Gustav Mahler

Mahler was born in 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, and died in Vienna in 1911. He was one of the leading conductors of his generation, director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907 and then conductor at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Songs and symphonies are closely linked in his work. The Wunderhorn songs fed directly into the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies, and the First Symphony reuses tunes from his own Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, a four-song cycle to his own texts.

He mixed bird calls, cowbells, bugle fanfares, street melodies and country dances such as the ländler into serious symphonies, and he often broke into solemn passages with trivial tunes, as in the funeral march of the Fifth. His orchestration uses extremes of volume and offstage ensembles. He also used progressive tonality, in which a conflict resolves in a different key from the one where it began: the Fifth moves from C-sharp minor to D major, the Ninth ends in D-flat major, while the Sixth begins and ends in A minor.

The catalog shows how far the plan stretched. The Second adds soloists, chorus and offstage brass to its finale. The Third runs six movements and about 95 to 110 minutes, with an alto soloist, women's and children's choirs and an offstage posthorn. The Fourth has a smaller orchestra without trombones or tuba and ends with a soprano song. The Sixth uses a hammer in its finale and cowbells that clash with the orchestra at the climax of its Andante. The Ninth has slow first and last movements, and of the Tenth only the opening Adagio was completed. Kindertotenlieder, five Rückert poems of 1901 to 1904, uses a chamber-sized orchestra.