Biographical notes

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860 in the village of Kalischt in
Bohemia-Moravia. In the October of that same year, the Emperor Franz
Joseph issued a decree granting his subjects "timely improvements in
law-giving and government" among which was the right of Jewish citizens to
live wherever they chose. Mahler's parents seized the opportunity to move to
the nearby garrison town of Iglau (now Jihlava), where they opened a small
distillery. Iglau's garrison even had a prior musical connection, as Beethoven's
nephew Karl had been stationed there in the late 1820s.

Many of the familiar hallmarks of Mahler's music can be traced to his
childhood in the town: the military marches and bugle calls, the melancholy
songs of the soldiers. Mahler himself believed that childhood impressions were
a formative influence in adult life - a remarkably modern concept - and was
later to recall, during his famous encounter with Sigmund Freud, a significant
incident when, rushing from the house to escape a row between his parents, he
encountered a street musician playing the popular German song Ach, du lieber
Augustin. Intense emotions and popular, even vulgar melodies would forever
be associated in his mind - and in his music.

Mahler himself famously said that he was "thrice homeless, as a native of
Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout
all the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed."

In fact, as Donald Mitchell perceptively observes, Mahler's situation was even
worse, for "he himself neglects to mention what was, territorially speaking, the
initial problem of status, that while he and his family may have been Bohemians
in Austria, they were not Bohemians among Bohemians, but part of an alien
minority whose rule was resented and finally, though after Mahler's death,
thrown off."

To quote Hans Redlich: "Tolerated by their Slavonic neighbours, whose
language Moravian Jews usually mastered, but scorned by the officially
favoured minority of resident Germans, they had to live in conditions of
constant insecurity, expecting at any time to be submitted to excesses of racial
prejudices from either side."

In addition to this social insecurity, Mahler also had to cope with growing up
in a dysfunctional family (to use today's jargon).

Much has been written of Bernard Mahler's brutality, and there can be no
gainsaying that his beating of his wife Marie made Mahler's childhood intensely
unhappy, yet there was apparently more to Mahler's father than a mere
unthinking brute. He was a largely self-taught man from a humble background
who had a burning desire to "better himself".

Marie, on the other hand, was from a wealthier family, of some social standing,
but she was "lame from birth" and suffered from a delicate constitution and
weak heart. (There is also an indication, from her birth certificate, that Marie's
mother was the result of inbreeding, probably not an uncommon occurrence is
small, isolated communities) Marie's family was therefore only too eager to rid
themselves of this largely unmarriageable daughter; we can readily imagine the
situation, then, a "common" and uncultured man keen to better himself and the
"ugly duckling" spinster of the family. No love match. A marriage made in hell,
in fact.

Gustav showed a musical talent from an early age and, to his family's credit,
they did not stand in his way. At the age of 15 he was taken, by his father, to
meet Julius Epstein, well-known piano teacher at the Vienna conservatory.
Epstein was initially unwilling but "struck by a remarkable look in the boy's
face" invited him to play. After only a few moments he turned to Bernard and
said "he is a born musician."

Mahler spent the years 1875-8 studying at the Conservatory, although details
of his time there are few, far-between and contradictory. Donald Mitchell's
excellent Gustav Mahler The Early Years (to which I am indebted for much
of this information) is essential reading on this period.

When he left the conservatory Mahler was faced with the same situation as
numerous other would-be composers: nobody wanted to pay him to write
music. As a "temporary" measure he became a conductor - oddly enough,
something which there seems to be no record of his having even attempted
while at the conservatory.

After a number of relatively insignificant and often menial jobs, Mahler spent
the years 1883-5 at Kassel - during which period his unhappy love affair with
the soprano Johanna Richter inspired the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
cycle - and from there he moved to Prague, to Leipzig in 1886 (where he was
second conductor to Artur Nikisch) and to Budapest in 1888.

Mahler stayed in Budapest until 1891, in which year he became chief
conductor of the Hamburg opera. It is from this period that his reputation as
one of the era's great conductors began: Brahms praised Mahler's conducting
of Mozart's Don Giovanni, calling it the finest performance he had ever heard,
and rushing backstage after Act 1 to embrace the conductor.

And Tchaikovsky wrote from Hamburg to his nephew: "the conductor here is
not merely passable but actually has genius and ardently desires to conduct the
first performance [of Eugene Onegin]...The singers, the orchestra, Pollini, the
manager and the conductor - his name is Mahler - are all in love with Onegin;
but I am very doubtful whether the Hamburg public will share their
enthusiasm."

From Hamburg in 1897 Mahler went to Vienna and in short order became
director of the Vienna Hofoper (court opera). It was at this time that he
converted to Catholicism, almost certainly a device to make his appointment
less controversial - Vienna was a hotbed of anti-semitism at the time - although
there is no evidence that he was ever a particularly devout Jew.

The decade of Mahler's reign in Vienna is still acknowledged as a Golden Age,
not merely of singing and playing, but of operatic staging. Mahler took control
of everything, insisting that only thus could his conception of a work be
brought to full fruition. Few opera directors before or since have had the
power which Mahler had in Vienna, or wielded it so successfully.

Mahler's insistence on total control - his megalomania as some saw it - won
him few friends among the hothouse atmosphere of fragile and inflated egos
that was the Vienna Opera. Combined with the constant sniping of the
anti-semitic press it is remarkable that he lasted as long as he did, and this fact
must surely be attributed to his magnificent management of every aspect of the
opera; the public responded to his musicmaking, even if the critics did not.

It was almost exactly halfway through Mahler's Vienna period, in 1902, that
fellow composer Alexander von Zemlinsky made the serious mistake of
introducing his current enamorata to Mahler. According to some sources (the
oversensitive should skip to the next paragraph) the young Alma Maria
Schindler was on the point of surrendering her virginity to Zemlinsky ( won't
even speculate on how this is known) but from the moment he introduced her
to Mahler, Alma had eyes for nobody else. Within a few months they were
married.

Alma was herself a talented musician and composer of some promise,
although she gave up her own career in order to devote all her energies to her
husband's genius. This raises all sorts of issues which I don't propose to
examine here; let us suffice it to say that Alma appears to have done this
voluntarily, and that it would surely have been extremely difficult for any
women in the early twentieth century to maintain an independent career after
her marriage.

Alma went on to become a celebrated beauty and to either marry or have
affairs with several other significant figures in the cultural life of this century,
perhaps most notably with Walter Gropius, one of the founders of the
Bauhaus, whom she eventually married (although their affair seems to have
begun before Mahler's death); their daughter, Manon, who died at eighteen,
was the "angel" in memory of whom Alban Berg composed his valedictory
violin concerto.

In 1907 though, the machinations of Mahler's enemies finally succeeded in
getting him to leave his post, a post which he had always viewed ambivalently;
he complained bitterly about the amount of time it took, and how little time this
left him for composing, but it is arguable that without his experience in the
opera pit his knowledge of the orchestra and voice would have been far less
complete, and even that he needed the tension between the two aspects of his
genius - creator and recreator - in order to function as a composer.

It was also in 1907 that his elder daughter "Putzi" died of scarlet fever at the
age of four, and that Mahler himself was diagnosed as having a valvular
malformation of the heart, a condition which eventually led to his early death.

On January 1, 1908 Mahler made his American debut conducting Tristan und
Isolde at the Metropolitan opera. The following year he was appointed
conductor of the reorganised New York Philharmonic Orchestra. His time in
New York was not especially happy, as he refused to kowtow to the wealthy
women who ran the musical organisations, and was thus an easy target for the
fans of his rival Toscanini. (Interestingly enough, the same thing happened, for
the same reasons, to Wilhelm Furtw绅gler - another would-be composer
turned conductor - nearly two decades later)

The two performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich in September 1910
were the only unalloyed successes of his compositional life. He returned to
New York for the 1910-11 season, but became seriously ill in February 1911
and, realising that his days were numbered, returned to Vienna, where he died
on 18 May 1911.