In 1897, the painter Gustav Klimt helped found the Vienna Secession, while the seeds of expressionism were sown with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams two years later, and taken up in the next decade by poets such as Georg Trakl. Vienna was about to become one of the centres of modernism in Europe, perhaps rivalled only by Paris as a centre of radical art in the years before the first world war. Mahler had settled in Vienna, having been appointed to the Hofoper (the Court Opera – today’s State Opera) in 1897 after converting to Catholicism, aware that a Jew would not gain such a prestigious post. The Third Symphony was not premiered until 1902, after he had finished the Fourth Symphony, the last one linked to the Wunderhorn world. Of all his works, it’s the one that most completely confirms what he told Sibelius in 1907: “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.” At around 100 minutes, it’s the longest symphony ever written by a major composer. He’d already begun a Third Symphony, conceived on an even more expansive scale than its predecessor. Composing took second place to conducting, though he did complete more Wunderhorn songs, and conducted the premiere of his Second Symphony in Berlin in 1895. In 1894, when Mahler finished work on the Second, he was living in Hamburg, where he’d been chief conductor at the Stadttheater since 1891. Conceived on a massive scale, the Second followed Beethoven’s Ninth in requiring vocal soloists and a chorus, as well as a huge orchestra. That same year, he sketched a single-movement symphonic poem, Totenfeier (Funeral Rites), which became the opening movement of his Second Symphony, the Resurrection. In 1888, he completed his First Symphony, conceiving it as a five-movement symphonic poem under the title of Titan and incorporating melodies from his song cycle eventually he dropped one movement, creating the work we usually hear today. During this period he completed his first orchestral song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), with texts modelled on poems in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, an early 19th-century collection of German folk poetry that would dominate his music for more than a decade. Though orchestras apparently disliked his authoritarianism, appointments in Prague and Leipzig from 1885 to 1887 confirmed Mahler’s rising reputation as a conductor. He reportedly discarded most of the music he composed during these years (there’s a theory that some of his early manuscripts were destroyed in the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945), but one large-scale work – the cantata Das klagende Lied, completed in 1880 – survived. Mahler began his conducting career in 1880, working in provincial opera houses across Austria and Germany. He was primarily as a pianist, but he also took composition lessons and started to conduct. By 10 he was already recognised as a musical wunderkind, and in 1875 he went to study at the Vienna Conservatory. But the sounds of his childhood – folk tunes, street songs and military bands – haunted his music for much of his life. The Mahlers were Jewish and German-speaking in a region where most people spoke Czech, and Gustav thought of himself as an exile, “always an outsider, never made welcome”.
He was the second of 14 children a few months after his birth, the family moved to the town of Jihlava, where his father opened a distillery and tavern. Mahler was a Bohemian, born in Kaliště, a village now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austrian empire.
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