Composers: The Man Who Speaks To a High-Strung Generation

• Share

After the première 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 Bülow 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 café 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.