Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia (now Kaliště, Czech Republic), in July 1860, the second of fourteen children in a Jewish family of modest means. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory from 1875, and from 1880 worked his way up through a succession of provincial opera houses — Bad Hall, Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg — before his appointment as Director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, a position for which he formally converted from Judaism to Catholicism.

His ten years at the Vienna Opera, during which he transformed both its repertoire and its production standards, were also the period of his major symphonic output. The nine completed symphonies, the *Kindertotenlieder*, the *Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen*, the *Rückert-Lieder*, and *Das Lied von der Erde* (1908–9) were all composed in the few summer months each year that he reserved for writing, at lakeside composing huts in Steinbach, Maiernigg and Toblach. After leaving Vienna in 1907 he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.

Mahler died in Vienna in May 1911 of bacterial endocarditis, leaving the Tenth Symphony in extensive draft. His reputation declined sharply after his death and was revived only in the 1960s by conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink and Sir Georg Solti. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his symphonic and song work in twentieth-century performance.