Free The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time by Michael Shapiro Page B

desires. Unlike Debussy who employed impressions, repetitions, and symbols to express psychological states, Mahler’s approach was more immediate. Painfully uncovering, achingly searching for his deepest wants and wishes, in expressions of almost suffocating lyricism and wild agitation, Mahler developed an almost therapeutic style of writing. Demons were exposed, and more often than not, after a grand and tiresome struggle, Gustav, the hero, prevailed in radiant triumph.
    Mahler’s background was humble, his father a small pub keeper of violent temperament. Five of his siblings died at young ages of diphtheria, another at twelve of heart disease; his elder brother Otto, a talented musician, jealous of Gustav’s greater success, shot himself, and his eldest sister Leopoldine succumbed to a brain tumor after a short, unhappy marriage. His brother Alois behaved like a fool, imagining himself the friend of the crown prince or a powerful dragoon, veteran of foreign campaigns. Mahler’s wife, Alma Schindler, would later remark that his brothers and sisters behaved in a way that could only be described as “Gustav Mahlerish.” Mahler’s music is often fantastical, exhibiting outlandish orchestral effects at the service of what sometimes seems an unconscious gone insane.
    Raised in Bohemia, now a part of the Czech Republic, the young Mahler often heard local regimental marching bands whose instrumentation would play a strategic role in the style and content of his symphonies. He was also undoubtedly exposed to indigenous Bohemian folk songs and Jewish liturgy (his father was an active member of the local synagogue).
    Mahler was not, like many of the great composers, a child prodigy. However, he showed a keen interest in chamber music, German Romantic poetry, and drama. Trained at the conservatory in Vienna, he shared lodgings with fellow student Hugo Wolf soon to be a preeminent song composer (before going mad and dying in an insane asylum at age forty-two), and became a disciple of the Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner (who referred to Mahler—to his face—as “my little Jew”).
    Mahler secured positions as a journeyman conductor in rapid succession and with increasing prominence, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as opera director of the Hofoper in Vienna, Europe’s leading theater. Anti-Semitic Viennese society would not permit a Jew to direct its most important theater. To secure the position, Mahler chose to renounce his Judaism and convert to Roman Catholicism. It was a decision that tormented him for the rest of his life.
    Mahler’s years in Vienna coincided with the rise of the influential Secession art movement led by, among others, the painters Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll, architect Otto Wagner, and stage designer Alfred Roller. Mahler and Roller championed a series of productions of Mozart’s operas, which reestablished the composer’s reputation as the greatest musical dramatist, not the classic trifle many then thought him to be. Mozart was revealed by Mahler (as Mendelssohn had “rediscovered” Bach) as Shakespeare’s equal in unlocking the secrets of love, infidelity, sex, power, and the soul (fifty years later Leonard Bernstein would do the same for Mahler’s reputation, establishing him as a symphonist the equal of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms). Mahler also developed the revolutionary concept of a repertory company of acting singers. He worked with the leading composers of the period, giving local first performances of works by Leoncavallo, Puccini, and Richard Strauss.
    Viennese musical politics in Mahler’s day were treacherous (they remain so to this day), and he was forced out in 1907 after ten brilliant, innovative years. First, the Metropolitan Opera and then the New York Philharmonic offered him positions. He spent an unhappy four seasons in New York, ultimately losing out in a musical power struggle with a young musical tornado named Arturo Toscanini.
    Mahler died in Vienna in