GUSTAV MAHLER

A Small Town, a Big Family, and a Piano

I was born on 7 July 1860 in Kaliště, a village in Bohemia, and the next year my family moved to Jihlava, where my father set up a liquor business. I was one of fourteen children, and eight of my brothers and sisters died when they were small, so loss was part of my life from the very start. Music was my way through it, and in 1870, when I was ten, I gave my first public piano recital in Jihlava. A few years later I went to the Vienna Conservatory, where I studied from 1875 to 1878 and where Julius Epstein taught me piano.

Waving a Stick in Every Town That Would Have Me

My breakthrough came on the podium before it came at my desk, because conducting is what paid the bills. I worked my way through Kassel, Prague and Leipzig, and then spent the years from 1888 to 1891 in Budapest, where my Symphony No. 1 was first performed in 1889. Next came Hamburg, where I was chief conductor from 1891 to 1897, and my Symphony No. 2 was first heard in Berlin in 1895. By then I had learned that a conductor in the opera house has to be a composer, a drill sergeant and a diplomat all at once.

The Emperor's Opera House, and a Change of Faith

In 1897 I became director of the Vienna Court Opera, which was the most important musical job a man like me could hope for. There was a catch, because my parents were Jewish and the post required me to convert to Catholicism, so I did. I held the job for ten years, until 1907, and I demanded a great deal from singers and orchestra alike. Along the way I married Alma Schindler on 9 March 1902, and we soon had two daughters, Maria and Anna.

Five Is Where the Trumpet Gets Lonely

If you want to meet my music, the Symphony No 5 is a very good place to start. It opens with a single trumpet call, and then a heavy, dark march gathers behind it, a bit like a procession slowly coming around the corner. The mood does not stay there, though, because the music keeps tearing itself out of the gloom with sudden outbursts, tender stretches and dance-like tunes. By the end the whole orchestra is racing toward a bright and joyful finish, and I like to think you will have travelled a long way without leaving your seat.

A Run of Very Bad Luck

In July 1907 my elder daughter Maria died of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and that same year I was told that I had a heart defect. The Kindertotenlieder, my songs on the death of children, had been written between 1901 and 1904, before Maria's death, and I never entirely shook off the feeling that I had tempted fate. Then in the summer of 1910 I learned about Alma's affair with the architect Walter Gropius. I was so shaken that I travelled to Leiden to talk with Sigmund Freud, which is not something I ever imagined doing.

Across the Ocean and Back Again

I left Vienna and went to New York, where I conducted at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1907-08 season, and my first performance there was Tristan on 1 January 1908. From 1909 I conducted the New York Philharmonic, and in between I kept composing, which is how my Eighth Symphony came to be first performed in Munich on 12 September 1910 with me conducting. Some clever promoter called it the Symphony of a Thousand to sell tickets, and I disapproved of that nickname. I came home to Vienna very ill, and I died there on 18 May 1911, aged 50, of a bacterial infection of the heart, and I was buried in Grinzing cemetery beside Maria.

The Music Keeps Going Without Me

I did not hear everything I wrote, because Das Lied von der Erde, which I wrote in 1908 and 1909, was first performed in Munich on 20 November 1911, under Bruno Walter, after I had died. My Ninth Symphony was the last one I managed to finish, and it is complete, whatever people sometimes say. In 1910 I completed drafts of a Tenth, but it was still unfinished when I died, like a house with the walls up and no roof. Still, I take comfort that other musicians kept picking up my scores long after I put down my pen.

What I'd Like You to Take Home

I would like you to give my music a little time, because it is long and it likes to wander through many moods. Once you let it, you may find that it holds a whole world, with village bands, quiet sorrow, big laughter and some stubborn hope. You do not need to know anything about music to feel that, and you do not have to understand every note. If a trumpet makes you sit up straight, or a quiet passage makes you feel a little less alone, then I have given you what I hoped to.