page_title: Gustav Mahler
section_title: Stadttheater Hamburg
hierarchical_section_title: Gustav Mahler / Biography / Budapest and Hamburg, 1888–97 / Stadttheater Hamburg
caption_attribution_description: English: Gustav Mahler's composer's lodge in Steinbach / Attersee Deutsch: Gustav Mahlers Komponierhäuschen in Steinbach am Attersee &#160; This media shows the protected monument with the number 38130 in Austria. (Commons, de, Wikidata)
context_page_description: Gustav Mahler 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. In 2016, a BBC Music Magazine survey of 151 conductors ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphonies of all time.
  Born in Bohemia 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.
context_section_description: 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 with 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.
  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.
  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.
  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.
caption: The Komponierhäuschen (German for '"composition hut"') in Steinbach am Attersee, where Mahler composed in the summer from 1893
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