Mahler

Growing reputation

In 1880, Mahler began his career as a conductor with a job at a summer theatre at Bad Hall; in the years that followed, he took posts at successively larger opera houses: in Ljubljana in 1881, Olomouc in 1882, Vienna in 1883, Kassel also in 1883, Prague in 1885, Leipzig in 1886 and Budapest in 1888. In 1887, he took over conducting Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from an ill Arthur Nikisch, firmly establishing his reputation among critics and public alike. The year after, he made a complete performing edition of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Die drei Pintos, the success of which brought financial rewards and contributed to his gradually growing fame. Brahms was greatly impressed by his conducting of Don Giovanni. His first long-term appointment was at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, where he stayed until 1897; it was while Mahler was at Hamburg that his youngest brother Otto, also a composer, committed suicide in 1895 at the age of 21. From 1893 to 1896, Mahler took summer vacations at Steinbach am Attersee in Upper Austria, where he revised his Symphony No. 1 (first heard in 1889), composed his Symphony No. 2, sketched his Symphony No. 3, and wrote most of the song collection Lieder aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (Songs from 'The Youth's Magic Horn'), based on a famous set of heavily redacted folk-poems.

In 1897, Mahler, then thirty-seven, was offered the directorship of the Vienna Opera, the most prestigious musical position in the Austrian Empire. This was an 'Imperial' post, and under Austro-Hungarian law, no such posts could be occupied by Jews. Mahler, who was never a devout or practising Jew, had, in preparation, converted to Roman Catholicism. As a child, he had been a chorister in a Catholic Church where he had also learned piano from the choir master.[2] As the years passed Mahler found much to attract him in Catholicism, and Catholic influences are observable in his music, for example his use of the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus" in his Eighth Symphony.[3] Still, there is ample evidence of a Jewish spirit manifest in his works, as in the Klezmer-like theme of the third movement of the first symphony.