Gustav Mahler's music outlived a Nazi ban

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

The story

In Gustav Mahler's lifetime, his status as a conductor was beyond question, but his own music met with mixed and often hostile reactions. Critics struggled with the First Symphony for years, and in Vienna the antisemitic press attacked almost every performance. Still, by his death in 1911, his friend Guido Adler calculated, his symphonies had been performed more than 260 times across Europe, Russia and America, the Fourth most often of all. Mahler himself once wished he could premiere his symphonies fifty years after his death.

In the decades that followed, performances became less frequent, but devoted conductors kept his music alive. Willem Mengelberg made Mahler a fixture in the Netherlands and brought him to New York Philharmonic audiences from 1922 to 1928. Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer conducted him in Germany and Austria, Leopold Stokowski gave the American premiere of the Eighth Symphony in 1916, and the young Aaron Copland championed him as a composer ahead of his time.

Then the Nazi regime banned Mahler's music as degenerate because of his Jewish birth. Under the Nazis his works were performed only by Jewish orchestras for Jewish audiences, in Berlin in 1941 and in occupied Amsterdam.

After 1945 a new generation discovered his music. Conductors including Dimitri Mitropoulos, John Barbirolli and Stokowski pressed his cause, and Leonard Bernstein gave the revival fresh energy around Mahler's centenary in 1960. The biographer Jonathan Carr credits the long-playing record, which from the early 1950s let listeners hear his long symphonies at home, again and again. Enthusiasm spread even to Spain, France and Italy, which had long resisted his music.

Today Mahler is one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers. In a 2016 BBC Music Magazine survey of 151 conductors, three of his symphonies were ranked among the ten greatest ever written. The International Gustav Mahler Society, founded in Vienna in 1955, works on a complete critical edition of his music, and his influence can be heard in composers from Shostakovich and Britten to the film scores of John Williams.