July 5, 2010

Gustav Mahler. The great Austrian composer was born 150 years ago this week, on July 7, 1860, but his music sounds as raw and tragic today as the day it was written. Nobody ever projected naked emotions with such force. His music is vulnerable, flawed, sometimes sentimental and at the same time noble. He managed to combine the low, even vulgar, and the angelic into one enormous but coherent whole. Mahler was ahead of his time even despite never accepting atonal music. He influenced many composers of the 20th century, from Schoenberg, Webern and Berg to (especially) Shostakovich. A Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna, he converted to Catholicism to get a position with the Vienna Court Opera but was still abused in the press. Superstitious, he was afraid of writing the 9th symphony, trying to deceive faith by not calling Das Lied von der Erde a symphony. But he still died at the age of 50 with exactly nine completed symphonies.

We’re grateful to the Peabody Conservatory for allowing us to present two of Mahler’s symphonies: No. 3 and No. 5. Symphony No. 3 runs for approximately 103 minutes, and the version you hear on our site is probably the longest streaming performance on the Web. You can also listen to the famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony as played by the Texas Festival Orchestra.

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