Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro/German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. His music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era.
About Gustav Mahler in brief
Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro/German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. His music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners, and he has sustained into the 21st century. In 2016, a BBC Music Magazine survey of 151 conductors ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphony of all time. Mahler’s immediate musical successors included the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. His works are generally designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955 to honour the composer’s life and achievements. The composer’s grandmother had been a street pedlar. The Mahler family came from eastern Bohemia, and were of humble circumstances. The future composer developed early on a permanent sense of exile, \”always an intruder, never welcomed\”. His father, Bernhard Mahler, was a coachman and later an innkeeper.
He bought a modest house in the village of Kaliště, and in 1857 married Marie Frank, the 19-year-old daughter of a local soap manufacturer. In the following year Marie gave birth to the first of the couple’s 14 children, a son Isidor, who died in infancy. Two years later, on 7 July 1860, their second son, Gustav, was born. In December 1860, the family moved with his wife and infant son to the town of Jihlava, where Bernhard built up a successful distillery and tavern business. The family grew rapidly, but of the 12 children born to the family in the town, only six survived infancy. Although Gustav loved making music, his school reports from the Iglau Gymnasium portrayed him as absent-minded and unreliable in his academic work. In 1871, his father sent him to Newglau in the hope of improving the boy’s academic work, but he was unhappy and returned to Prague. All later later in his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor. He was briefly director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. His Eighth Symphony was the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. His Second Symphony, Third Symphony, and the Fourth Symphony were slow to receive critical and popular approval; exceptions included his Fourth Symphony, Fourth Symphony and Fifth Symphony.
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