One hundred years after his death the music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) has become one of the most frequently performed, recorded, and at the same time one of the parts of the concert repertoire that are most sought out by audiences around the world. Thus Mahler´s own vision „Meine Zeit wird kommen“ (My time is yet to come“), which at the beginning of twentieth century rang of an overconfident statement by the author, whose conductor´s demands and perfectionism interfered with the established interpretation habits and a certain level of indolence, and whose compositions brought the music, which provoked and irritated, but at the same time caused incredible enthusiasm, came true unbelievably. It is also of interest that even the completely antagonistic streams of the so-called avant-garde and at the same time the so-called classics of the twentieth century referred to Mahler´s musical legacy in the twentieth century. Both the Second Viennese School (otherwise Arnold Schonberg himself called Mahler a holy man), and Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Krzystof Penderecki as well avow the creative legacy if this author, who was born and spent the first fifteen years of his life in the territory of what today is the Czech Republic.
Gustav Mahler is a great representative of artistic creation as a message and philosophical missive sui generis, of the art, which at the break of two great historical periods tries to bring great humanistic ideals and values, supersending the hitherto religious certainties in the secularising world. The modernity, relevance, and appeal of his music consist in original linking of very heterogeneous elements. If we wanted to paraphrase Paul Stefan, author of one of the first monographs on Gustav Mahler, then indeed, „Mahler´s music begins on the street and ends in infinity…“. A kind of the basic cellular, intonational core of Mahler´s musical fabric is the genre of song, melodic fragment, ditty. This is what Mahler heard around in his childhood and what was typical for his home – Austria-Hungary, variously multinational, multiconfessional, and multicultural, slowly decaying empire. The nostalgia, fear for the fate of the great art and fear for the fate of an intellectual in the modern industrialized and alienated world (the same feelings were expressed by the younger Mahler´s contemporary and also Czech compatriot Franz Kafka) associated with this fact, these are also sentiments which the listeners can identify in the works of Gustav Mahler. That´s why the work of this composer is so topical - not only for the means of its musical expression, but also by its content, which reflects a series of question marks with respect to our present.
prof. PhDr. Jiří Štilec, CSc., President of the Gustav Mahler Society in Czech Republic
