Considered one of the greatest products of ‘Heidelberg Romanticism’, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s song anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, issued in 3 volumes between 1805 and 1808, was an unfailing resource for German composers. Unlike earlier collections of folk

This has to be one of the most tantalising ‘What Ifs’ in musical history. In 1911, at the end of his tenure with the New York Philharmonic and only months before his death, Gustav Mahler visited the office of Tams

In the afternoon of 24 February 1901, Gustav Mahler conducted the sixth Philharmonic concert in a performance of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. Mahler had been unhappy that Bruckner had left so many passages and themes “of a Beethovenian grandeur not carried

On 12 September 1910, audiences in Munich were treated to a unique classical music extravaganza. For the premiere of his 8th Symphony, Gustav Mahler had assembled a performing cast that stretched the resources to their limits. It involved 858 singers,

The birth of Gustav Mahler, the second of fourteen children born to Bernhard Mahler and Marie Mahler née Herrmann, was announced on 7 July 1860 in Kalischt, a small settlement on the border of Moravia. His parents were members of

After listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the American physician and poet Lewis Thomas wrote an essay that addresses the anxieties produced by the development of nuclear weapons. “I cannot listen to Mahler’s Ninth with anything like the old melancholy mixed

The Birth of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony When he started work on his second symphony, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) started with a funerary idea. After a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s comic opera Die drei Pintos, which Mahler had completed from

On 9 June 1902, Gustav Mahler treated the audience in Krefeld to the premiere of his complete 3rd Symphony. The second movement alone had first sounded on 9 November 1896, and the second, third and sixth movements on 9 March