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Born musician
“This is a born musician!”
Julius Epstein at acceptance test during which Mahler also prided himself on his own creations.
Jihlava has a centuries-old musical tradition. The first mention of the local voice school dates back to 1571. Activities of Jihlava “master singers,” together with the development of instrumental and vocal performances in the galleries of St Jacob’s and the Assumption of the Virgin churches – all this created an extraordinary musical environment in the town.
In the 1860s and 1870s club activities developed rapidly, and musical associations held an important position. A typical supporter of the burghers’ musicality was the Musical Association (Musikverein), founded in 1819. The members of the association were mostly the town’s dignitaries and members of the town intelligentsia. The coming of the forms of the new-era musical can be traced to the 1860s. Vocal music in particular represented the most widely spread form of musical social life in the conservative society of the Jihlava burghers. In 1852 the “Men Singers’ Society” (Männer-Gesang-Verein) was founded. Life after the revolutionary year of 1848 featured many musical and theatrical benefit performances, which took place in the new building of the Town Theatre, built in 1850 by the factory owner Jan Okonski by converting the former Capuchin monastery. When Mahler was a youth there operas, operettas, and plays were introduced and then performed throughout the monarchy. Starting in 1870 another spot where the music-loving Jihlava community could meet was the dance hall at the hotel of the factory owner Franz G. Czap (today’s Dělnický dům – Workers’ House).
Thus it was not only the sufficient material support, but also the slowly evolving cultural life in the town, which became the conditioning factors in the development of Gustav Mahler’s musical talent.
The musical talent of Gustav Mahler started to develop very early. Many stories have been passed on that document Mahler’s early musical beginnings and his unusual talent, but unfortunately it is impossible to verify to what extent they are true.
From the beginning his father decided to support his son’s musical talent. Little Gustav’s first teachers included Czech musicians from the town band, whom Gustav knew mostly from the taproom, such as Jakub Sladký, and later Jan Brož and Jan Žižka of the theatre orchestra, its conductor František Viktorin, and the music teachers Václav Pressburg (pupil of Anton Bruckner) and František Sturm. The biggest role in Gustav Mahler’s musical growth was played by a music teacher, a graduate of the Prague Conservatory, the choirmaster at St Jacob and the “Men Singers’ Society” and an organizer of musical life in Jihlava, Heinrich Fischer (1827–1917). It was to him alone that Mahler expressed gratitude for his whole life and wrote to him on all sorts of occasions.
Gustav Mahler’s first public performance took place on October 13, 1870, in the Town Theatre. Jihlava’s public was informed of the first big success of the ten-year-old son of the Jewish merchant Mahler by the Vermittler newspaper of October 16, 1870. On November 11, 1872, young Mahler performed Liszt’s piano variations on Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a soirée at the gymnasium dedicated to Schiller’s anniversary [ed note: Is that the anniversary of Schiller’s birth? You need some thing to qualify the anniversary – anniversary of what?]. The newspapers in those days wrote about a young virtuoso with excellent technique and original interpretation. On April 20, 1873, he won great applause for his performance of Thalberg’s piano phantasy on a theme from the opera Norma. The concert took place in the Town Theatre. Gustav Mahler repeated the same concert on May 17, 1873, in the hall of the Czap Hotel on the occasion of the “Men Singers’ Society” anniversary.
Mahler came regularly to visit his parents, to spend his holidays and days of leisure with them. And Jihlava’s institutions took advantage of the presence of the outstanding and locally well known musician to organize a number of concerts. Immediately during his first vacation there, on July 31, 1876, Mahler, together with his Jihlava colleague Richard Schraml, gave a concert in the hall of the Czap Hotel.
Mahler also gave a concert, with the participation of other conservatory students and members of the Vienna Court Opera, which took place in Jihlava on September 12, 1876, to help purchase teaching aids for the gymnasium.
Several successful concerts followed: On April 24, 1879, there was a gala concert to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the marriage of the imperial couple in the Town Theatre, on September 19, 1882, he conducted the operetta Boccaccio by Franz von Suppé, and on August 11, 1883, he gave a benefit concert for the Red Cross accompanying the violin player Míla Ottová and conducting Kunze’s operetta Kaffeekränzchen, again in the Town Theatre.
