BBC Great Composer Series on Gustav Mahler

http://youtu.be/OnBNFRzdkIM It is now 154 years. Gustav Mahler was born on 7th July 1860. One of the greatest composers the world has seen , particularly in the symphonic genre. He was also the leading conductor in his days. He was born a Jew in Kalischt in Bohemia , Austria. He grew up in Iglau. His music was a bridge between the nineteenth-century Austro-German school and the modern composers of the early twentieth century. His music gained popularity after a considerable period of neglect in the first four decades after his death in 1911. Leonard Bernstein was the pioneer who made his music popular by coming out with the first recorded cycle of his symphonies with the New York Philharmonic. His music was repressed during the Nazi regime in Germany. Today, he is a frequently performed composer. http://youtu.be/HS97YMN5Y0Q Gustav Mahler gave his first piano recital at the age of ten. Mahler joined the Conservatory at Wien and soon became a devotee of Wagner’s music, a supporter of the music of Anton Bruckner and Nietzsche’s philosophy.In 1878, he began his first major work, Das Klagende Lied (‘The Song of Sorrow’).Mahler’s career as a conductor began by conducting operettas at the Austrian provincial theatre of Bad Hall. Mahler went to New York to make his Metropolitan Opera debut on 1 January 1908 and become conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1909. He returned to Vienna the next year on account of a heart ailment he had developed and that finally killed him in 1911. He gave to the world in his fifty years what I could not have given even with thousand years of technique and experience. Though Mahler was a post-Wagnerian Romantic, he became increasingly modern and had a deep impact on most composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, Shostakovich, Britten Henze and Boulez; they have all acknowledged their debt to this great symphonist.