Gustav Mahler raised the Vienna Opera to new heights

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

The story

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 to Jewish parents of humble origins in the Bohemian village of Kaliště. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878 he rose through a series of conducting posts across Europe, from small theatres to Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg. In 1897, at 38, he was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera, the Hofoper. The writer Stefan Zweig later recalled the astonishment in Vienna that such a young man had been given the city's highest artistic post.

Mahler began with acclaimed performances of Wagner's Lohengrin and Mozart's The Magic Flute and Vienna's first uncut Ring cycle. During his decade there he introduced 33 new operas and mounted 55 new or completely revamped productions. From 1903 he worked with the designer Alfred Roller, and together they created more than 20 celebrated productions, beginning with Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. He demanded the highest standards from singers and players, and his methods, though often resented, transformed the quality of performances. By the time he left he had also cleared the opera house's debts. He conducted his 645th and final performance there, Beethoven's Fidelio, on 15 October 1907.

His work in Vienna established his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, especially in Wagner, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. He later led the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.

Composing mostly in his summers, at lakeside huts in Austria, Mahler wrote vast symphonies and song cycles for large orchestras, choruses and soloists. His Vienna years were especially fruitful, producing the Fourth to Eighth Symphonies, the Rückert-Lieder and the Kindertotenlieder. Many of his works were slow to win acceptance, and the Nazis later banned his music, but after 1945 a new generation rediscovered it.

He became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers and influenced Schoenberg, Berg, Shostakovich and Britten. In Vienna he is remembered as the director who brought new life to the opera house, uniting music, staging and design in productions that set a benchmark for the century that followed.