On 12 September 1910, audiences in Munich were treated to a unique classical music extravaganza. For the premiere of his 8th Symphony, Gustav Mahler had assembled a performing cast that stretched the resources to their limits. It involved 858 singers,

The birth of Gustav Mahler, the second of fourteen children born to Bernhard Mahler and Marie Mahler née Herrmann, was announced on 7 July 1860 in Kalischt, a small settlement on the border of Moravia. His parents were members of

After listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the American physician and poet Lewis Thomas wrote an essay that addresses the anxieties produced by the development of nuclear weapons. “I cannot listen to Mahler’s Ninth with anything like the old melancholy mixed

The Birth of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony When he started work on his second symphony, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) started with a funerary idea. After a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s comic opera Die drei Pintos, which Mahler had completed from

On 9 June 1902, Gustav Mahler treated the audience in Krefeld to the premiere of his complete 3rd Symphony. The second movement alone had first sounded on 9 November 1896, and the second, third and sixth movements on 9 March

Gustav Mahler conducted the premier performance of his 6th Symphony on 27 May 1906 at the Saalbau Concert Hall in Essen. It was conceived and composed during a period of great personal happiness and professional success. In 1902 he had

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, nicknamed, though not by him, Tragic, was actually written at a happy time for Mahler. He completed it in 1903 after having married the 21-year-old Alma Schindler in 1902, and while he was composing the work, his

The problems with performances in the age of Covid is that the large orchestral works are just too dangerous to assemble. In Erwin Stein’s 1921 arrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, created for Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Society for Private Musical Performances,’