Mahler's work is at the end of the Romantic era and greatly influenced what happened in music in the rest of the 20th Century. His pieces are mainly written for huge orchestras, sometimes with singers added. They are highly dramatic works with a huge variety of material: Mahler thought that the symphony should "contain the whole world", so you will find funeral marches, military music, Jewish klezmer, Viennese waltzes.
What Mahler adds to this is:
- a sense of irony - sometimes he seems to be making fun
- predictions about the future - as a Jew frequently suffering from antisemitism he seems to portray both the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and the Nazi marching boots
- music which shows the full passion of love, builds to a climax and then suddenly stops (he was a friend of Freud and seems to understand his ideas of psychoanalysis
Try this for his irony and Jewish music. The double bass is playing a minor version of Frère Jacques and then Jewish music, sounding like the much later Fiddler on the Roof, takes over
And try this for those Nazi boots marching:
And this because it just might change your life!
Something to read while you listen?
Mahler's favourite novel, religion, morals and murder:
A great book about the suffering of the Jews at Auschwitz:
And a romance with Freudian overtones:
