Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony premiered in triumph

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

The story

For much of his life, Gustav Mahler's symphonies met a mix of enthusiasm, confusion and critical contempt. His Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies failed to win general public approval at first, and critics mocked his unconventional orchestral effects, such as the wooden mallet, birch rods and huge bass drum of the Sixth. In Vienna, hostile newspapers attacked almost every performance of his music.

The Eighth Symphony was different. Mahler wrote it in a single inspired burst at his summer villa at Maiernigg in 1906, in about eight weeks. Instead of the usual separate movements, it has two parts: a setting of the ninth-century Latin hymn Veni creator spiritus, and the closing scene of Goethe's Faust, united by the idea of redemption through love. Turning away from the darkness of much of his music, Mahler offered it as an expression of confidence in the human spirit.

The premiere required enormous forces. Choirs from Munich, Leipzig and Vienna prepared in their home towns, the Munich Zentral-Singschule supplied 350 children, and Bruno Walter recruited the eight soloists. The impresario Emil Gutmann hired the new 3,200-seat Neue Musik-Festhalle in Munich and coined the nickname "Symphony of a Thousand", which Mahler disliked. On 12 September 1910 Mahler conducted the Munich Philharmonic before a sold-out audience that included Richard Strauss, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Webern, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Max Reinhardt and the young Leopold Stokowski.

The occasion was a triumph, described by the biographer Jonathan Carr as easily Mahler's biggest lifetime success. Applause lasted twenty minutes or more, and Thomas Mann wrote to Mahler that he expressed the art of the time in its most profound and sacred form. Mahler conducted a repeat performance the next day.

It was the last of his works to be premiered in his lifetime; he died the following May, aged 50. Within three years the Eighth had been performed some 20 more times across Europe, and Stokowski gave the American premiere in Philadelphia in 1916. Since the mid-20th century it has been heard in concert halls around the world, opening the Sydney Olympic Arts Festival in 2000 and the BBC Proms in Mahler's 150th anniversary year, 2010. The critic Deryck Cooke called it the Choral Symphony of the twentieth century.