Mahler, Gustav
1860 - 1911.
Austrian composer and conductor.

His epic symphonies express a world-weary Romanticism in visionary tableaux incorporating folk music and pastoral imagery. He composed nine large-scale symphonies, many with voices, including Symphony No 2 Resurrection 1884-86, revised 1893-96, and left a tenth unfinished. He also composed orchestral lieder including Das Lied von der Erde/The Song of the Earth 1909 and Kindertotenlieder/Dead Children's Songs 1901-04. The Symphony No 2 second movement, based on a laendler (folk dance in three time), is reinterpreted in stream-of-consciousness mode by Berio in Sinfonia 1968, into which Berio inserts a history of musical references from J S Bach to Stockhausen.  The Adagietto slow movement from Symphony No 5 provided a perfect foil for Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice 1971. Mahler was born in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic); he studied at the Vienna Conservatoire, and conducted in Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg 1891-97. He was director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 and conducted the New York Philharmonic from 1910.