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

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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 protégé 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."