After Mahler’s death, his music fell into major disrepute and near-total neglect for several decades. While he was internationally famous as a brilliant, autocratic conductor during his lifetime, his compositions were heavily criticized and failed to find immediate acceptance into the mainstream classical canon.
The suppression of his music occurred in three major historical phases:
• Fin-de-Siècle Anti-Semitism: Even during his life, Mahler’s music faced fierce hostility from nationalistic and anti-Semitic critics in Vienna and Germany. Critics weaponized Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic essays to dismiss Mahler’s grand symphonies as “dishonest,” “sentimental,” and un-German.
• The Nazi Ban: Following the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s, the Nazi regime officially labeled Mahler’s works as “degenerate music” (Entartete Musik). His music was completely banned from concert halls across German-occupied Europe, his scores were purged, and Mahlerstraße (Mahler Street) in Vienna was renamed.
• Post-War Coldness: After World War II, his music did not bounce back immediately. Lingering Nazi-era cultural attitudes in Germany and Austria meant that musicologists and institutions actively minimized his contributions well into the 1950s.
Mahler’s global “Renaissance” didn’t truly take off until around his centenary in 1960. Champions like his protégé Bruno Walter and, most famously, Leonard Bernstein began heavily conducting and recording his symphonies, permanently cementing Mahler into the core orchestral repertoire.
The 2nd symphony is called Resurrection because it is concerned with mortality and life after death. This is a beautiful recording, and while it is long, I hope that you will listen to it.
Fourth Movement, Urlicht
O Röschen roth!
Der Mensch liegt in größter Noth!
Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein!
Je lieber möcht’ ich in Himmel sein!
Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg:
Da kam ein Engelein und wollt’ mich abweisen.
Ach nein! Ich ließ mich nicht abweisen:
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis in das ewig selig Leben!
Fourth Movement, Primoridial Light
O little red rose!
Man lies in greatest need!
Man lies in greatest suffering!
How much rather would I be in Heaven!
I came upon a broad road.
There came an angel and wanted to block my way.
Ah no! I did not let myself be turned away!
I am of God, and to God I shall return.
Dear God will grant me a small light,
Will light my way to eternal, blissful life!
Fifth Movement, Auferstehen
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du,
Mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!
Unsterblich Leben
Wird der dich rief dir geben.
Wieder aufzublüh’n wirst du gesät!
Der Herr der Ernte geht
Und sammelt Garben
Uns ein, die starben.
O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube:
Es geht dir nichts verloren!
Dein ist, was du gesehnt!
Dein, was du geliebt, Was du gestritten!
O glaube:
Du wardst nicht umsonst geboren!
Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!
Was entstanden ist, das muß vergehen!
Was vergangen, auferstehen!
Hör’ auf zu beben!
Bereite dich zu leben!
O Schmerz! Du Alldurchdringer!
Dir bin ich entrungen!
O Tod! Du Allbezwinger!
Nun bist du bezwungen!
Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen,
In heißem Liebesstreben,
Werd’ ich entschweben
Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug’ gedrungen!
Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du,
Mein Herz, in einem Nu!
Was du geschlagen,
Zu Gott wird es dich tragen!
Fifth Movement, Resurrection
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My dust, after a short rest!
Eternal life!
Will be given you by Him who called you.
To bloom again are you sown.
The lord of the harvest goes
And gathers the sheaves,
Us who have died.
O believe, my heart, oh believe,
Nothing will be lost to you!
Everything is yours that you have desired,
Yours, what you have loved, what you have struggled for.
O believe,
You were not born in vain,
Have not lived in vain, suffered in vain!
What was created must perish,
What has perished must rise again.
Tremble no more!
Prepare yourself to live!
O Sorrow, all-penetrating!
I have been wrested away from you!
O Death, all-conquering!
Now you are conquered!
With wings that I won
In the passionate strivings of love
I shall mount
To the light to which no sight has penetrated.
I shall die, so as to live!
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My heart, in an instant!
What you have conquered
Will bear you to God.
Gustav Mahler
July 7, 1860 – 18 May 18, 1911
Mahler was an Austrian Jewish composer and conductor, noted for his 10 symphonies and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of 20th-century techniques of composition and an acknowledged influence on such composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.
Mahler was the son of an Austrian Jewish distiller and tavern keeper living in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt), in the southwestern corner of what is now the Czech Republic. Within months of his birth, the family moved to the nearby town of Jihlava (German: Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood and youth. These simple facts provide a first clue to his tormented personality: he was afflicted by racial tensions from the beginning of his life. As part of a German-speaking Austrian minority, he was an outsider among the indigenous Czech population and, as a Jew, an outsider among that Austrian minority; later, in Germany, he was an outsider as both an Austrian from Bohemia and a Jew.
His musical talent revealed itself early and significantly. Around the age of four, fascinated by the military music at a nearby barracks and the folk music sung by the Czech working people, he reproduced both on the accordion and on the piano and began composing pieces of his own. The military and popular styles, together with the sounds of nature, became main sources of his mature inspiration. At 10 he made his debut as a pianist in Jihlava and at 15 was so proficient musically that he was accepted as a pupil at the Vienna Conservatory. After winning piano and composition prizes and leaving with a diploma, he supported himself by sporadic teaching while trying to win recognition as a composer. When he failed to win the Conservatory’s Beethoven Prize for composition with his first significant work, the cantata Das klagende Lied (completed 1880; The Song of Complaint), he turned to conducting for a more secure livelihood, reserving composition for the lengthy summer vacations.
The next 17 years saw his ascent to the very top of his chosen profession. From conducting musical farces in Austria, he rose through various provincial opera houses, including important engagements at Budapest and Hamburg, to become artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, at age 37. As a conductor he had won general acclaim, but as a composer, during this first creative period, he immediately encountered the public’s lack of comprehension that was to confront him for most of his career.
Musical works: first period
Each of Mahler’s three creative periods produced a symphonic trilogy. The three symphonies of his first period were conceived on a programmatic basis (i.e., founded on a nonmusical story or idea), the actual programs (later discarded) being concerned with establishing some ultimate ground for existence in a world dominated by pain, death, doubt, and despair. To this end, he followed the example of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major (Pastoral) and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in building symphonies with more than the then traditional four movements; that of Wagner’s music-dramas in expanding the time span, enlarging the orchestral resources, and indulging in uninhibited emotional expression; that of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Choral) in introducing texts sung by soloists and chorus; and that of certain chamber works by Franz Schubert in introducing music from his own songs (settings of poems from the German folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Youth’s Magic Horn] or of poems by himself in a folk style).
Mahler’s disturbing early background, coupled with his lack of an inherited Jewish faith (his father was a freethinker), resulted in a state of metaphysical torment, which he resolved temporarily by identifying himself with Christianity. That this was a genuine impulse there can be no doubt, even if there was an element of expediency in his becoming baptized, early in 1897, because it made it easier for him to be appointed to the Vienna Opera post. The 10 years there represent his more balanced middle period. His newfound faith and his new high office brought a full and confident maturity, which was further stabilized by his marriage in 1902 to Alma Maria Schindler, who bore him two daughters, in 1902 and 1904.
Musical works: middle period
Most of the works of this middle period reflect the fierce dynamism of Mahler’s full maturity. An exception is Symphony No. 4 (1900; popularly called Ode to Heavenly Joy), which is more of a pendant to the first period: conceived in six movements (two of which were eventually discarded), it has a Wunderhorn song finale for soprano, which was originally intended as a movement for Symphony No. 3 and which evokes a naive peasant conception of the Christian heaven. At the same time, in dispensing with an explicit program and a chorus and coming near to the normal orchestral symphony, it does foreshadow the middle-period trilogy, Nos. 5, 6, and 7. These are all purely orchestral, with a new, hardedged, contrapuntal clarity of instrumentation, and devoid of programs altogether, yet each clearly embodies a spiritual conflict that reaches a conclusive resolution. No. 5 (1902; popularly called Giant) and No. 7 (1905; popularly called Song of the Night) move from darkness to light, though the light seems not the illumination of any afterlife but the sheer exhilaration of life on Earth. Both symphonies have five movements. Between them stands the work Mahler regarded as his Tragic Symphony—the four-movement No. 6 in A Minor (1904), which moves out of darkness only with difficulty, and then back into total night. From these three symphonies onward, he ceased to adapt his songs as whole sections or movements, but in each he introduced subtle allusions, either to his Wunderhorn songs or to his settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, including the cycle Kindertotenlieder (1901–04; Songs on the Deaths of Children).
At the end of this period he composed his monumental Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major (1907) for eight soloists, double choir, and orchestra—a work known as the Symphony of a Thousand, owing to the large forces it requires, though Mahler gave it no such title. This stands apart, as a later reversion to the expansive metaphysical tendencies of the first period, and represents a consummation of them: the first continuously choral and orchestral symphony ever composed. It could be called at once a massive statement of human aspirations and a cry for illumination, from both the religious and the humanistic points of view. The first of its two parts, equivalent to a symphonic first movement, is a setting of the medieval Roman Catholic Pentecost hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”; part two, amalgamating the three movement-types of the traditional symphony, has for its text the mystical closing scene of J.W. von Goethe’s Faust drama (the scene of Faust’s redemption). The work marked the climax of Mahler’s confident maturity, since what followed was disaster—of which, he believed, he had had a premonition in composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6. This work had revealed for the first time a superstitious element in his personality. The finale originally contained three climactic blows with a large hammer, representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled” (he subsequently removed the final blow from the score). Afterward he identified these as presaging the three blows that fell on himself in 1907, the last of which portended his own death: his resignation was demanded at the Vienna Opera, his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died, and a doctor diagnosed his fatal heart disease.
Musical works: last period
Thus began Mahler’s last period, in which, at age 47, he became a wanderer again. He was obliged to make a new reputation for himself, as a conductor in the United States, directing performances at the Metropolitan Opera and becoming conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York; yet he went back each summer to the Austrian countryside to compose his last works. He returned finally to Vienna, to die there, in 1911.
This last-period trilogy marked an even more decisive break with the past than had the middle-period trilogy. It represents a threefold attempt to come to terms with the modern individual’s fundamental problem—the reality of death, which in his case had effectively destroyed the religious faith he had opposed to death as an imagined event. Das Lied von der Erde—a six-movement “song-cycle symphony” as opposed to the two-part “oratorio symphony,” No. 8—views the evanescence of all things human in veiled poetic terms—sardonic, wistful, and grief-stricken by turns—until it finds a sad consolation in the beauty of the Earth that endures after the individual is no longer alive to see it.
In the four-movement No. 9, purely orchestral, the confrontation with death becomes an anguished personal one, evoking horror and bitterness in Mahler’s most modern and prophetic movement, the “Rondo-Burleske,” and culminating in a finale of heartbroken resignation. The finales of both these works end with an extraordinary, long-drawn disintegration of the musical texture, suggesting dissolution, and the more extreme case in No. 9 was for long thought to be Mahler’s final comment on human existence. Growing familiarity with the sketch of No. 10, however, has suggested that he broke through to a more positive attitude: its five movements deal with the same conflict as the two preceding works, but the resignation attained at the end of the finale is entirely serene and affirmative.
Legacy
Modern critical opinion recognizes Mahler’s powerful influence during a period of musical transition. In his works may be found pervasive elements foreshadowing the radical methods employed in the 20th century: these elements include “progressive tonality” (ending a work in a different key from the initial one); dissolution of tonality (obscuring the perception of key through the constant use of chromaticism or harmonies not belonging to that key); a breakaway from harmony produced by the entire orchestra in favour of a contrapuntal texture (based on interwoven melodies) for groups of solo instruments within the full orchestra; the principle of continually varying themes rather than merely restating them; ironic quotation of popular styles and of sounds from everyday life (bird calls, bugle signals, etc.); and, on the other hand, a new way of formally unifying the symphony through the adoption of techniques subtly derived from Liszt’s “cyclic” method (the carrying over of themes from one movement of a work to others).
In terms of the personal content of his art, it can be said of Mahler, more than of any other composer, that he lived out the spiritual torment of disinherited modern man in his art, and that the man is the music.
Bruno Walter
September 15, 1876 – February 17, 1962
Walter was a German conductor known primarily for his interpretations of the Viennese school. Though out of step with 20th-century trends, he was such a fine musician that he became a major figure—filling the wide gulf between the extremes of his day, Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
He began his career as a pianist but made his debut as a conductor in 1894 at the Cologne Opera. By 1900 he was at the State Opera in Berlin, and in the following year he became Gustav Mahler’s associate in Vienna—the beginning of what was to be a lifetime spent in promotion of the master’s music. He conducted the premieres of Das Lied von der Erde (1911) and the Ninth Symphony (1912). Walter moved to the Munich Opera (1914–22) and from 1922 conducted at Salzburg, where his interest in Mozart developed. Other appointments followed: at the Berlin Municipal Opera (1925–29) and as Furtwängler’s successor in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra (1929–33). The advent of the Nazi regime in Germany forced him to leave Leipzig and his Berlin concerts; he moved first to Vienna (1936–38), then to Paris, and finally to the United States (1939). He conducted frequently at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic (musical adviser, 1947–49).