Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born on 7 July 1860 to a German-speaking Jewish family in Kalischt, Bohemia. Shortly thereafter, his parents relocated to neighbouring Iglau, where Mahler acquired a wide range of musical impressions, particularly from folk and military music, traces of which can be found in his later works.

Mahler attended the conservatory in Vienna as well as its university, where he was a student of Anton Bruckner. However, all his attempts to gain recognition as a composer failed at first. Within ten years, on the other hand, his breathtaking rise as a conductor led him through numerous positions to be Kapellmeister at the Hamburg Opera, which he held from 1891 to 1897. In Hamburg, Mahler also managed to continue working as a composer.

From 1893 onwards, every summer, he retreated to the seclusion of a rural holiday home to compose. The fruits of his time in Hamburg range from the new version of the First Symphony to the Wunderhorn lieder and the Second Symphony to large parts of the Third Symphony. In 1897, Mahler was appointed to one of the most prestigious positions of his time, first as Kapellmeister and soon after as director of the Vienna Court Opera. The decade of his tenure, which lasted until 1907, went down in opera history as a particularly glorious period including many groundbreaking performances. All the while, Mahler managed to further establish himself as a composer so that his symphonies were performed not just by himself but also by other conductors. Despite his successes as an opera director, his public image gradually changed from that of a conductor who also composed on the side to that of a conducting composer.

Mahler, who was feeling a certain weariness with his position, decided to go to New York in the summer of 1907 to work at the Metropolitan Opera. He was only supposed to conduct for four months in the winter, leaving him free to spend the rest of the time in Europe. That summer brought him two bitter and life-changing experiences: His eldest daughter died of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and he himself was diagnosed with heart disease. From 1908 onwards, he composed a late work consisting of Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony and the fragmentary Tenth Symphony, in which gestures of mourning and farewell are poignantly articulated. In February 1911, Mahler fell ill with a heart infection that was untreatable at the time and died in Vienna on 18 May.