MG Gustav Mahler

Coductor and opera director

Gustav Mahler entered the Vienna conservatory in September 1875. He studied piano with Professor Julius Epstein, and composition and counterpoint with Franz Krenn. The conservatory provided education to future pianists and composers. In that time no special conductor’s teaching existed yet. Only in 1909, when the private conservatory changed into the Government Vienna Academy, the “choirmasters‘ school“ was established. When Gustav Mahler was a student a general musical education was considered a precondition for a conductor’s career. This included in particular impromptu piano playing, playing from a score, and the ability to compose and improvise. The basic education also comprised outstanding management of the trade, including harmony and counterpoint. Thus it can’t be asserted that Mahler became an outstanding conductor without relevant teaching, only that he had no particular teacher. But the conservatory’s teaching provided him with everything that was then important for a conductor. The conservatory education was extensive and practical.

After finishing at the conservatory in 1880 Mahler entered his first engagement as the conductor of a summer theatre orchestra in the spa town of Bad Hall, in Upper Austria. He worked there in May and June, 1880. After that he went to Ljubljana, where he worked in 1881 and 1882, and from January to March 1883 he was principal of the Royal Town Theatre orchestra in Olomouc. From there he went to Kassel (1883-1855), and afterwards he took a position in Prague at the German Royal Land Theatre (1885-1886) with director Angelo Neumann. He presented the opera Don Giovanni by W.A. Mozart and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with great success. Afterwards, from 1886 to 1888 he worked as the second conductor at the Town Theatre of Leipzig. From 1888 to 1891 he took the position of art director at the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest, from where he went to Hamburg to a position as the first conductor of the Town Theatre (1891-1897). In that period he was already an acknowledged European conductor and had engagements in many big cities (his guest engagement in London from June to July 1892 was a great success).

In 1897 he gained the most prestigious position possible in that period: he became the principal conductor and director of the Court Opera in Vienna. There he cooperated with stage designers Heinrich Lefler and Alfred Roller in the implementation of operatic works. He engaged the best vocalists, and he placed stringent demands on the orchestra and on performances. His engagement as the director can be characterised as the period when opera flowered and the beginning of a new way of staging operas. He worked as the director till 1907. Then he took an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he stayed till his death. Starting in 1909 he also conducted for the New York Philharmonic. During his American stay he gave concerts not only in New York, but also in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. In almost three hundred concerts Mahler featured almost four hundreds musical works by approximately ninety composers.

Most frequently he featured the works of Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Johann Strauss, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Of Czech composers he several times featured the operatic works of Bedřich Smetana as well as Píseň bohatýrská (A Hero's Song) by Antonín Dvořák.

“As an ingenious conductor Mahler had no serious competitors. All musical experts and journalists acknowledged his virtues as a musician and as a reviver of opera, a reputation which he gained as a conductor, repertory adviser, stage manager, and adviser of the singers.” (FISCHER, T.: Gustav Mahler; from lecture of the author of 21. 3. 1931. In: JAROŠ, Z. Young Gustav Mahler and Jihlava, MVJ 1994, p. 26.)