About Mahler
Gustav Mahler
(b. Kalischt [Kaliště], Bohemia, 7 July 1860; d. Vienna, 18 May 1911). Like Schubert, he won full recognition as a composer only posthumously. Unlike Schuber, he was a celebrity in his lifetime – but as a conductor, especially at New York’s Metropolitan and at the Vienna Court Opera, where he insisted on refining and unifying singing, orchestra and staging into convincing dramatic presentations.
Despite his hectic performing schedule, he completed nine intensely expressive symphonies, conceived on a vast scale. „My time will come,“ said Mahler of his music, which – probably because of its existential ambiguity – only now, in the nuclear age, has become an indispensable part of the repertoire.
A Prophet of Pluralism
Mahler’s early death in Vienna on 18 May 1911 at the age of only 51 – after a life of consuming intensity that had taken him from modest beginnings in the Bohemian hamlet of Kalischt (modern Kaliště) to such cultural centres as Vienna and New York – was followed by a transfiguration of his life and works, extending to the present day and encompassing the great enthusiasm for Mahler’s music shared by many contemporary composers. The exceptional biography of this restless composer and conductor also continues to elicit tremendous interest, while the popularity of his works can be seen in the predominant position they occupy in today’s musical world. And yet this triumphal progress could not have been foreseen, nor has it been entirely uninterrupted.
In spite of the selfless commitment of conductors such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, who championed Mahler outside Austria and Germany and who kept the tradition alive after the composer’s death, the Nazis’ ban on the music undoubtedly set back his cause, leading to a break in the tradition that lasted until well after World War II. Not until the 1960s, largely inspired by Leonard Bernstein, was there an unprecedented revival of Mahler’s works, a rehabilitation in the widest sense of the term, firmly anchoring them in the international repertoire. Unlike Beethoven and Wagner, whose place in the pantheon of music was secure by the time they died, Mahler only came to enjoy a comparable status as a key figure in the 20th century some 50 years after his death. But when it came, his triumph was all the more striking. “Does one first have to be dead before people allow one to live?” he himself asked with prescient irony, while sharing the prophetic self-certainty of all major artists and never losing faith in the validity and viability of his work: “My time will come.”
The fact is that Mahler’s time has indeed come and sheds significant light on our own times, because every age must rediscover and redefine its approach to the great composers. Mahler’s posthumous reputation, too, is characterized by a similar multiplicity of approaches, a range that extends from the creative appropriation of his sound world by many younger composers – inspired by the stylistic breadth and progressive nature of his works – to his function as a role model in the form, not only of an uncommonly authentic performing musician committed to unconditional artistic truth, but also as the director of leading cultural institutions such as the Vienna Opera. Finally, there is the spiritual content of works that many people see as a welcome alternative to the levelling process taking place all around them. It is a content, moreover, that is felt to be more and more attractive in an increasingly uniform, secularized world.
Mahler demanded of the symphony as a whole, the central genre in his output: “It must have something cosmic about it, it must be as inexhaustible as the world and as life itself if it is not to make a mockery of its name.” As a composer, Mahler obeyed this imperative through an overwhelming and at times even bewildering array of forms, stylistic levels and characters. As if in an attempt to create a large-scale synthesis of every aspect of western music, Mahler used march tunes and dance music in his works – genres that were felt to be alien to the world of “high art” – and he integrated them into his scores with the same self-evident ease as the sounds of nature, military fanfares and the solemn strains of chorales and hymns. He used a musical language influenced by Wagner’s mature music dramas, in the process demonstrating the same sovereign approach as he evinced when drawing on the far simpler language of the German lied. And above all he not infrequently revealed a subtle humour ranging from the most glancing irony, as in the fifth movement of the Third Symphony and the final movement of the Fourth, to the grotesqueries of the First Symphony’s funeral march and the sort of sardonic dance of death that we find both in the Scherzo of the Sixth Symphony and in the Rondo-Burleske of the Ninth. The full range of Mahler’s music becomes even more apparent when all the works are presented in their entirety in the form of a collected edition.
The present set includes not only the eleven symphonic works – the nine complete symphonies, the unfinished Tenth and Das Lied von der Erde – but also all the songs and song cycles and the few surviving early works such as the cantata Das klagende Lied. This survey of Mahler’s relatively narrow but uncommonly varied output additionally affords ultimate proof of his abiding topicality and modernity: a composer whom Kurt Blaukopf described as the “contemporary of the future” was also a prophet of pluralism in music.
