Gustav mahler biography vienna
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Biography
‘I am,’ wrote Gustav Mahler, ‘three times homeless: a native of Bohemia in Austria; an Austrian among Germans; a Jew throughout the world.’ Mahler’s sense of being an outsider, coupled with penetrating intelligence and an extraordinary talent for depicting his surroundings in music, made him a restless and acutely self-critical artist.
‘The symphony,’ he insisted to fellow composer Jean Sibelius, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ Mahler’s symphonies are often conceived on an immense scale, with immense philosophical subjects: love and hate, joy in life and terror of death, the beauty of nature, innocence and bitter experience.
He was also a great composer of songs, and in these smaller forms he distilled the essence of intense human emotions, developing and enriching his exquisite melodic gift in the process.
Gustav mahler biography vienna
He was the second of 14 children of a Jewish distillery owner. His parents were apparently ill matched. Mahler remembered violent arguments betwe