On October 8, 1897 – 121 years ago today – Emperor Franz Joseph I of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary officially named Gustav Mahler Director of the Vienna Court Opera. 

Mahler in 1865-66

For the 37 year-old Mahler, it was the culminating moment in what had been (and sadly, what would continue to be) a very difficult life. He was born on July 7, 1860 in the village of Kalischt, in central Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today part of the Czech Republic. Mahler’s was a lower middle class Jewish family; they spoke German and were thus a double-minority among their predominately Catholic, Czech-speaking neighbors. 

Mahler grew up abnormally sensitive and morbidly imaginative; a constant witness to his father’s brutality and his mother’s helplessness. According to Henry Raynor: 

“All the Mahler children were incapable of facing reality and suffered from a sense of inevitable tragedy.” 

Mahler in 1878

Young Gustav’s sense of morbid tragedy was also a function of the disastrous mortality rate of his siblings. Of the fourteen Mahler children, seven died in infancy and only four (including Gustav) lived into full adulthood.

Mahler’s musical talent was prodigious. He attended the Vienna Conservatory from 1876 to 1878, where he studied piano and composition. An indifferent student, his harmony teacher later told Gustav’s wife Alma that “Mahler always played truant, and yet there was nothing he couldn’t do.”

Mahler in 1881

Well, in fact, there was indeed something Mahler wasn’t able to do: he wasn’t able to figure out how to make a living as a composer. So, to what he later claimed was his eternal regret, he began conducting opera for a living. Had he trained as a conductor? No. Had he ever composed an opera? No. (And he never did, despite being a brilliant composer for both the orchestra and the voice and the greatest opera conductor of his time.) But financial necessity can make us all do the darndest things, and thus Mahler began his conducting career in 1881 at the age of 21, conducting operettas in the summer resort town of Bad Hall in northern Austria. For Mahler, it was almost certainly a case of “fake it till you make it”, though he didn’t have to “fake it” for long: he discovered, almost immediately, that he had a real flair for conducting. From Bad Hall he quickly moved on to the Landestheatre in Laibach (1881); and then the Stadttheatre in Olmütz (1883). A succession of posts followed, each one marking a step up from the last: the Kassel Opera (1883); the Landestheatre of Prague (1885); the Neues Stadttheatre in Leipzig (1886); the Royal Hungarian Theater in Budapest (1888); the Hamburg Stadttheatre (1891, where at the height of the season Mahler was conducting nineteen different operas every month!). 

Mahler ca. 1889

At each stop, Mahler set about reforming the various companies to his standards, whether management wanted him to or not. Soloists, choruses and orchestras found themselves exhaustively rehearsing operas they believed they already knew for hours upon hours. Mahler was a small, pale, merciless tyrant. Yes: the singers, choruses, and orchestras loathed him.