Mahler was a titan, a genius who took on a tremendous creative responsibility at a critical time--carrying the symphonic tradition over the century mark from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. He brought the symphony from the diversity and confusion of the Romantic and post-Romantic era over to the modern era. It was a great task, undertaken with much soul-searching and incredible quantities of labor. In doing it, Mahler inevitably colored the symphonic form with his own personality--one that was spiritual, emotional, and intellectual, tinged with melancholy and isolation. But he also laid the foundation for the symphony of the twentieth century--for all large-scale composition of our time, in fact--by taking the form to the limit and pushing it even further, into individualist fragmentation that brought the orchestra new transparency and character.
Mahler was born to a Jewish family on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian town of Kalist. He was the second of fourteen children and the first of six to live to maturity. His father ran a brewery and tavern, and had married a woman of higher social standing in hopes of advancing the lot of both himself and his children. The marriage was not to be a happy one; the father was an angry and often violent man, and some of young Gustav's earliest recollections were to be those of bitter quarrels and fights in the home.
Fortunately, the Moravian town of Iglau in which he was raised offered Gustav more congenial and musical inspiration and furnished him with materials that appear time and time again in his symphonies--folk songs and peasant dances (including the hearty Landler, or early waltzes), military marches and calls from the nearby army barracks, birdcalls and close contact with Nature.
At the edge of four, young Gustav had already shown musical promise by picking out simple melodies on the family's accordion. The family sought first the advice of the local theater conductor, who taught him for several years before referring him to another, more advanced, teacher for piano lessons. By age ten, Gustav had appeared in public as a pianist, and he was even sent to Prague for a term or two. But the move was not successful, and he returned to his town for further study. He threw himself into all his subjects; he was an uneven genius who was fascinated by weird Romantic stories and poems as much as by music. Throughout his life, he was to be an omnivorous reader, concerned with all aspects of religion and spiritual experience, seeing them as related to music, and vice versa.
It was at the age of fifteen that Mahler finally made the great journey to Vienna, enrolling at the Conservatory and concentrating on composition, conducting, and piano. He was entranced, as was almost every other European his age, by the music of Wagner, and he considered himself called to opera composition. He began two operas, both destroyed later when he had reached a more critical stage of development.
While at the Conservatory, Mahler made the acquaintance of Anton Bruckner, who soon became a close friend. One of his first published works, in fact, was a piano arrangement of Bruckner's Third Symphony, completed when young Gustav was only eighteen. His piano studies familiarized him with the works of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and Weber, as well as J. S. Bach; their influences were to be permanent in his own compositions. At graduation, he was awarded a prize for piano
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