Gustav Mahler

Biography

Gustav Mahler saw the day with Kaliště the July 7th 1860, in Bohemia. During its first year, his/her parents were established in Moravie with Jihlava, where it passed its childhood. In 1875 it was allowed with the academy of Vienna where it studied the piano with Julius Epstein and divided the room of Hans Rott. It in parallel followed conferences given by Anton Bruckner to the university of Vienna. Its first important composition was Das Klagende Lied which it presented to a contest as a opera, but that it transformed later into Cantate. The failure of this attempt persuaded it to turn to the direction of orchestra. After the first engagement with Bad Hall, it obtained stations in increasingly large operas; Ljubljana in 1881, Olomouc in 1882, Kassel in 1884, Opera of State of Prague in 1885 (it directed the ninth symphony of Beethoven there), Leipzig in 1886 and Budapest in 1891. Its first station of long life was with the opera of Hamburg in 1891, where it remained until in 1897. It is during the summer holidays that it took then with Steinbach-amndts-Attersee, that it went back to the composition and completed its first symphony and the Lieder aus “Of Knaben Wunderhorn ”.

Mahler converts into 1897 Judaïsme with the Catholicisme to be able to obtain the artistic position of director of the prestigious opera of Vienna, station from which the Juifs were then excluded in practice. It spent the ten following years to Vienna and acquired a reputation of perfectionism there. For this period, during which it alternated the direction for nine months of the year and the composition the remainder of time - mainly in Maiernigg, where it had a small house on Wörthersee - it composed its symphonies of the second to the eighth.

He married Alma Schindler (1879 - 1964) in 1902 and had of them two girls, Maria and Anna. In 1907, his/her Maria oldest daughter dies, carried by the scarlet fever. The same year, he was discovered a disorder cardiac and he lost his employment in Vienna, in prey with the attacks of a press largely anti-semite, after having without too much success tried to defend his own works. In 1910, fearing that his wife does not leave it he will consult Sigmund Freud with which he made a 4 hours discussion-walk lasting which it " guérit": he will write with his wife: " - am merry. Interesting conversation… " Whereas its fourth symphony had received a rather favorable reception, it had to await 1910 to meet a true public success with the eighth symphony. Its later works were never carried out as a public of alive sound.

Mahler was in hillock with attacks increasingly virulent anti-semites when it accepted an offer to direct the Metropolitan Opera to New York. It there directed one season in 1908 but was isolated with the profit of Arturo Toscanini. It returned to New York the following year to direct there the Philharmonic orchestra of New York. From this period go back completion from Das Lied von der Erde and to its last completed work, the ninth symphony . It is during its last visit with the the United States that it fell seriously sick and asked to go back to Vienna, where it died the May 18th 1911, leaving unfinished its tenth symphony . The last word which he pronounced, a raised finger directing an invisible orchestra, was: " Mozart! ". Mahler dies on May 18th, 1911 at 51 years. It was buried not far from the Austrian capital, with the cemetery of Grinzing.

Music of Gustav Mahler

The music of Mahler is anchored in the German tradition, that of Jean-Sebastien Bach, the “school of Vienna” of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert and of the romantic generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn. However the decisive influence of its work was Richard Wagner, only according to him whose music had really a “development” ( cf Sonata form).

The music of Mahler combines romantic influences - as the fact of giving titles to its symphonies, or of associating programs to them - with the use of the popular music Viennese and art contrapuntic, by using the immense resources of the Symphony orchestra. The result of its research to extend its musical universe was that it developed the symphonic form with the point to make some burst the formal mould. A symphony was to be, in its terms, a whole universe. So Mahler was confronted with difficulties in the presentation of its works and tended to revise of them without end the details of orchestration.

One generally divides his symphonies according to three periods:

the first period, marked by its interpretation of the poems of the collection “of Knaben Wunderhorn” and strewn with melodies coming from its own setting in music from these same poems, includes/understands the first four symphonies.
During the second time, including/understanding the three following symphonies, the expression becomes more severe, more tragic. It impressed the public Viennese very as far as it influenced other type-setters.
the last period is marked by an increasing importance of the Polyphonie and includes/understands the symphony n° 8 known as “of the thousand”, the ninth symphony, it tenth, unfinished, as well as the cycle of Lied er with orchestra Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the ground).

Mahler was obsessed by the heritage of Beethoven. While being terrified with the idea to write a symphony which carried the new number, he declared that each one of his own symphonies was a “ninth”, with as much of impact and importance that of the Ode to the joy. Few type-setters have at this point mixed their personal life and their work. The manuscript of the tenth symphony of Mahler comprises notes intended for his wife, who had a connection with Walter Gropius, and other autobiographical references. To supplement the portrait, let us add its obsession for God, with which one said it of “to frequently converse on the telephone”, and for Nature.

These aspects resulted in considering its music, still a long time after its death, like emphatic, even swollen. Debussy, which had openly left the room at the time of the first of the 2nd symphony in Paris, had declared: “ Let us open the eye (and let us close the ear)… The French taste will never admit these pneumatic giants with other honor to be used as advertisement in Bibendum. ”

However, whatever the duration of these works, or manpower necessary for their execution, it is true also that they always constitute a demonstration of masterly orchestration, which even the worst detractors of its music, at the time, were quite constrained to recognize. Even in works being satisfied with an orchestra " minimal" (like its 4th symphony), the delicacy of the orchestration, its inventiveness, the fact that the stamps are integral part of the composition make of Mahler, under many aspects, a direct heir to Berlioz.

It is true that Mahler had always sought to innovate and extend the symphonic kind, but that should not make forget that he was also a meticulous craftsman, which is seen in its work methods meticulous persons, in the ordered planning of its works and in its studies of the former Masters.

The heritage of Mahler

The hinge role of Mahler between the romantic period and the modern period is not without pointing out the part which Haydn for the romantic music had played. Its compositions had a decisive influence on the type-setters Richard Strauss, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, like on the leaders Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, which it had helped both in their career.

Its melodies, sometimes with, its taste rupture limit of the great expressive intervals, its abrupt modulations, the use of dissonant agreements on key points when the program requires it, even if it means to somewhat violate the control of the voices of the traditional counterpoint, made possible the great jump towards the Atonalité. Sometimes among his other innovations, one finds the introduction of “exotic” instruments into the orchestra (Guitare, Mandoline), the extension of the section of the percussions, the use of choruses and soloists vocal in the symphonic music.

As a leader, his technique and its methods survived until our time. Famous to have said that “the tradition, it the idleness”, it required an intense work of repetitions before a concert, which led to tensions with the orchestras that it directed, whatever could be in addition the improvement of the end result.

“My time will come” said Mahler vis-a-vis the difficulties that it met to make accept its œuvres and they is indeed what occurred about the years 1960, in particular thanks to Leonard Bernstein, then, later, in 1971, thanks to the musical illustration of the film masterpiece of Luchino Visconti " Died in Venice " by the use of the adagietto of the 5 {{E}} symphony , which finally will generate a true passion for its music and will definitively leave its very whole work the relative purgatory in which it was confined since its disappearance.

Works

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