Sadly, by the end of his life, Wolf’s unstinting admiration for Mahler had dissolved into spiteful resentment at the latter’s success. The two shared lodgings as students, and formed a kind of mutual admiration society. Mahler’s blazing talent unwittingly contributed to the great Lieder composer Hugo Wolf’s decline.

At 13, he gave a sensational public recital that included a virtuoso note-spinner by Thalberg, and as a student at the Vienna Conservatory he performed Scharwenka’s ferociously difficult Piano Concerto No.1, apparently without batting an eyelid. He suffered from a psychosomatic nervous tic in his right leg, which made his movements slightly ungainly, and he inherited his mother’s heart defect, the deciding factor in his death.Īlthough Mahler’s performance was only average in most of his school subjects, by his early teens he was already marked out as a pianist prodigy. It is somewhat ironic that the physical scars left by his father amounted to little more than a severe bruising, whereas those left by his mother were to plague him to the end of his days. She bore Bernhard 14 children in all and, despite suffering from a limp since birth and a heart condition, was made to work like a slave.ĭuring a session with the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the deeply traumatised Mahler recalled running screaming from the house in agony to the strains of a hurdy-gurdy playing outside. His father, Bernhard, ran a ramshackle distillery, and regularly thrashed his children and Mahler’s mother, Marie. Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, to a poor family of Moravian Jews.

Even 40 years ago, Mahler was still dismissed by many as a “fringe” composer, but now he is widely considered the last great symphonist in the tradition of Beethoven. He also stretched the traditional system of major and minor keys to its limits, taking music to the very brink of atonality (keylessness). He expanded the scale of music to near-bursting point – there are single movements in his works that last longer than an entire symphony by Mozart or Haydn. Each of Mahler’s nine symphonies (and the unfinished Tenth) requires the highest degree of orchestral virtuosity and sensitivity.

Shout classics wild at heart