5
Bohemia and Moravia were parts of an empire governed by a German-speaking
monarchy and an administration based in Vienna. Mahler was born before the Hapsburgs
were humiliated in the war with Prussia in 1866, a defeat that led to a structural reform in
1867 that transformed the empire into the so-called dual monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. If that reform had created a triple monarchy and recognized the equality of the
Slavic population, particularly the Czechs, the Habsburg monarchy might have survived
and World War I averted. Mahler, an acculturated, secularly educated, and highly literate
German-speaking Jew from a Czech province who settled in Vienna, represented the
truly quintessential and ideal subject of the late 19th-century multi-national monarchy, a
cultivated individual without an overriding reductive allegiance to any single religion,
nationality, or ethnicity. In the Habsburg monarchy, devotion to a cosmopolitan ideal of
learning and art could secure political loyalty.
Much has been made of Mahler’s childhood. His mother, Marie, to whom the composer
was devoted, was a soap manufacturer’s daughter; his father Bernhardt owned a tavern.
Moving to Iglau from Kalischt was a reflection of Bernhardt’s desire to better his
circumstances and status. Bernhardt, who followed his father’s footsteps into the liquor
business, was said to be harsh and abusive and his marriage to Marie to be troubled.
Gustav was the oldest of 14 children, of whom only six survived. He was closest to his
sister Justine, born in 1868, who later married one of her older brother’s colleagues and
friends, the legendary violinist and longtime concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic,
Arnold Rose. Mahler’s close relationship with his sister would be compromised only by
the enmity and contempt directed at her by Mahler’s bride, Alma.
Except for a brief sojourn in Prague in 1871, Mahler’s formal schooling took place in
Iglau. Among aspiring urban Jewish families eager to acquire secular German culture,
music education was indispensable. Gustav, who showed early aptitude, made his public
debut as a pianist at age 10 in Iglau. By 1873 Maher was playing serious virtuoso piano
music, including Sigismond Thalberg’s “Fantasia and Variations on Themes from
Norma.” A career in music appeared plausible and promising. At age 15 Mahler enrolled
in the Vienna Conservatory, primarily to study with the legendary piano teacher (and
friend of Brahms) Julius Epstein.
The years Mahler studied in Vienna, the second half of the 1870s, were politically and
culturally decisive for more than his generation. The physical transformation of the city
that began with the creation of the Ringstrasse in the l850s was well under way. But the
financial crash of 1873 brought the liberal boom years of the 1860s to a sudden halt and
ushered in an era of stagnation that would last until the mid-1890s. During those two long
decades the beginnings of an anti-liberal and anti-capitalist political populism, including
outspoken anti-Semitism, began to develop. By the late 1870s the most visible and
prominent minority in Vienna were the Jews, who exceeded their proper demographic
proportion in terms of enrollment in the Vienna University and the conservatory.
Throughout the years Mahler lived in Vienna, the city remained a magnet for people from
within the multi-ethnic empire, even in times of financial distress. Vienna was city of
newcomers. By 1900 only a small proportion of residents in Vienna had been born in the
city.
6
By 1875 Brahms had established himself as a major cultural influence and a force to be
reckoned with in the city’s musical life. Vienna boasted a great new opera house, a new
concert hall (the Musikverein), piano manufacturers, publishers, innumerable choral
societies, a fine orchestra, several concert series, and the most prominent citizen-based
association dedicated to music on the continent of Europe, the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde, an organization that sponsored the conservatory. Brahms had just stepped
down as director of the Gesellschaft’s concert series the year Mahler arrived as a student.
Brahms did not teach, but he sat on the governing board of the Gesellschaft and his allies
dominated the conservatory faculty. He and his circle were seen as part of a liberal,
tolerant, philo-Semitic elite in the city.
Yet by 1875 Wagner’s popularity as prophet of a persuasive progressive vision of the link
between art and life had reached new heights. That year Wagner, who had lived in
Vienna briefly in the early 1860s, returned to the city in triumph to give a series of
concerts and conduct one performance of Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera. The students
and the faculty at the conservatory became profoundly engaged in the culture wars of the
mid-1870s, most of which involved a reaction to Wagner’s music and Wagnerian ideas.
Among the key beliefs associated with Wagner was German cultural chauvinism.
Mahler’s classmates and friends were Wagnerian enthusiasts. They included the
composers Hugo Wolf and Hans Rott (whose early symphony influenced Mahler and
who was a favorite of Anton Bruckner, with whom Mahler did not study at the
conservatory) and the conductor Rudolf Krzyzanowski (a friend with whom Mahler
produced his first publication, a piano version of Bruckner’s Third Symphony).
Mahler distinguished himself quickly, winning prizes his first year in piano performance
and composition. His earliest ambition, like others of his generation, was to follow in
Wagner’s path and compose for the stage. The young Wagnerians in Vienna were partial
to Bruckner and were reserved, if not overtly hostile (as Wolf was) toward Brahms.
Despite Mahler’s relative coolness to Brahms, the older composer did not take offense
and later helped bring him back to Vienna, having been impressed with the younger man
(in particular a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni) during Mahler’s tenure in the
1880s at the opera in Budapest.
In 1877 Mahler, having passed his secondary school examinations, took courses at the
Vienna University, focusing on art history, literature, and philosophy, and he made close
friends among nonmusicians. Early in his conservatory career his ambitions had turned
away from a concert career as pianist to that of a composer. Although he did not win the
coveted Beethoven prize at the conservatory in 1878, the year he finished his studies, he
did win a first prize in composition for a piano quintet that has unfortunately not
survived. He worked on large-scale projects, including Das klagende Lied (insert English
name), a work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra he completed and later revised, and a
never-realized fairy tale opera Rübezahl (Rapunzel) During this time, he also played
concerts at his boyhood home in Iglau.