Gustav Mahler used to say: “My time is yet come” and he was right – it has come. His music resounds today in concert halls all over the world and is no longer as controversial as it was perceived in the composer’s day.
Mahler was born on 7 July 1860 in a town on the border of Czechia and Moravia in the family of a Jewish tavern and distillery owner. He grew up in a family with no musical traditions. Nevertheless, he began his musical education at the age of six and at fifteen he began studying piano and composition at Vienna Conservatory. Later he studied musicology at the University of Vienna and intensively explored composition under Anton Bruckner. After completing his studies, he was unable to make a living from composing, so he devoted his entire professional life to conducting. He conducted orchestras in various opera theatres including Leipzig, Kassel, Budapest, Hamburg and Vienna. As a conductor he remained uncompromising, he tormented the orchestra musicians, obsessively taking care of every nuance of the sound. He quickly alienated the musicians, and yet the effects he achieved in cooperation with them proved to be excellent. He was famous for his brilliant interpretations of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner. In 1907 he gave up his European concert tours and moved to the United States, where he joined the Metropolitan Opera in New York and became the musical director of the New York Philharmonic Society. Every summer, however, he returned to Austria, to his small house by the lake, and devoted himself to composing. After completing the Ninth Symphony, he wrote Das Lied von der Erde, a kind of vocal-instrumental symphony. By refusing to number this work as a ‘symphony' he wanted to deceive fate; he remembered the stories of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Anton Bruckner, who died shortly after writing their ninth symphonies. He could already feel that death was near. Stress at work and personal problems (death of his children, infidelity of his wife Alma) only aggravated his heart problems. Gustav Mahler conducted his last New York concert (1911) in a state of extreme exhaustion. Shortly after that he was taken to Vienna where he died (18 May).

Interesting facts:
When he applied for the position of the conductor of the Vienna Opera he was baptised, as at that time the institution was extremely xenophobic and refused any employment to Jews.
He suffered from ischaemic heart disease which often lead to angina pectoris and myocardial infarction.
He was a patient of Sigmund Freud, who subjected him to psychoanalysis.
Mahler’s symphonies are often very long (Symphony No.3 lasts over 1,5 hours) and require a huge cast of performers (Symphony No.8 - called the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the number of musicians needed to perform it).
For a three-month contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York Mahler received a salary equivalent to today’s 300,000 dollars. It has been the highest salary ever paid to a musician.

Aneta Derkowska, PhD