title: Green Revolution

text: Studies have found that the Green Revolution substantially reduced infant mortality in the developing world. A 2020 study of 37 developing countries found that the diffusion of modern crop varieties "reduced infant mortality by 2.4–5.3 percentage points (from a baseline of 18%), with stronger effects for male infants and among poor households." Another 2020 study found that high yield crop varieties reduced infant mortality in India, with particularly large effects for rural children, boys and low-caste children.


title: Green Revolution

text: Consumption of pesticides and fertilizer agrochemicals associated with the Green Revolution may have adverse health impacts. For example, pesticides may increase the likelihood of cancer. Poor farming practices including non-compliance to usage of masks and over-usage of the chemicals compound this situation. In 1989, WHO and UNEP estimated that there were around 1 million human pesticide poisonings annually. Some 20,000 (mostly in developing countries) ended in death, as a result of poor labeling, loose safety standards etc. A 2014 study found that Indian children who were exposed to higher quantities of fertilizer agrochemicals experienced more adverse health impacts.


title: Green Revolution

text: A Greenpeace Research Laboratories investigation of 50 villages in Muktsar, Bathinda and Ludhiana districts revealed that twenty percent of the sampled wells had nitrate levels above WHO limits for drinking water. The 2009 study linked the nitrate pollution with high use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.


title: Green Revolution

text: Borlaug dismissed certain claims of critics, but also cautioned, "There are no miracles in agricultural production. Nor is there such a thing as a miracle variety of wheat, rice, or maize which can serve as an elixir to cure all ills of a stagnant, traditional agriculture."


title: Green Revolution

text: some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels...If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.


title: Green Revolution

text: Although the Green Revolution has been able to improve agricultural output in some regions in the world, there was and is still room for improvement. As a result, many organizations continue to invent new ways to improve the techniques already used in the Green Revolution. Frequently quoted inventions are the System of Rice Intensification, marker-assisted selection, agroecology, and applying existing technologies to agricultural problems of the developing world. Current challenges for nations trying to modernize their agriculture include closing the urban-rural income gap, integration of smallholders into value chains, and maintaining competitiveness in the market. However, in low-income countries, chronic problems such as poverty and hunger cause agricultural modernization efforts to be constrained. It is projected that global populations by 2050 will increase by one-third and as such will require a 70% increase in the production of food. Therefore, the Second Green Revolution will likely focus on improving tolerances to pests and disease in addition to technological input use efficiency.


title: Green Revolution

text: The term 'Evergreen Revolution' was coined by Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan in 1990, though he has stated that the concept dates back to as early as 1968. It aims to represent an added dimension to the original concepts and practices of the green revolution, the ecological dimension. Swaminathan has described it as "productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological harm". The concept has evolved into a combination of science, economics, and sociology. In 2002 American biologist E.O. Wilson observed that:


title: Devil May Cry

text: The series alludes to Dante's "Divine Comedy". Hideki Kamiya created "Devil May Cry" after a failed attempt to develop a "Resident Evil" game with the first game originally being conceived as "Resident Evil 4". Kamiya wanted to create a game with more action features, which Capcom felt the series did not need. The games were directed by Hideaki Itsuno and writer Bingo Morihashi. Capcom announced a new game, "" (developed by Ninja Theory and supervised by Capcom), during the 2010 Tokyo Game Show. A high-definition remastering of the three PlayStation 2 titles was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012, and in 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows. The latest game is "Devil May Cry 5", released on March 8, 2019.


title: Devil May Cry

text: The series has been successful; the main entries have sold several million copies and received Capcom's Platinum Title award. The success of the video-game series has led to comic books, novelizations, an animated series, guides, collectibles, publications, and a variety of action figures. Critical response to the gameplay combos has been positive. However, the games' narrative was considered simple until the third installment.


title: Devil May Cry

text: According to Eurogamer, another Capcom franchise, "Strider", was a vital influence on the "Devil May Cry" franchise, and according to "Retro Gamer", the over-the-top action of "Devil May Cry" draws from "Strider", particularly in their inclusion of the "boss rush".


title: Devil May Cry

text: The series begins two millennia before the first game with the demon Sparda, the Black Knight, defeating Demon World ruler Mundus. Sparda stops Mundus from conquering the human world by sealing several Hellgates and Temen-Ni-Gru (the last portal) with a ritual requiring his blood and the aid of a human priestess. Sparda meets Eva, who gives birth to his twin sons Dante and Vergil.


title: Devil May Cry

text: The plot begins with "Devil May Cry 3", a year after Dante has a falling-out with Vergil. A large tower erupts from the ground near the shop, and Dante interprets it as a challenge from Vergil. Dante is defeated in Temen-Ni-Gru by Vergil, who takes his locket and leaves with Arkham. Dante's dormant devil power revives him, and he resumes pursuing his brother. Vergil wants to use the pendants their mother gave them in a ritual to create a portal to the Demon World. The battle is joined by Lady, who wants to avenge her mother's death by Arkham; Arkham manipulated the three into completing the ritual, which would allow him to acquire Sparda's sword: the Force Edge. Dante and Vergil defeat him, and resume battling each other. The portal begins to close, and Vergil approaches it. Dante pleads with his brother not to go, but Vergil leaps into the Demon World before the portal closes. Vergil is tested and encounters Mundus, his mother's killer. When Lady returns to the human world, she coins the phrase "devil may cry"; Dante uses it for the shop.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Dante is confronted in "Devil May Cry" by Trish, who reveals that Mundus is planning to return and only a descendant of Sparda can defeat him. He explores Mallet Island (where Mundus is set to return), encountering demons which include Mundus' general: the undead Vergil, Nelo Angelo. As Dante approaches Mundus, he falls into a trap which reveals that Trish is the demon's agent; he saves her, however, because she resembles his mother. Trish saves Dante from Mundus, and Dante realizes his father's power. Dante defeats Mundus when Trish helps him return Mundus to the Demon World. Dante and Trish escape as the island collapses and work together in the Devil Never Cry shop.


title: Devil May Cry

text: In the "Devil May Cry: The Animated Series" anime, Trish is a demon hunter; Dante is the bodyguard of Patty, a young heiress who becomes obsessed with him. Patty's mother is descended from a sorcerer who sealed the power of Abigail, an ancient devil lord. Patty is targeted by Sid, a demon seeking Abigail's power. Lady and Trish fight demons summoned by Sid, and Dante kills him.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Dante is invited by Lucia in "Devil May Cry 2" to meet her mother, Matier. Dante learns that Arius is collecting artifacts (Arcana) to summon the demon lord Argosax. Dante flips a coin, and decides to help. Lucia confronts Arius, who reveals that he created her. Lucia gives Dante the last of the Arcana before facing Arius alone. Dante encounters Matier, who asks him to take the Arcana to save Lucia from Arius. Lucia attacks Arius, but he captures her. Dante arrives, trades the Arcana for Lucia, and attacks Arius (who escapes). A stream of energy strikes the Ouroboros tower, and a portal to the demon world opens. Dante and Lucia argue about who will enter, and Dante determines that he will go. After Dante leaves, Arius returns to the human world and Lucia defeats him.


title: Devil May Cry

text: In "Devil May Cry 4", Dante and Trish discover foul play within the Order of the Sword and investigate while learning its religious leader's scheme to conquer the world using demonic power. Dante seemingly assassinates the Sanctus, only to face a young holy knight named Nero, who awakened his demonic forces as a descendant of Sparda. Nero quests to capture Dante while gaining Yamato, only to learn the Order's dark secrets before being captured by Sanctus through his girlfriend. Dante manages to cripple Sanctus's plans before freeing Nero to finish the job. The two part ways on good terms with Nero allowed keeping Yamato.


title: Devil May Cry

text: In "Devil May Cry 5", set several years after "Devil May Cry 4", Nero runs a mobile branch of Dante's Devil May Cry business. He befriends Nico, a weapons artist and descendant of the gunsmith who crafted Dante's Ebony and Ivory handguns. Nero's Devil Bringer arm from "Devil May Cry 4" is stolen; armed with a prosthetic Devil Breaker created by Nico, he leaves with Dante and the demon hunter V to face their "strongest foe yet".


title: Devil May Cry

text: Although the series' timeline had placed "Devil May Cry 4" before "Devil May Cry 2", it was retconned with the release of "Devil May Cry 5". "", developed by Ninja Theory, is not part of the timeline and takes place in an alternate universe from the main series. Along with a very different looking Dante, it moves away from the gothic look of the previous games to a more contemporary setting with some social commentary on mass media and culture.


title: Devil May Cry

text: After the completion of "Resident Evil 2" in 1998, preliminary work on a PlayStation 2 installment of the "Resident Evil" series began by Team Little Devil under the direction of Hideki Kamiya. Early research and development included a trip to Spain to examine castles as a basis for the game's environments. Its prototype, however, was a radical departure from the "Resident Evil" formula and the survival horror genre. Kamiya rewrote the story and changed its premise, drawing from Italian poet Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" for "Devil May Cry".


title: Devil May Cry

text: Despite the success of the original game, its sequel was not created by Kamiya or Team Little Devils. Although an unidentified director was placed in charge of the project, Capcom was dissatisfied with their work and assigned Hideaki Itsuno "with only 4 to 5 months remaining in development" to steer the project back on course. Despite Itsuno's limited time on the project, he is the only person credited as director in the final version of the game. According to producer Tsuyoshi Tanaka, the design aim was to make "Devil May Cry 2" bigger than its predecessor; Tanaka estimated that the game's environments were about nine times larger than the first.


title: Devil May Cry

text: After "Devil May Cry 2" mixed reception, Capcom decided to develop the next game like the more critically successful "Devil May Cry". Gameplay elements, such as environment size and battle engine, were reconsidered. In the original game, Vergil was killed by demons early and his soul was controlled by Mundus; Bingo Morihashi wanted to create an alternate universe in which Vergil was alive. However, Kamiya gave Morihashi the freedom to rework Vergil's backstory and make him a living teenager for "Devil May Cry 3". As a result, the game was designed as a prequel to the series, set several years before the events of the first game.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Development of "Devil May Cry 4" began shortly after its predecessor's success. The development team had 80 members. A new protagonist was discussed many times at Capcom, but was not approved until producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi said that Dante had to be in the game. Kobashi said before the game's release that they wanted to make Dante seem significantly more powerful than Nero, to create an obvious difference between the strength of a "veteran" compared to a "rookie". Writer Morihashi collaborated with film director Yuji Shimomura, who worked on the earlier games. Morihashi left Capcom at one point, but returned at Itsuno's request. It took him a year to finish writing the game; he had difficulty with the characterization of Nero, the new protagonist. Dante returned as a supporting character.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Although the fourth game was a commercial and critical success, the staff considered rebooting the series because other game series had better sales. They chose Ninja Theory, impressed with their work on "Heavenly Sword" (which the staff thought would work with a "Devil May Cry" game). However, in 2013 Itsuno expressed interest in developing a fifth installment. It was originally thought that Itsuno intended for the series to go on hiatus or end if "Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition" was not a commercial success, but he said in a GameSpot interview that the series' future did not depend on "Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s sales. He alleviated fears that "DmC: Devil May Cry"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s sales would kill the series, confirming that Capcom was satisfied with them. In mid-January 2016, Itsuno tweeted that he had begun work on a new project. Reuben Langdon and Johnny Yong Bosch, who had done voice acting and motion capture for Dante and Nero in "Devil May Cry 4", took pictures of themselves in motion-capture gear in March 2016; this led to speculation that a new "Devil May Cry" game was in development. According to Capcom Vancouver, "It's not a game that [they] announced that [they are] working on at [their] studio". On May 17, 2018, the domain name "DevilMayCry5.com" was registered under Capcom's Onamae domain register.


title: Devil May Cry

text: "Devil May Cry 5", featuring the return of Dante and Nero, was confirmed at E3 2018 for release the following year. Most of the team had worked on the recently released "Resident Evil 7", and were experienced with the game engine; Itsuno was influenced by his work in "" to provide content appealing to new gamers but also felt that making the game challenging would appeal to long-time fans. Other members of the staff had worked on the reboot game "", but the Osaka team was more willing to make a sequel to the fourth installment of the main series. The team listened to fan opinions about previous games to ensure that the new game appealed to them; an "auto" mode facilitated combos. Itsuno was moved to tears by a film in which three robots combined into a giant robot to overcome their foe, and wanted to create similar moments. He wanted to convey the style of a Hollywood movie such as Marvel's "Avengers" series. Kamiya, currently working at PlatinumGames, was interested in making a remake of the first installment and a crossover game with Dante and Bayonetta.


title: Devil May Cry

text: The series has several print adaptations. Two "Devil May Cry" light novels, written by Shinya Goikeda and illustrated by Shirow Miwa, were published in Japan in 2002 and translated and published in the United States in 2006. The first, "Devil May Cry Volume 1", was published in Japan in conjunction with the release of the first game and explored Dante in an adventure set before the game's events. The second, entitled "Devil May Cry Volume 2" in the US, was published in Japan to coincide with the second game's release and is set after the first game's events. Tokyopop published the books in the United States in June and November 2006, respectively.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Bingo Morihashi wrote a "Devil May Cry 4" novel entitled "Devil May Cry 4 Deadly Fortune". The two-volume novel, published in Japan in 2009, has a number of scenes which were not included in the original game due to time constraints. A prequel novel by Morihashi titled "Before the Nightmare", set before "Devil May Cry 5" and leading to the beginning of the game, was published on March 1, 2019.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Three issues of a comic adaptation of the first game were published by the Canadian Dreamwave Productions in 2004, but the series was left unfinished when the company went bankrupt the following year. On July 25, 2008, WildStorm (a DC Comics imprint) and Capcom announced that they would collaborate on a "Devil May Cry" comic-book series. Details about the series were planned to be announced at a later date, but no new information has been provided.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Two volumes of a planned three-part "Devil May Cry 3" manga series have been published in Japan and the United States. Set a year before the events of "Devil May Cry 3", the manga describes how the characters come to be at the beginning of the game.


title: Devil May Cry

text: On March 7, 2019, Capcom announced that a tie-in manga entitled "Devil May Cry 5 Visions of V" would be serialized on the Japanese manga-hosting site Line Manga (LINE マンガ). The manga's prologue was published before the serialization began. Illustrated by Tomio Ogata, the manga (only available in Japan) would update every other Sunday beginning on April 27.


title: Devil May Cry

text: An anime series, "", premiered on Japan's Wowow TV network on June 12, 2007. The 12-episode series, produced by Madhouse, was directed by Shin Itagaki. Bingo Morihashi, a writer of the third and fourth games, was one of its writers.


title: Devil May Cry

text: In November 2018, Adi Shankar announced that he had acquired the rights to produce a "Devil May Cry" anime series for Netflix. Shankar, who has been completing a similar animated series for Konami's "Castlevania" franchise, said that he considered both series part of a shared "Bootleg Multiverse".


title: Devil May Cry

text: In November 2021, Shankar revealed that the show's first season will have 8 episodes. He also have plans for a connected “multi-season arc”, like what he did with "Castlevania", and that fan-favorite characters will make their debut throughout the series.


title: Devil May Cry

text: On February 28, 2011, Screen Gems (which made "Resident Evil" into a film series) had purchased feature-film rights to the "Devil May Cry" series. Kyle Ward was hired to write the screenplay for the film (based on "DmC: Devil May Cry"), which would be Dante's origin story. No news has emerged about the project's status.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Capcom produced "Sengoku Basara vs. Devil May Cry" a staged amalgam of the "Devil May Cry" and "Sengoku Basara" series, in August 2015. In the play, Dante, Lady, Trish, and Vergil encounter mysterious historical ruins while chasing a devil and are sent back in time to Japan's Warring States period; there, they meet Date Masamune, Sanada Yukimura, and other characters from the "Sengoku Basara" franchise. The play ran at the AiiA 2.5 Theater in Tokyo for 18 performances. Masanari Ujigawa wrote and directed the play, and Hideaki Itsuno and Izaki Matsuno collaborated on the scenery. Kazushi Miyakoda and Tetsuya Yamaura were the producers, supervised by Hiroyuki Kobayashi and Makoto Yamamoto.


title: Devil May Cry

text: "Devil May Cry: The Live Hacker", a musical, ran for 13 performances in March 2019 at Zepp DiverCity in Tokyo. Jun Yoriko wrote and directed the musical and its video, and a DVD was released in late August of that year.


title: Devil May Cry

text: The "Devil May Cry" series has seen the release of seven separate soundtracks. Initially, Capcom was very reluctant to release an officially sanctioned soundtrack for the "Devil May Cry" series, due to worries that the products would sell poorly. As a means of testing the market, Capcom decided to ask for pre-release sales.


title: Devil May Cry

text: "Devil May Cry" characters appear in the PlayStation versions of the "Viewtiful Joe" games, another Capcom series created by Hideki Kamiya; Dante is a playable character in the PlayStation 2 port of the first "Viewtiful Joe". The PSP version of "" also includes Dante and costumes based on Vergil, Trish, Sparda, Marionette, and Plasma.


title: Devil May Cry

text: In a deal between Capcom and Atlus, "Megami Tensei" character designer Kazuma Kaneko created Dante and Vergil's demonic forms in "Devil May Cry 3". In return, Atlus included Dante in his "Devil May Cry 2" costume as a character in an enhanced release of "" ("Maniax" in Japan). The English localization of "Nocturne" was based on the game's "Maniax" edition.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Dante and Trish are playable characters in "", and Vergil, Dante, and Trish are playable characters in its "Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3" update. Dante and Vergil retain their Kazuma Kaneko-designed Devil Trigger forms since they are based on the third game of the "Devil May Cry" series. Dante is also a playable character in "".


title: Devil May Cry

text: The "DmC: Devil May Cry" version of Dante is a playable character in "PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale", and he is a playable character in "Project X Zone" for the Nintendo 3DS as half of a pair with "Darkstalkers" Demitri Maximoff; Lady is a separate character. Dante returns in its sequel, "Project X Zone 2", with Vergil; Vergil's future self, Nelo Angelo, is a rival character.


title: Devil May Cry

text: On June 28, 2021, it was announced that a Mii costume based on Dante would appear in the crossover fighting game "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", as a set for the Mii Sword fighter character with clothing inspired by his design from the original "Devil May Cry" game. The set was released the following day alongside the game's new DLC fighter, Kazuya Mishima from the "Tekken" series.


title: Devil May Cry

text: By September 30, 2022, the "Devil May Cry" series has sold 27 million units worldwide; each installment is a Capcom Platinum Title, selling over a million units. As of October 19, 2022, "Devil May Cry 5" is the best-selling game in the series having sold 6.10 million units worldwide.


title: Devil May Cry

text: The series has received generally positive reviews. In 2010, IGN ranked "Devil May Cry" number 42 and "Devil May Cry 3" number 18 on its "Top 100 PlayStation 2 Games" list. The series' gameplay has been praised as innovative. "Devil May Cry" has been cited as beginning a subgenre of "extreme combat" action games, which focus on powerful heroes fighting hordes of foes with stylized action. It has been described as the first game that "successfully captured the twitch-based, relentlessly free-flowing gameplay style of so many classic 2D action games". The series is the standard against which other 3D hack and slash action games are measured, with comparisons in reviews of games such as "God of War", "Chaos Legion", and "Blood Will Tell". "Devil May Cry 5" has three protagonists with distinctive abilities, increasing the number of moves available. According to Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the team's work on "Devil May Cry 4" influenced Capcom's "Dragon's Dogma".


title: Devil May Cry

text: Response to the series' narrative has been mixed, despite Dante's increased popularity. The series' popularity led to a line of "Devil May Cry" action figures produced by Toycom, and Kaiyodo produced a "Devil May Cry 2" and "Devil May Cry 3" Dante action figure.


title: Devil May Cry

text: According to a gamecritics.com reviewer, the story was overly short and the characters underdeveloped. Dante's cockiness was noted as largely absent from "Devil May Cry 2".


title: Devil May Cry

text: "Devil May Cry 3" and its relationships among the cast in the narrative were found to be superior to Kamiya's original version. Dante's dynamic with Nero in the following game was praised, with critics saying that neither overshadowed the other. "Devil May Cry 5"s handling of its characters and their connections was well received.


title: Devil May Cry

text: Although well received by most critics, "DmC: Devil May Cry" was highly controversial with many long time fans due to the dramatic change in Dante's appearance and the move away from the series' iconic gothic style to a modern urban setting.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Born in Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire) to Jewish parents of humble origins, the German-speaking Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler's "œuvre" is relatively limited; for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor. Aside from early works such as a movement from a piano quartet composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works are generally designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. These works were frequently controversial when first performed, and several were slow to receive critical and popular approval; exceptions included his Second Symphony, and the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Some of Mahler's immediate musical successors included the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955 to honour the composer's life and achievements.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The Mahler family came from eastern Bohemia, and were of humble circumstances—the composer's grandmother had been a street pedlar. Bohemia was then part of the Austrian Empire; the Mahler family belonged to a German-speaking minority among Bohemians, and was also Jewish. From this background the future composer developed early on a permanent sense of exile, "always an intruder, never welcomed". The pedlar's son Bernhard Mahler, the composer's father, elevated himself to the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie by becoming a coachman and later an innkeeper. He bought a modest house in the village of Kaliště (), and in 1857 married Marie Herrmann, the 19-year-old daughter of a local soap manufacturer. In the following year Marie gave birth to the first of the couple's 14 children, a son Isidor, who died in infancy. Two years later, on 1860, their second son, Gustav, was born.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In December 1860, Bernhard Mahler moved with his wife and infant son to the city of Jihlava (), where Bernhard built up a successful distillery and tavern business. The family grew rapidly, but of the 12 children born to the family in the city, only six survived infancy. Jihlava was then a thriving commercial city of 20,000 people, in which Gustav was introduced to music through the street songs of the day, through dance tunes, folk melodies and the trumpet calls and marches of the local military band. All of these elements would later contribute to his mature musical vocabulary.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: When he was four years old, Gustav discovered his grandparents' piano and took to it immediately. He developed his performing skills sufficiently to be considered a local "Wunderkind" and gave his first public performance at the town theatre when he was ten years old. Although Gustav loved making music, his school reports from the Jihlava Gymnasium portrayed him as absent-minded and unreliable in academic work. In 1871, in the hope of improving the boy's results, his father sent him to the New Town Gymnasium in Prague, but Gustav was unhappy there and soon returned to Jihlava. On 13 April 1875 he suffered a bitter personal loss when his younger brother Ernst (b. 18 March 1862) died after a long illness. Mahler sought to express his feelings in music: with the help of a friend, Josef Steiner, he began work on an opera, "Herzog Ernst von Schwaben" ("Duke Ernest of Swabia"), as a memorial to his lost brother. Neither the music nor the libretto of this work has survived.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Bernhard Mahler supported his son's ambitions for a music career, and agreed that the boy should try for a place at the Vienna Conservatory. The young Mahler was auditioned by the renowned pianist Julius Epstein, and accepted for 1875–76. He made good progress in his piano studies with Epstein and won prizes at the end of each of his first two years. For his final year, 1877–78, he concentrated on composition and harmony under Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. Few of Mahler's student compositions have survived; most were abandoned when he became dissatisfied with them. He destroyed a symphonic movement prepared for an end-of-term competition, after its scornful rejection by the autocratic director Joseph Hellmesberger on the grounds of copying errors. Mahler may have gained his first conducting experience with the Conservatory's student orchestra, in rehearsals and performances, although it appears that his main role in this orchestra was as a percussionist.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Among Mahler's fellow students at the Conservatory was the future song composer Hugo Wolf, with whom he formed a close friendship. Wolf was unable to submit to the strict disciplines of the Conservatory and was expelled. Mahler, while sometimes rebellious, avoided the same fate only by writing a penitent letter to Hellmesberger. He attended occasional lectures by Anton Bruckner and, though never formally his pupil, was influenced by him. On 16 December 1877, he attended the disastrous premiere of Bruckner's Third Symphony, at which the composer was shouted down, and most of the audience walked out. Mahler and other sympathetic students later prepared a piano version of the symphony, which they presented to Bruckner. Along with many music students of his generation, Mahler fell under the spell of Richard Wagner, though his chief interest was the sound of the music rather than the staging. It is not known whether he saw any of Wagner's operas during his student years.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler left the conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the silver medal given for outstanding achievement. He then enrolled in the University of Vienna (he had, at his father's insistence, sat and with difficulty passed the "Matura," a highly demanding final exam at a "Gymnasium", which was a precondition for university studies) and followed courses which reflected his developing interests in literature and philosophy. After leaving the university in 1879, Mahler made some money as a piano teacher, continued to compose, and in 1880 finished a dramatic cantata, "Das klagende Lied" ("The Song of Lamentation"). This, his first substantial composition, shows traces of Wagnerian and Brucknerian influences, yet includes many musical elements which musicologist Deryck Cooke describes as "pure Mahler." Its first performance was delayed until 1901, when it was presented in a revised, shortened form.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler developed interests in German philosophy, and was introduced by his friend Siegfried Lipiner to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. These thinkers continued to influence Mahler and his music long after his student days were over. Mahler's biographer Jonathan Carr says that the composer's head was "not only full of the sound of Bohemian bands, trumpet calls and marches, Bruckner chorales and Schubert sonatas. It was also throbbing with the problems of philosophy and metaphysics he had thrashed out, above all, with Lipiner."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: From June to August 1880, Mahler took his first professional conducting job, in a small wooden theatre in the spa town of Bad Hall, south of Linz. The repertory was exclusively operetta; it was, in Carr's words "a dismal little job," which Mahler accepted only after Julius Epstein told him he would soon work his way up. In 1881, he was engaged for six months (September to April) at the Landestheater in Laibach (now Ljubljana, in Slovenia), where the small but resourceful company was prepared to attempt more ambitious works. Here, Mahler conducted his first full-scale opera, Verdi's "Il trovatore", one of 10 operas and a number of operettas that he presented during his time in Laibach. After completing this engagement, Mahler returned to Vienna and worked part-time as chorus-master at the Vienna Carltheater.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: From the beginning of January 1883, Mahler became conductor at the Royal Municipal Theatre in Olmütz (now Olomouc) in Moravia. He later wrote: "From the moment I crossed the threshold of the Olmütz theatre I felt like one awaiting the wrath of God." Despite poor relations with the orchestra, Mahler brought nine operas to the theatre, including Bizet's "Carmen", and won over the press that had initially been sceptical of him. After a week's trial at the Royal Theatre in the Hessian town of Kassel, Mahler became the theatre's "Musical and Choral Director" from August 1883. The title concealed the reality that Mahler was subordinate to the theatre's Kapellmeister, Wilhelm Treiber, who disliked him (and vice versa) and set out to make his life miserable. Despite the unpleasant atmosphere, Mahler had moments of success at Kassel. He directed a performance of his favourite opera, Weber's "Der Freischütz", and 25 other operas. On 23 June 1884, he conducted his own incidental music to Joseph Victor von Scheffel's play "Der Trompeter von Säckingen" ("The Trumpeter of Säckingen"), the first professional public performance of a Mahler work. An ardent, but ultimately unfulfilled, love affair with soprano Johanna Richter led Mahler to write a series of love poems which became the text of his song cycle "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" ("Songs of a Wayfarer").


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In January 1884, the distinguished conductor Hans von Bülow brought the Meiningen Court Orchestra to Kassel and gave two concerts. Hoping to escape from his job in the theatre, Mahler unsuccessfully sought a post as Bülow's permanent assistant. However, in the following year his efforts to find new employment resulted in a six-year contract with the prestigious Leipzig Opera, to begin in August 1886. Unwilling to remain in Kassel for another year, Mahler resigned on 22 June 1885, and applied for, and through good fortune was offered a standby appointment as conductor at the Royal "Neues Deutsches Theater" in Prague by the theatre's newly appointed director, the famous Angelo Neumann.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In Prague, the emergence of the Czech National Revival had increased the popularity and importance of the new Czech National Theatre, and had led to a downturn in the "Neues Deutsches Theater" fortunes. Mahler's task was to help arrest this decline by offering high-quality productions of German opera. He enjoyed early success presenting works by Mozart and Wagner, composers with whom he would be particularly associated for the rest of his career, but his individualistic and increasingly autocratic conducting style led to friction, and a falling out with his more experienced fellow-conductor, Ludwig Slansky. During his 12 months in Prague he conducted 68 performances of 14 operas (12 titles were new in his repertory), and he also performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time in his life. By the end of the season, in July 1886, Mahler left Prague to take up his post at the "Neues Stadttheater" in Leipzig, where rivalry with his senior colleague Arthur Nikisch began almost at once. This conflict was primarily over how the two should share conducting duties for the theatre's new production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle. Nikisch's illness, from February to April 1887, meant that Mahler took charge of the whole cycle (except "Götterdämmerung"), and scored a resounding public success. This did not, however, win him popularity with the orchestra, who resented his dictatorial manner and heavy rehearsal schedules.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In Leipzig, Mahler befriended Captain (1849–1897), grandson of the composer, and agreed to prepare a performing version of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera "Die drei Pintos" ("The Three Pintos"). Mahler transcribed and orchestrated the existing musical sketches, used parts of other Weber works, and added some composition of his own. The premiere at the Stadttheater, on 20 January 1888, was an important occasion at which several heads of various German opera houses were present. (The Russian composer Tchaikovsky attended the third performance on 29 January.) The work was well-received; its success did much to raise Mahler's public profile, and brought him financial rewards. Mahler's involvement with the Weber family was complicated by Mahler's alleged romantic attachment to Carl von Weber's wife Marion Mathilde (1857–1931) which, though intense on both sides – so it was rumoured by for example English composer Ethel Smyth – ultimately came to nothing. In February and March 1888 Mahler sketched and completed his First Symphony, then in five movements. At around the same time Mahler discovered the German folk-poem collection "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" ("The Youth's Magic Horn"), which would dominate much of his compositional output for the following 12 years.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: On 17 May 1888, Mahler suddenly resigned his Leipzig position after a dispute with the "Stadttheater's" chief stage manager, Albert Goldberg. However, Mahler had secretly been invited by Angelo Neumann in Prague (and accepted the offer) to conduct the premiere there of "his" "Die drei Pintos", and later also a production of "Der Barbier von Bagdad" by Peter Cornelius. This short stay (July–September) ended unhappily, with Mahler's dismissal following his outburst during a rehearsal. However, through the efforts of an old Viennese friend, Guido Adler, and cellist David Popper, Mahler's name went forward as a potential director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest. He was interviewed, made a good impression, and was offered and accepted (with some reluctance) the post from 1 October 1888.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In the early years of Mahler's conducting career, composing was a spare time activity. Between his Laibach and Olmütz appointments he worked on settings of verses by Richard Leander and Tirso de Molina, later collected as Volume I of "Lieder und Gesänge" ("Songs and Airs"). Mahler's first orchestral song cycle, "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen", composed at Kassel, was based on his own verses, although the first poem, "" ("When my love becomes a bride") closely follows the text of a "Wunderhorn" poem. The melodies for the second and fourth songs of the cycle were incorporated into the First Symphony, which Mahler finished in 1888, at the height of his relationship with Marion von Weber. The intensity of Mahler's feelings is reflected in the music, which originally was written as a five-movement symphonic poem with a descriptive programme. One of these movements, the "Blumine," later discarded, was based on a passage from his earlier work "Der Trompeter von Säckingen". After completing the symphony, Mahler composed a 20-minute symphonic poem, "Totenfeier" "Funeral Rites", which later became the first movement of his Second Symphony.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: There has been frequent speculation about lost or destroyed works from Mahler's early years. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg believed that the First Symphony was too mature to be a first symphonic work, and must have had predecessors. In 1938, Mengelberg revealed the existence of the so-called "Dresden archive," a series of manuscripts in the possession of the widowed Marion von Weber. According to the Mahler historian Donald Mitchell, it was highly likely that important Mahler manuscripts of early symphonic works had been held in Dresden; this archive, if it existed, was almost certainly destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: On arriving in Budapest in October 1888, Mahler encountered a cultural conflict between conservative Hungarian nationalists who favoured a policy of Magyarisation, and progressives who wanted to maintain and develop the country's Austro-German cultural traditions. In the opera house a dominant conservative caucus, led by the music director Sándor Erkel, had maintained a limited repertory of historical and folklore opera. By the time that Mahler began his duties, the progressive camp had gained ascendancy following the appointment of the liberal-minded Ferenc von Beniczky as intendant. Aware of the delicate situation, Mahler moved cautiously; he delayed his first appearance on the conductor's stand until January 1889, when he conducted Hungarian-language performances of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and "Die Walküre" to initial public acclaim. However, his early successes faded when plans to stage the remainder of the "Ring" cycle and other German operas were frustrated by a renascent conservative faction which favoured a more traditional "Hungarian" programme. In search of non-German operas to extend the repertory, Mahler visited in spring 1890 Italy where among the works he discovered was Mascagni's recent sensation "Cavalleria rusticana" (Budapest premiere on 26 December 1890).


title: Gustav Mahler

text: On 18 February 1889, Bernhard Mahler died; this was followed later in the year by the deaths both of Mahler's sister Leopoldine (27 September) and his mother (11 October). From October 1889 Mahler took charge of his four younger brothers and sisters (Alois, Otto, Justine, and Emma). They were installed in a rented flat in Vienna. Mahler himself suffered poor health, with attacks of haemorrhoids and migraine and a recurrent septic throat. Shortly after these family and health setbacks the premiere of the First Symphony, in Budapest on 20 November 1889, was a disappointment. The critic August Beer's lengthy newspaper review indicates that enthusiasm after the early movements degenerated into "audible opposition" after the Finale. Mahler was particularly distressed by the negative comments from his Vienna Conservatory contemporary, Viktor von Herzfeld, who had remarked that Mahler, like many conductors before him, had proved not to be a composer.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In 1891, Hungary's move to the political right was reflected in the opera house when Beniczky on 1 February was replaced as intendant by Count Géza Zichy, a conservative aristocrat determined to assume artistic control over Mahler's head. However, Mahler had foreseen that and had secretly been negotiating with Bernhard Pollini, the director of the Stadttheater Hamburg since summer and autumn of 1890, and a contract was finally signed in secrecy on 15 January 1891. Mahler more or less "forced" himself to be sacked from his Budapest post, and he succeeded on 14 March 1891. By his departure he received a large sum of indemnity. One of his final Budapest triumphs was a performance of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" (16 September 1890) which won him praise from Brahms, who was present at the performances on 16 December 1890. During his Budapest years Mahler's compositional output had been limited to a few songs from the "Wunderhorn" song settings that became Volumes II and III of "Lieder und Gesänge", and amendments to the First Symphony.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler's Hamburg post was as chief conductor, subordinate to the director, Bernhard Pohl (known as Pollini) who retained overall artistic control. Pollini was prepared to give Mahler considerable leeway if the conductor could provide commercial as well as artistic success. This Mahler did in his first season, when he conducted Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" for the first time and gave acclaimed performances of the same composer's "Tannhäuser" and "Siegfried". Another triumph was the German premiere of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin", in the presence of the composer, who called Mahler's conducting "astounding," and later asserted in a letter that he believed Mahler was "positively a genius." Mahler's demanding rehearsal schedules led to predictable resentment from the singers and orchestra in whom, according to music writer Peter Franklin, the conductor "inspired hatred and respect in almost equal measure." He found support, however, from Hans von Bülow, who was in Hamburg as director of the city's subscription concerts. Bülow, who had spurned Mahler's approaches in Kassel, had come to admire the younger man's conducting style, and on Bülow's death in 1894 Mahler took over the direction of the concerts.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In the summer of 1892 Mahler took the Hamburg singers to London to participate in an eight-week season of German opera—his only visit to Britain. His conducting of "Tristan" enthralled the young composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who "staggered home in a daze and could not sleep for two nights." However, Mahler refused further such invitations as he was anxious to reserve his summers for composing. In 1893 he acquired a retreat at Steinbach, on the banks of Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, and established a pattern that persisted for the rest of his life; summers would henceforth be dedicated to composition, at Steinbach or its successor retreats. Now firmly under the influence of the "Wunderhorn" folk-poem collection, Mahler produced a stream of song settings at Steinbach, and composed his Second and Third Symphonies there.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Performances of Mahler works were still comparatively rare (he had not composed very much). On 27 October 1893, at Hamburg's Konzerthaus Ludwig, Mahler conducted a revised version of his First Symphony; still in its original five-movement form, it was presented as a "Tondichtung" (tone poem) under the descriptive name "Titan". This concert also introduced six recent "Wunderhorn" settings. Mahler achieved his first relative success as a composer when the Second Symphony was well-received on its premiere in Berlin, under his own baton, on 13 December 1895. Mahler's conducting assistant Bruno Walter, who was present, said that "one may date [Mahler's] rise to fame as a composer from that day." That same year Mahler's private life had been disrupted by the suicide of his younger brother Otto on 6 February.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: At the Stadttheater Mahler's repertory consisted of 66 operas of which 36 titles were new to him. During his six years in Hamburg, he conducted 744 performances, including the debuts of Verdi's "Falstaff", Humperdinck's "Hänsel und Gretel", and works by Smetana. However, he was forced to resign his post with the subscription concerts after poor financial returns and an ill-received interpretation of his re-scored Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Already at an early age Mahler had made it clear that his ultimate goal was an appointment in Vienna, and from 1895 onward was manoeuvring, with the help of influential friends, to secure the directorship of the Vienna Hofoper. He overcame the bar that existed against the appointment of a Jew to this post by what may have been a pragmatic conversion to Catholicism in February 1897. Despite this event, Mahler has been described as a lifelong agnostic.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: As he waited for the Emperor's confirmation of his directorship, Mahler shared duties as a resident conductor with Joseph Hellmesberger Jr. (son of the former conservatory director) and Hans Richter, an internationally renowned interpreter of Wagner and the conductor of the original "Ring" cycle at "Bayreuth" in 1876. Director Wilhelm Jahn had not consulted Richter about Mahler's appointment; Mahler, sensitive to the situation, wrote Richter a complimentary letter expressing unswerving admiration for the older conductor. Subsequently, the two were rarely in agreement, but kept their divisions private.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Vienna, the imperial Habsburg capital, had recently elected an anti-Semitic conservative mayor, Karl Lueger, who had once proclaimed: "I myself decide who is a Jew and who isn't." In such a volatile political atmosphere Mahler needed an early demonstration of his German cultural credentials. He made his initial mark in May 1897 with much-praised performances of Wagner's "Lohengrin" and Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte". Shortly after the "Zauberflöte" triumph, Mahler was forced to take sick leave for several weeks, during which he was nursed by his sister Justine and his long-time companion, the viola player Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Mahler returned to Vienna in late July to prepare for Vienna's first uncut version of the "Ring" cycle. This performance took place on 24–27 August, attracting critical praise and public enthusiasm. Mahler's friend Hugo Wolf told Bauer-Lechner that "for the first time I have heard the "Ring" as I have always dreamed of hearing it while reading the score."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: On 8 October Mahler was formally appointed to succeed Jahn as the Hofoper's director. His first production in his new office was Smetana's Czech nationalist opera "Dalibor", with a reconstituted finale that left the hero Dalibor alive. This production caused anger among the more extreme Viennese German nationalists, who accused Mahler of "fraternising with the anti-dynastic, inferior Czech nation." The Austrian author Stefan Zweig, in his memoirs "The World of Yesterday" (1942), described Mahler's appointment as an example of the Viennese public's general distrust of young artists: "Once, when an amazing exception occurred and Gustav Mahler was named director of the Court Opera at thirty-eight years old, a frightened murmur and astonishment ran through Vienna, because someone had entrusted the highest institute of art to 'such a young person' ... This suspicion—that all young people were 'not very reliable'—ran through all circles at that time." Zweig also wrote that "to have seen Gustav Mahler on the street [in Vienna] was an event that one would proudly report to his comrades the next morning as it if were a personal triumph." During Mahler's tenure a total of 33 new operas were introduced to the Hofoper; a further 55 were new or totally revamped productions. However, a proposal to stage Richard Strauss's controversial opera "Salome" in 1905 was rejected by the Viennese censors.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Early in 1902 Mahler met Alfred Roller, an artist and designer associated with the Vienna Secession movement. A year later, Mahler appointed him chief stage designer to the Hofoper, where Roller's debut was a new production of "Tristan und Isolde". The collaboration between Mahler and Roller created more than 20 celebrated productions of, among other operas, Beethoven's "Fidelio", Gluck's "Iphigénie en Aulide" and Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro". In the "Figaro" production, Mahler offended some purists by adding and composing a short recitative scene to Act III.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In spite of numerous theatrical triumphs, Mahler's Vienna years were rarely smooth; his battles with singers and the house administration continued on and off for the whole of his tenure. While Mahler's methods improved standards, his histrionic and dictatorial conducting style was resented by orchestra members and singers alike. In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff. The anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society, long opposed to Mahler's appointment, continued to attack him relentlessly, and in 1907 instituted a press campaign designed to drive him out. By that time he was at odds with the opera house's administration over the amount of time he was spending on his own music, and was preparing to leave. In May 1907 he began discussions with Heinrich Conried, director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, and on 21 June signed a contract, on very favourable terms, for four seasons' conducting in New York. At the end of the summer he submitted his resignation to the Hofoper, and on 15 October 1907 conducted "Fidelio", his 645th and final performance there. During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler had brought new life to the opera house and cleared its debts, but had won few friends—it was said that he treated his musicians in the way a lion tamer treated his animals. His departing message to the company, which he pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered over the floor. After conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony on 24 November, Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: When Richter resigned as head of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription concerts in September 1898, the concerts committee had unanimously chosen Mahler as his successor. The appointment was not universally welcomed; the anti-Semitic press wondered if, as a non-German, Mahler would be capable of defending German music. Attendances rose sharply in Mahler's first season, but members of the orchestra were particularly resentful of his habit of re-scoring acknowledged masterpieces, and of his scheduling of extra rehearsals for works with which they were thoroughly familiar. An attempt by the orchestra to have Richter reinstated for the 1899 season failed, because Richter was not interested. Mahler's position was weakened when, in 1900, he took the orchestra to Paris to play at the Exposition Universelle. The Paris concerts were poorly attended and lost money—Mahler had to borrow the orchestra's fare home from the Rothschilds. In April 1901, dogged by a recurrence of ill-health and wearied by more complaints from the orchestra, Mahler relinquished the Philharmonic concerts conductorship. In his three seasons he had performed around 80 different works, which included pieces by relatively unknown composers such as Hermann Goetz, Wilhelm Kienzl and the Italian Lorenzo Perosi.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The demands of his twin appointments in Vienna initially absorbed all Mahler's time and energy, but by 1899 he had resumed composing. The remaining Vienna years were to prove particularly fruitful. While working on some of the last of his "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" settings he started his Fourth Symphony, which he completed in 1900. By this time he had abandoned the composing hut at Steinbach and had acquired another, at Maiernigg on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia, where he later built a villa. In this new venue Mahler embarked upon what is generally considered as his "middle" or post-"Wunderhorn" compositional period. Between 1901 and 1904 he wrote ten settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, five of which were collected as "Rückert-Lieder". The other five formed the song cycle "Kindertotenlieder" ("Songs on the Death of Children"). The trilogy of orchestral symphonies, the Fifth, the Sixth and the Seventh were composed at Maiernigg between 1901 and 1905, and the Eighth Symphony written there in 1906, in eight weeks of furious activity.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Within this same period Mahler's works began to be performed with increasing frequency. In April 1899 he conducted the Viennese premiere of his Second Symphony; 17 February 1901 saw the first public performance of his early work "Das klagende Lied", in a revised two-part form. Later that year, in November, Mahler conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, in Munich, and was on the rostrum for the first complete performance of the Third Symphony, at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein festival at Krefeld on 9 June 1902. Mahler "first nights" now became increasingly frequent musical events; he conducted the first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies at Cologne and Essen respectively, in 1904 and 1906. Four of the "Rückert-Lieder", and "Kindertotenlieder", were introduced in Vienna on 29 January 1905.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: During his second season in Vienna, Mahler acquired a spacious modern apartment on the Auenbruggergasse and built a summer villa on land he had acquired next to his new composing studio at Maiernigg. In November 1901, he met Alma Schindler, the stepdaughter of painter Carl Moll, at a social gathering that included the theatre director Max Burckhard. Alma was not initially keen to meet Mahler, on account of "the scandals about him and every young woman who aspired to sing in opera." The two engaged in a lively disagreement about a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma was one of Zemlinsky's pupils), but agreed to meet at the Hofoper the following day. This meeting led to a rapid courtship; Mahler and Alma were married at a private ceremony on 9 March 1902. Alma was by then pregnant with her first child, a daughter Maria Anna, who was born on 3 November 1902. A second daughter, Anna, was born in 1904.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Friends of the couple were surprised by the marriage and dubious of its wisdom. Burckhard called Mahler "that rachitic degenerate Jew," unworthy for such a good-looking girl of good family. On the other hand, Mahler's family considered Alma to be flirtatious, unreliable, and too fond of seeing young men fall for her charms. Mahler was by nature moody and authoritarian—Natalie Bauer-Lechner, his earlier partner, said that living with him was "like being on a boat that is ceaselessly rocked to and fro by the waves." Alma soon became resentful because of Mahler's insistence that there could only be one composer in the family and that she had given up her music studies to accommodate him. "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner ... I'm asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange." She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart." Mahler's requirement that their married life be organized around his creative activities imposed strains, and precipitated rebellion on Alma's part; the marriage was nevertheless marked at times by expressions of considerable passion, particularly from Mahler.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In the summer of 1907 Mahler, exhausted from the effects of the campaign against him in Vienna, took his family to Maiernigg. Soon after their arrival both daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered, but after a fortnight's struggle Maria died on 12 July. Immediately following this devastating loss, Mahler learned that his heart was defective, a diagnosis subsequently confirmed by a Vienna specialist, who ordered a curtailment of all forms of vigorous exercise. The extent to which Mahler's condition disabled him is unclear; Alma wrote of it as a virtual death sentence, though Mahler himself, in a letter written to her on 30 August 1907, said that he would be able to live a normal life, apart from avoiding over-fatigue. The illness was, however, a further depressing factor. Mahler and his family left Maiernigg and spent the rest of the summer at Schluderbach. At the end of the summer the villa at Maiernigg was closed and never revisited.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler made his New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 1 January 1908, when he conducted Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde". In a busy first season Mahler's performances were widely praised, especially his "Fidelio" on 20 March 1908, in which he insisted on using replicas that were at the time being made of Alfred Roller's Vienna sets. On his return to Austria for the summer of 1908, Mahler established himself in the third and last of his composing studios, in the pine forests close to Toblach in Tyrol. Here, using a text by Hans Bethge based on ancient Chinese poems, he composed "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth"). Despite the symphonic nature of the work, Mahler refused to number it, hoping thereby to escape the "curse of the Ninth Symphony" that he believed had affected fellow-composers Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. On 19 September 1908 the premiere of the Seventh Symphony, in Prague, was deemed by Alma Mahler a critical rather than a popular success.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: For its 1908–09 season the Metropolitan management brought in the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to share duties with Mahler, who made only 19 appearances in the entire season. One of these was a much-praised performance of Smetana's "The Bartered Bride" on 19 February 1909. In the early part of the season Mahler conducted three concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra. This renewed experience of orchestral conducting inspired him to resign his position with the opera house and accept the conductorship of the re-formed New York Philharmonic. He continued to make occasional guest appearances at the Met, his last performance being Tchaikovsky's "The Queen of Spades" on 5 March 1910.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Back in Europe for the summer of 1909, Mahler worked on his Ninth Symphony and made a conducting tour of the Netherlands. The 1909–10 New York Philharmonic season was long and taxing; Mahler rehearsed and conducted 46 concerts, but his programmes were often too demanding for popular tastes. His own First Symphony, given its American debut on 16 December 1909, was one of the pieces that failed with critics and public, and the season ended with heavy financial losses. The highlight of Mahler's 1910 summer was the first performance of the Eighth Symphony at Munich on 12 September, the last of his works to be premiered in his lifetime. The occasion was a triumph—"easily Mahler's biggest lifetime success," according to biographer Robert Carr—but it was overshadowed by the composer's discovery, before the event, that Alma had begun an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. Greatly distressed, Mahler sought advice from Sigmund Freud, and appeared to gain some comfort from his meeting with the psychoanalyst. One of Freud's observations was that much damage had been done by Mahler's insisting that Alma give up her composing. Mahler accepted this, and started to positively encourage her to write music, even editing, orchestrating and promoting some of her works. Alma agreed to remain with Mahler, although the relationship with Gropius continued surreptitiously. In a gesture of love, Mahler dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In spite of the emotional distractions, during the summer of 1910 Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements. He and Alma returned to New York in late October 1910, where Mahler threw himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Around Christmas 1910 he began suffering from a sore throat, which persisted. On 21 February 1911, with a temperature of 40 °C (104 °F), Mahler insisted on fulfilling an engagement at Carnegie Hall, with a program of mainly new Italian music, including the world premiere of Busoni's "Berceuse élégiaque". This was Mahler's last concert. After weeks confined to bed he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, a disease to which sufferers from defective heart valves were particularly prone and which could be fatal. Mahler did not give up hope; he talked of resuming the concert season, and took a keen interest when one of Alma's compositions was sung at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda, on 3 March. On 8 April the Mahler family and a permanent nurse left New York on board SS "Amerika" bound for Europe. They reached Paris ten days later, where Mahler entered a clinic at Neuilly, but there was no improvement; on 11 May he was taken by train to the Löw sanatorium in Vienna, where he developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. Hundreds had come to the sanitorium during this brief period to show their admiration for the great composer. After receiving treatments of radium to reduce swelling on his legs and morphine for his general ailments, he died on 18 May.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: On 22 May 1911 Mahler was buried in the , as he had requested, next to his daughter Maria. His tombstone was inscribed only with his name because "any who come to look for me will know who I was and the rest don't need to know." Alma, on doctors' orders, was absent, but among the mourners at a relatively pomp-free funeral were Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as "the holy Gustav Mahler"), Bruno Walter, Alfred Roller, the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, and representatives from many of the great European opera houses. "The New York Times", reporting Mahler's death, called him "one of the towering musical figures of his day," but discussed his symphonies mainly in terms of their duration, incidentally exaggerating the length of the Second Symphony to "two hours and forty minutes." In London, "The Times" obituary said his conducting was "more accomplished than that of any man save Richter," and that his symphonies were "undoubtedly interesting in their union of modern orchestral richness with a melodic simplicity that often approached banality," though it was too early to judge their ultimate worth.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Alma Mahler survived her husband by more than 50 years, dying in 1964. She married Walter Gropius in 1915, divorced him five years later, and married the writer Franz Werfel in 1929. In 1940 she published a memoir of her years with Mahler, entitled "Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters". This account was criticised by later biographers as incomplete, selective and self-serving, and for providing a distorted picture of Mahler's life. The composer's daughter Anna Mahler became a well-known sculptor; she died in 1988. The International Gustav Mahler Society was founded in 1955 in Vienna, with Bruno Walter as its first president and Alma Mahler as an honorary member. The Society aims to create a complete critical edition of Mahler's works, and to commemorate all aspects of the composer's life.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler's composing life into three distinct phases: a long "first period," extending from "Das klagende Lied" in 1880 to the end of the "Wunderhorn" phase in 1901; a "middle period" of more concentrated composition ending with Mahler's departure for New York in 1907; and a brief "late period" of elegiac works before his death in 1911.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The main works of the first period are the first four symphonies, the "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" song cycle and various song collections in which the "Wunderhorn" songs predominate. In this period songs and symphonies are closely related and the symphonic works are programmatic. Mahler initially gave the first three symphonies full descriptive programmes, all of which he later repudiated. He devised, but did not publish, titles for each of the movements for the Fourth Symphony; from these titles the German music critic Paul Bekker conjectured a programme in which Death appears in the Scherzo "in the friendly, legendary guise of the fiddler tempting his flock to follow him out of this world."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The middle period comprises a triptych of purely instrumental symphonies (the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh), the "Rückert" songs and the "Kindertotenlieder", two final "Wunderhorn" settings and, in some reckonings, Mahler's last great affirmative statement, the choral Eighth Symphony. Cooke believes that the Eighth stands on its own, between the middle and final periods. Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programmes and descriptive titles; he wanted to write "absolute" music that spoke for itself. Cooke refers to "a new granite-like hardness of orchestration" in the middle-period symphonies, while the songs have lost most of their folk character, and cease to fertilise the symphonies as explicitly as before.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The three works of the brief final period—"Das Lied von der Erde", the Ninth and (incomplete) Tenth Symphonies—are expressions of personal experience, as Mahler faced death. Each of the pieces ends quietly, signifying that aspiration has now given way to resignation. Cooke considers these works to be a loving (rather than a bitter) farewell to life; the composer Alban Berg called the Ninth "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote." None of these final works were performed in Mahler's lifetime.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler was a "late Romantic," part of an ideal that placed Austro-German classical music on a higher plane than other types, through its supposed possession of particular spiritual and philosophical significance. He was one of the last major composers of a line which includes, among others, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner and Brahms. From these antecedents Mahler drew many of the features that were to characterise his music. Thus, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony came the idea of using soloists and a choir within the symphonic genre. From Beethoven, Liszt and (from a different musical tradition) Berlioz came the concept of writing music with an inherent narrative or "programme," and of breaking away from the traditional four-movement symphony format. The examples of Wagner and Bruckner encouraged Mahler to extend the scale of his symphonic works well beyond the previously accepted standards, to embrace an entire world of feeling.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Early critics maintained that Mahler's adoption of many different styles to suit different expressions of feeling meant that he lacked a style of his own; Cooke on the other hand asserts that Mahler "redeemed any borrowings by imprinting his [own] personality on practically every note" to produce music of "outstanding originality." The music critic Harold Schonberg sees the essence of Mahler's music in the theme of struggle, in the tradition of Beethoven. However, according to Schonberg, Beethoven's struggles were those of "an indomitable and triumphant hero," whereas Mahler's are those of "a psychic weakling, a complaining adolescent who ... enjoyed his misery, wanting the whole world to see how he was suffering." Yet, Schonberg concedes, most of the symphonies contain sections in which Mahler the "deep thinker" is transcended by the splendour of Mahler the musician.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Except for his juvenilia, little of which has survived, Mahler composed only in the media of song and symphony, with a close and complex interrelationship between the two. Donald Mitchell writes that this interaction is the backcloth against which all Mahler's music can be considered. The initial connection between song and symphony occurs with the song-cycle "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" and the First Symphony. Although this early evidence of cross-fertilisation is important, it is during Mahler's extended "Wunderhorn" phase, in which his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies were written, that the song and symphony genres are consistently intermingled. Themes from the "Wunderhorn" song "Das himmlische Leben" ("The Heavenly Life"), composed in 1892, became a key element in the Third Symphony completed in 1896; the song itself forms the finale to the Fourth (1900) and its melody is central to the whole composition. For the Second Symphony, written between 1888 and 1894, Mahler worked simultaneously on the "Wunderhorn" song, "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" ("The Sermon of St Anthony of Padua to the Fishes"), and on the Scherzo based on it which became the symphony's third movement. Another "Wunderhorn" setting from 1892, "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), is used as the Second Symphony's fourth (penultimate) movement.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In Mahler's middle and late periods, the song-symphony relationship is less direct. However, musicologist Donald Mitchell notes specific relationships between the middle period songs and their contemporaneous symphonies—the second "Kindertotenlieder" song and the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the last "Kindertotenlieder" song and the Sixth Symphony finale. Mahler's last work employing vocal and orchestral forces, "Das Lied von der Erde", is subtitled "A Symphony ..."—Mitchell categorises it as a "song "and" symphony."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The union of song and symphonic form in Mahler's music is, in Cooke's view, organic; "his songs flower naturally into symphonic movements, being already symphonic in cast." To Sibelius, Mahler expressed the belief that "The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything." True to this belief, Mahler drew material from many sources into his songs and symphonic works: bird calls and cow-bells to evoke nature and the countryside, bugle fanfares, street melodies and country dances to summon the lost world of his childhood. Life's struggles are represented in contrasting moods: the yearning for fulfilment by soaring melodies and chromatic harmony, suffering and despair by discord, distortion and grotesquerie. Amid all this is Mahler's particular hallmark—the constant intrusion of banality and absurdity into moments of deep seriousness, typified in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony when a trivial popular tune suddenly cuts into a solemn funeral march. The trite melody soon changes its character, and in due course re-emerges as one of the majestic Brucknerian chorales which Mahler uses to signify hope and the resolution of conflict. Mahler himself recognised the idiosyncrasies in his work, calling the Scherzo in the Third Symphony "the most farcical and at the same time the most tragic piece that ever existed ... It is as though all nature is making faces and sticking out its tongue."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: The range of musical moods, Cooke maintains, comes from Mahler's "amazing orchestration" which, in the writer's view, defies analysis—"it speaks for itself." Franklin lists specific features which are basic to Mahler's style: extremes of volume, the use of off-stage ensembles, unconventional arrangement of orchestral forces, and frequent recourse to popular music and dance forms such as the ländler and the waltz. Musicologist Vladimír Karbusický maintains that the composer's Jewish roots had lasting effects on his creative output; he pinpoints the central part of the third movement of the First Symphony as the most characteristically "Yiddish" music in Mahler's work. The Czech composer-journalist Max Brod has also identified Jewish tunes and rhythms in Mahler's music.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: A technical device much used by Mahler is that of "progressive tonality," which Deryck Cooke describes as "the procedure of resolving a symphonic conflict in a different key from that in which it was stated," and which is often used "to symbolise the gradual ascendancy of a certain value by progress from one key to another over the whole course of a symphony." This technique was also used by Mahler's Danish contemporary Carl Nielsen. Mahler first employed the device in an early song, "Erinnerung" ("Memory"), and thereafter used it freely in his symphonies. For example, the predominant key of the First Symphony is D major; at the beginning of the Finale, the "conflict" movement, the key switches to F minor, and only after a lengthy battle gets back to D, near the end. The Second Symphony begins in C minor and ends in E flat. The movements of the Fifth Symphony progress successively from C-sharp minor to A minor, then D major, F major and finally to D major. The Sixth Symphony, unusually for Mahler, begins and ends in the same key, A minor, signifying that in this case the conflict is unresolved.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Mahler's friend Guido Adler calculated that at the time of the composer's death in 1911 there had been more than 260 performances of the symphonies in Europe, Russia and America, the Fourth Symphony with 61 performances given most frequently (Adler did not enumerate performances of the songs). In his lifetime, Mahler's works and their performances attracted wide interest, but rarely unqualified approval; for years after its 1889 premiere critics and public struggled to understand the First Symphony, described by one critic after an 1898 Dresden performance as "the dullest [symphonic] work the new epoch has produced." The Second Symphony was received more positively, one critic calling it "the most masterly work of its kind since Mendelssohn." Such generous praise was rare, particularly after Mahler's accession to the Vienna Hofoper directorship. His many enemies in the city used the anti-Semitic and conservative press to denigrate almost every performance of a Mahler work; thus the Third Symphony, a success in Krefeld in 1902, was treated in Vienna with critical scorn: "Anyone who has committed such a deed deserves a couple of years in prison."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: A mix of enthusiasm, consternation and critical contempt became the normal response to new Mahler symphonies, although the songs were better received. After his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies failed to gain general public approval, Mahler was convinced that his Sixth would finally succeed. However, its reception was dominated by satirical comments on Mahler's unconventional percussion effects—the use of a wooden mallet, birch rods and a huge square bass drum. Viennese critic Heinrich Reinhardt dismissed the symphony as "Brass, lots of brass, incredibly much brass! Even more brass, nothing but brass!" The one unalloyed performance triumph within Mahler's lifetime was the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich, on 12 September 1910, advertised by its promoters as the "Symphony of a Thousand." At its conclusion, applause and celebrations reportedly lasted for half an hour.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Performances of Mahler's works became less frequent after his death. In the Netherlands the advocacy of Willem Mengelberg ensured that Mahler remained popular there, and Mengelberg's engagement with the New York Philharmonic from 1922 to 1928 brought Mahler regularly to American audiences. However, much American critical reaction in the 1920s was negative, despite a spirited effort by the young composer Aaron Copland to present Mahler as a progressive, 30 years ahead of his time and infinitely more inventive than Richard Strauss. Earlier, in 1916, Leopold Stokowski had given the American premieres of the Eighth Symphony and "Das Lied von der Erde" in Philadelphia. The Eighth was a sensationally successful performance that was immediately taken to New York where it scored a further triumph. An early proponent of Mahler's work in Britain was Adrian Boult, who as conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra performed the Fourth Symphony in 1926 and "Das Lied von der Erde" in 1930. The Hallé Orchestra brought "Das Lied" and the Ninth Symphony to Manchester in 1931; Sir Henry Wood staged the Eighth in London in 1930, and again in 1938 when the young Benjamin Britten found the performance "execrable" but was nevertheless impressed by the music. British critics during this period largely treated Mahler with condescension and faint praise. Thus Dyneley Hussey, writing in 1934, thought the "children's songs" were delightful, but that the symphonies should be let go. Composer-conductor Julius Harrison described Mahler's symphonies as "interesting at times, but laboriously put together" and as lacking creative spark. Bernard Shaw reported that the younger generation of the 1930s found Mahler (and Bruckner) "expensively second-class."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Before Mahler's music was banned as "degenerate" during the Nazi era, the symphonies and songs were played in the concert halls of Germany and Austria, often conducted by Bruno Walter or Mahler's younger assistant Otto Klemperer, and also by Willem Mengelberg. In Austria, Mahler's work experienced a brief renaissance between 1934 and 1938, a period known today as 'Austrofascism', when the authoritarian regime with the help of Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter, who were both on friendly terms with the new chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, sought to make Mahler into a national icon (with a status comparable to that of Wagner in Germany). Mahler's music was performed during the Nazi era in Berlin in early 1941 and in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands by Jewish orchestras and for Jewish audiences alone; works performed included the Second Symphony (Berlin), the First and Fourth Symphonies, and the "Songs of a Wayfarer" (Amsterdam).


title: Gustav Mahler

text: According to American composer David Schiff, his compatriot Leonard Bernstein used to imply that he had single-handedly rescued Mahler from oblivion in 1960, after 50 years of neglect. Schiff points out that such neglect was only relative—far less than the (incomplete) disregard of Bach in the years after his death. Although Bernstein gave the Mahler revival further impetus, it was well under way before 1960, sustained by conductors such as Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos and John Barbirolli, and by the long-time Mahler advocate Aaron Copland. Mahler himself predicted his place in history, once commenting: "Would that I could perform my symphonies for the first time 50 years after my death!"


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Deryck Cooke argues that Mahler's popularity escalated when a new, postwar generation of music-lovers arose, untainted by "the dated polemics of anti-romanticism" which had affected Mahler's reputation in the inter-war years. In this more liberated age, enthusiasm for Mahler expanded even into places—Spain, France, Italy—which had long been resistant to him. Robert Carr's simpler explanation for the 1950s Mahler revival is that "it was the long-playing record [in the early 1950s] rather than the "Zeitgeist" which made a comprehensive breakthrough possible. Mahler's work became accessible and repeatable in the home." In the years following his centenary in 1960, Mahler rapidly became one of the most performed and most recorded of all composers, and has largely remained thus. In Britain and elsewhere, Carr notes, the extent of Mahler performances and recordings has replaced a relative famine with a glut, bringing problems of over-familiarity. Harold Schonberg comments that "it is hard to think of a composer who arouses equal loyalty," adding that "a response of anything short of rapture to the Mahler symphonies will bring [to the critic] long letters of furious denunciation."


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In a letter to Alma dated 16 February 1902, Mahler wrote, with reference to Richard Strauss: "My day will come when his is ended. If only I might live to see it, with you at my side!" Carr observes that Mahler could conceivably have lived to see "his day"; his near-contemporary Richard Strauss survived until 1949, while Sibelius, just five years younger than Mahler, lived until 1957.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Donald Mitchell writes that Mahler's influence on succeeding generations of composers is "a complete subject in itself." Mahler's first disciples included Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who together founded the Second Viennese School. Mahler's music influenced the trio's move from progressive tonalism to atonality (music without a key); although Mahler rejected atonality, he became a fierce defender of the bold originality of Schoenberg's work. At the premiere of the latter's First String Quartet in February 1907, Mahler reportedly was held back from physically attacking the hecklers. Schoenberg's Serenade, Op. 24 (1923), Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra (1915) and Webern's Six Pieces (1928) all carry echoes of Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Mahler has also influenced the film scores of John Williams and other Hollywood composers.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Among other composers whose work carries the influence of Mahler, Mitchell lists America's Aaron Copland, the German song and stage composer Kurt Weill, Italy's Luciano Berio, Russia's Dmitri Shostakovich and England's Benjamin Britten. The American composers Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber were also influenced by Mahler's work. In a 1989 interview the pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy said that the connection between Mahler and Shostakovich was "very strong and obvious"; their music represented "the individual versus the vices of the world." Mitchell highlights Britten's "marvellously keen, spare and independent writing for the wind in ... the first movement of the Cello Symphony of 1963 [which] clearly belongs to that order of dazzling transparency and instrumental emancipation which Mahler did so much to establish." Mitchell concludes with the statement: "Even were his own music not to survive, Mahler would still enjoy a substantial immortality in the music of these pre-eminent successors who have embraced his art and assimilated his techniques." A 2016 "BBC Music Magazine" survey of 151 conductors ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphonies of all time.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In Hamburg, the Gustav Mahler Museum is dedicated to Gustav Mahler's life and work. It is situated in the Composers Quarter.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: In Altschluderbach, near Toblach in South Tyrol, Italy, there remains a little museum and memorial in the former composer's hut of Mahler. It is situated in the animal park next to the Gustav Mahler Stube. The "Stube" formerly had a museum on the first floor. There, Mahler and his wife Alma resided from 1907 to 1910.


title: Gustav Mahler

text: Two of the other composer's huts used by Mahler still exist; both are equipped as little museums. There is one composing hut at the Attersee, Upper Austria, and one at the Wörthersee in Carinthia.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine I (; born , ; – ) was the second wife and empress consort of Peter the Great, and Empress Regnant of Russia from 1725 until her death in 1727.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: The life of Catherine I was said by Voltaire to be nearly as extraordinary as that of Peter the Great himself. Said to have been born on 15 April 1684 (o.s. 5 April), she was originally named Marta Helena Skowrońska. Marta was the daughter of Samuel Skowroński (later spelt "Samuil Skavronsky"), a Roman Catholic farmer from the eastern parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, born to Minsker parents. In 1680 he married Dorothea Hahn at Jakobstadt. Her mother is named in at least one source as Elizabeth Moritz, the daughter of a Baltic German woman and there is debate as to whether Moritz's father was a Swedish officer. It is likely that two stories were conflated, and Swedish sources suggest that the Elizabeth Moritz story is probably incorrect. Some biographies state that Marta's father was a gravedigger and handyman, while others speculate that he was a runaway landless serf.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Marta's parents died of the plague around 1689, leaving five children. According to one of the popular versions, at the age of three Marta was taken by an aunt and sent to Marienburg (the present-day Alūksne in Latvia, near the border with Estonia and Russia) where she was raised by Johann Ernst Glück, a Lutheran pastor and educator who was the first to translate the Bible into Latvian. In his household she served as a lowly servant, likely either a scullery maid or washerwoman. No effort was made to teach her to read and write and she remained illiterate throughout her life.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Marta was considered a very beautiful young girl, and there are accounts that Frau Glück became fearful that she would become involved with her son. At the age of seventeen, she was married off to a Swedish dragoon, Johan Cruse or Johann Rabbe, with whom she remained for eight days in 1702, at which point the Swedish troops were withdrawn from Marienburg. When Russian forces captured the town, Pastor Glück offered to work as a translator, and Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev agreed to his proposal and took him to Moscow.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: There are unsubstantiated stories that Marta worked briefly in the laundry of the victorious regiment, and also that she was presented in her undergarments to Brigadier General Rudolph Felix Bauer, later the Governor of Estonia, to be his mistress. She may have worked in the household of his superior, Sheremetev. It is not known whether she was his mistress, or household maid. She travelled back to the Russian court with Sheremetev's army.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Afterwards she became part of the household of Prince Alexander Menshikov, who was the best friend of Peter the Great of Russia. Anecdotal sources suggest that she was purchased by him. Whether the two of them were lovers is disputed, as Menshikov was already engaged to Darya Arsenyeva, his future wife. It is clear that Menshikov and Marta formed a lifetime alliance.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: It is possible that Menshikov, who was quite jealous of Peter's attentions and knew his tastes, wanted to procure a mistress on whom he could rely. In any case, in 1703, while visiting Menshikov at his home, Peter met Marta. In 1704, she was well established in the Tsar's household as his mistress, and gave birth to a son, Peter. In 1703, she converted to Orthodoxy and took the new name of Catherine Alexeyevna ("Yekaterina Alexeyevna"). She and Darya Menshikova accompanied Peter and Menshikov on their military excursions.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Though no record exists, Catherine and Peter are described as having married secretly between 23 October and 1 December 1707 in Saint Petersburg. They had twelve children, two of whom survived into adulthood, Anna (born 1708) and Elizabeth (born 1709).


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Peter had moved the capital to St. Petersburg in 1703. While the city was being built he lived in a three-room log cabin with Catherine, where she did the cooking and caring for the children, and he tended a garden as though they were an ordinary couple. The relationship was the most successful of Peter's life and a great number of letters exist demonstrating the strong affection between Catherine and Peter. As a person she was very energetic, compassionate, charming, and always cheerful. She was able to calm Peter in his frequent rages and often was called in to do so.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine went with Peter on his Pruth Campaign in 1711. There, she was said to have saved Peter and his Empire, as related by Voltaire in his book "Peter the Great". Surrounded by overwhelming numbers of Turkish troops, Catherine suggested before surrendering, that her jewels and those of the other women be used in an effort to bribe the Ottoman grand vizier Baltacı Mehmet Pasha into allowing a retreat.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Mehmet allowed the retreat, whether motivated by the bribe or considerations of trade and diplomacy. In any case Peter credited Catherine and proceeded to marry her again (this time officially) at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg on 9 February 1712. She was Peter's second wife; he had previously married and divorced Eudoxia Lopukhina, who had borne him the Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich. Upon their wedding, Catherine took the style of her husband and became Tsarina. When Peter elevated the Russian Tsardom to Empire, Catherine became Empress. The Order of Saint Catherine was instituted by her husband on the occasion of their wedding.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Upon Peter's death, Catherine found her four siblings, Krystyna, Anna, Karol, and Fryderyk, gave them the newly created titles of Count and Countess, and brought them to Russia.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine was crowned in 1724. The year before his death, Peter and Catherine had an estrangement over her support of Willem Mons, brother of Peter's former mistress Anna, and brother to one of the current ladies in waiting to Catherine, Matryona Balk. He served as secretary to Catherine. Peter had fought his entire life to clear up corruption in Russia. Catherine had a great deal of influence on who could gain access to her husband. Willem Mons and his sister Matrena had begun selling their influence to those who wanted access to Catherine and, through her, to Peter. Apparently this had been overlooked by Catherine, who was fond of both. Peter found out and had Willem Mons executed and his sister Matrena exiled. He and Catherine did not speak for several months. Rumors flew that she and Mons had had an affair, but there is no evidence for this.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Peter died (28 January 1725 Old Style) without naming a successor. Catherine represented the interests of the "new men", commoners who had been brought to positions of great power by Peter based on competence. A change of government was likely to favor the entrenched aristocrats. For that reason during a meeting of a council to decide on a successor, a coup was arranged by Menshikov and others in which the guards regiments with whom Catherine was very popular proclaimed her the ruler of Russia. Supporting evidence was "produced" from Peter's secretary Makarov and the Bishop of Pskov, both "new men" with motivation to see Catherine take over. The real power, however, lay with Menshikov, Peter Tolstoy, and with other members of the Supreme Privy Council.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine viewed the deposed empress Eudoxia as a threat, so she secretly moved her to Shlisselburg Fortress near St Petersburg to be put in a secret prison under strict custody as a state prisoner.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine I died two years after Peter I, on 17 May 1727 at age 43, in St. Petersburg, where she was buried at St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. Tuberculosis, diagnosed as an abscess of the lungs, caused her early demise.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine was the first woman to rule Imperial Russia, opening the legal path for a century almost entirely dominated by women, including her daughter Elizabeth and granddaughter-in-law Catherine the Great, all of whom continued Peter the Great's policies in modernizing Russia. At the time of Peter's death the Russian Army, composed of 130,000 men and supplemented by another 100,000 Cossacks, was easily the largest in Europe. However, the expense of the military was proving ruinous to the Russian economy, consuming some 65% of the government's annual revenue. Since the nation was at peace, Catherine was determined to reduce military expenditure. For most of her reign, Catherine I was controlled by her advisers. However, on this single issue, the reduction of military expenses, Catherine was able to have her way. The resulting tax relief on the peasantry led to the reputation of Catherine I as a just and fair ruler.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: The Supreme Privy Council concentrated power in the hands of one party, and thus was an executive innovation. In foreign affairs, Russia reluctantly joined the Austro-Spanish league to defend the interests of Catherine's son-in-law, the Duke of Holstein, against Great Britain.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: Catherine gave her name to Catherinehof near St. Petersburg, and built the first bridges in the new capital. She was also the first royal owner of the Tsarskoye Selo estate, where the Catherine Palace still bears her name.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: She also gave her name to the Kadriorg Palace (German: "Katharinental", meaning "Catherine's Valley"), its adjacent Kadriorg Park and the later Kadriorg neighbourhood of Tallinn, Estonia, which today houses the Presidential Palace of Estonia. The name of the neighbourhood is also used as a metonym for the institution of the President.


title: Catherine I of Russia

text: In general, Catherine's policies were reasonable and cautious. The story of her humble origins was considered by later generations of tsars to be a state secret.


title: 1960 Valdivia earthquake

text: The 1960 Valdivia earthquake and tsunami () or the Great Chilean earthquake ("Gran terremoto de Chile") on 22 May 1960 was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. Various studies have placed it at 9.4–9.6 on the moment magnitude scale. It occurred in the afternoon (19:11 GMT, 15:11 local time), and lasted for approximately 10 minutes. The resulting tsunamis affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands.


title: 1960 Valdivia earthquake

text: The epicenter of this megathrust earthquake was near Lumaco, approximately south of Santiago, with Valdivia being the most affected city. The tremor caused localised tsunamis that severely battered the Chilean coast, with waves up to . The main tsunami traveled across the Pacific Ocean and devastated Hilo, Hawaii, where waves as high as were recorded over from the epicenter.


title: 1960 Valdivia earthquake

text: Various estimates of the total number of fatalities from the earthquake and tsunamis have been published, ranging between 1,000 and 6,000 killed. Different sources have estimated the monetary cost ranged from 400 million to $800 million (or $4.01 billion to $8.021 billion in 2022, adjusted for inflation).