Gustav Mahler championed the young Arnold Schoenberg

Person: Gustav Mahler
Lived: 1860–1911
Field: Music
From: Austrian

The story

In the first decade of the 20th century, Vienna was the centre of a musical revolution. Gustav Gustav Mahler, director of the Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, was himself a target of constant attack from conservative and antisemitic critics. Many of his own symphonies were met with mockery when first performed, so he knew what it was like to be misunderstood.

Mahler's first disciples included Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who together founded the Second Viennese School, one of the most influential movements in 20th-century music. Mahler's music shaped their move from late romantic harmony towards atonality, music without a home key. Their work would transform how composers thought about harmony for the rest of the century.

Mahler himself rejected atonality, but he became a fierce defender of the bold originality of Schoenberg's work. At the premiere of Schoenberg's First String Quartet in February 1907, when hecklers disrupted the performance, Mahler reportedly had to be held back from physically confronting them. Berg later called Mahler's Ninth Symphony the most marvellous thing he ever wrote, and Webern was in the audience at the triumphant Munich premiere of the Eighth Symphony in 1910.

Schoenberg never forgot that support. At Mahler's funeral in 1911, his wreath described him as "the holy Gustav Mahler". The musicologist Donald Mitchell notes that Schoenberg's Serenade (1923), Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra (1915) and Webern's Six Pieces (1928) all carry echoes of Mahler's Seventh Symphony.

Mahler's influence reached composers far beyond Vienna. Mitchell lists Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill, Luciano Berio, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten among those who absorbed his techniques, and Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber were also influenced by him. Mitchell concluded that even if his own music did not survive, Mahler would live on in the music of these successors. His generosity towards younger, more radical composers helped open the way for the new music of the 20th century.