The Man Who Speaks To a High-Strung Generation

After the premiere of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony at the 1902 Krefeld Festival in Germany, one reviewer concluded that "the composer should be shot." The first Vienna performance of Mahler's Fourth drove the audience to such fury that fistfights broke out all over the concert hall. Conductor Hans von Buelow refused to perform Mahler's works because they were "much too strange." In the face of such hostility, Mahler remained stoic. "My time will come," he predicted.

Today, 56 years after his death, it has. His nine symphonies and the unfinished Tenth, several symphonic song cycles and numerous lieder came out of eclipse after World War II, nudged into the periphery of standard works in the early '60s, and now--played and appreciated as never before--are sparking a full-scale Mahler boom.

In the U.S., the number of recordings of Mahler works has leaped from ten in 1952 to 81 this year--three of which are currently among the 40 best-selling classical LPs. At least four record companies are issuing complete sets of the symphonies under a single conductor. The Pittsburgh Symphony's William Steinberg is planning an unprecedented series of seven Mahler concerts for the orchestra next season, three of them in New York. In Paris, no fewer than ten concerts since January have featured Mahler compositions. And in Austria last week, the Vienna Festival wound up a monthlong, twelve-concert survey of nearly all of the composer's major works. Appropriately, leading Mahlerite Leonard Bernstein climaxed the festival by conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a 100-voice Vienna Opera choir in an incisive, wrenchingly emotional performance of the Second Symphony ("The Resurrection"), which ends with the choral prophecy: "Thou shall surely rise again."

Mahler's own musical resurrection is all the more impressive in view of the practical and esthetic difficulties that bristle throughout his work. Most of his symphonies are so long that they take up an entire concert, often require more than 100 instrumentalists and at least that many singers (his Eighth Symphony is scored for as many as 1,000 musicians). Folk tunes, military marches and cafe ditties jostle each other in the symphonies--sometimes with deliberately sarcastic effect--against rich, romantic textures and harsher lines that range out boldly to the limits of traditional tonality. Mahler plunges the listener from surging eddies of counterpoint into brooding, tragic depths, or lifts him with sudden paroxysms of melody into the heights of metaphysical yearning.

Naked Nerves. Why does this appeal so powerfully to modern audiences? U.S. Critic Jack Diether points to the "existentialist" strain in Mahler: "He is the only composer who looked into our whole civilization, who questioned the whole basis of our existence." Says Rafael Kubelik, who conducted Mahler's Eighth at Vienna last week: "He's a sufferer who forces man to look into a mirror. He exposes naked nerves." The Angst, as well as the questing spirit of Mahler's music, no doubt explains its special meaning for today's college-age youth, who are among the biggest buyers of Mahler recordings, and who made up about 40% of the Vienna Festival audience. As Conductor Steinberg puts it: "Mahler was a high-strung genius who speaks today to a high-strung generation."

Mahler, born in 1860, was one of the last great Romantics. Because of the way he transformed the symphonic tradition extending from Mozart to Anton Bruckner, he was also, in Steinberg's words, "the father of contemporary music--the forerunner of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern." Yet no composer was ever less interested in the objective development of musical form as such. For Mahler, composing was a highly subjective process of grappling with the deepest, most painful questions of life. "The creative act and actual experience," he said, are "one and the same."

Shadow Plays. In his struggle to maintain that fusion, he very nearly realized the wish that he once expressed as a little boy--to grow up to be "a martyr." He was accepted at the Vienna Conservatory at 15, later supported himself by conducting, and at 37 became director of the Vienna Opera. He swept out has-been singers and dusty traditions, and turned out the polished, provocative productions that made him one of Europe's major musical forces. He was also a fanatical-looking figure--5 ft. 6 in. tall, thin, gazing fiercely from behind rimless spectacles--yet, as his protege Bruno Walter wrote, "his spirit never knew escape from the torturing question: 'For what?' " Demon-driven, he sought the answer in the music he wrote in spare moments, making each piece a gigantic shadow play of the dark forces that struggled in his soul.

Shortly before leaving the Vienna Opera in 1907, Mahler learned that he had a serious heart ailment. He said his farewell to earthly joys and confronted death in the hauntingly bittersweet song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and the coolly spiritual Ninth Symphony. Weakened by overwork, he caught a streptococcus infection while struggling feverishly with his Tenth Symphony ("The devil is dancing with me!" he scrawled in the margin), and died at 50 in 1911. His life was incomplete but, as he once expressed it, "I am a musician; that says everything."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.