a series
of conducting posts throughout Central and Eastern
Europe, including Budapest, Hamburg, and Leipzig. It
was in Leipzig that he first attracted notice with his
interpretation of Wagner's Ring cycle. He ultimately
ended up in Vienna, conducting the state opera
orchestra. His success in transforming the repertory and
performance standards of the opera house was nothing
short of remarkable, but it came at high personal cost.
Mahler
 The constant work forced him to confine his
composing to the summer months, and probably
contributed to the health problems that would end
his life at an early age. In addition, in order to
obtain a post in Vienna—a city with deep
undercurrents of anti-Semitism—Mahler had to
renounce Judaism and convert to Catholicism. In
the end it did him no good, and these same antiSemitic forces compelled him to leave the city. He
emigrated to the United States.
Mahler
 In New York, he was engaged as conductor for the
Metropolitan Opera, and later the New York
Philharmonic. When he died at the age of fifty, he
was working on his tenth symphony, a work he
had postponed thinking it something of a curse
(pointing to Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner).
His "real" tenth symphony, Das Lied von der Erde
(a setting of six poems by the eighth-century
Chinese poet Li Po) serves as a fitting summary of
his symphonic style, and one of his true
masterpieces.
Mahler
 Mahler's music reflects the same ambiguities as
his life. He was intensely tied to the past in many
ways, following in the footsteps of the great
Austrian symphonists. At the same time, he
expanded the forms he inherited to a point that it
seemed impossible to go beyond. His works are
enormous, both in size and in forces. His late
symphonies are often more than ninety minutes in
length, and call for huge instrumental (and often
choral) forces.
Mahler
 His Symphony No. 8 (called the "Symphony of a
Thousand"), for example, calls for five vocal soloists,
a boy choir, and an adult choir, along with a gigantic
orchestra. He also departed from tradition in his use of
tonality. His larger works often ended in a different
tonality than they began in, weakening the structural
role of tonality at the same time that Schoenberg and
his contemporaries were moving toward a purely
atonal style. The final element we can note in Mahler's
music is its wit, often tinged with irony and parody.
This often occurs by means of the juxtaposition of
incongruous elements to create a jarring, often
seemingly banal mix.