Gustav Mahler

Austria, 1880–1911

Conductor and composer whose nine symphonies stretched the form to embrace 'the whole world' — song, irony, funeral marches and transcendence side by side.

MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced Gustav Mahler and 3 artists Gustav Mahler influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Gustav Mahler?

• Ludwig van Beethoven — Beethoven's Ninth — the symphony with voices — was the explicit precedent for Mahler's choral symphonies and his conducting repertoire's core.
• Richard Wagner — Mahler was the supreme Wagner conductor of his age and absorbed Wagner's harmonic and orchestral world into the symphony.
• Anton Bruckner — Mahler attended Bruckner's Vienna lectures, prepared the piano reduction of his Third Symphony and inherited his monumental symphonic scale.

Which artists did Gustav Mahler influence?

• Dmitri Shostakovich — Mahler — introduced to him by Ivan Sollertinsky — became the model of Shostakovich's symphonism: irony, march, song and catastrophe in one span.
• Alfred Schnittke — Mahler's collision of the banal and the tragic is the acknowledged ancestor of Schnittke's polystylism — his unfinished piano quartet completes a Mahler sketch.
• Benjamin Britten — Hearing Mahler's Fourth Symphony in 1930 hit Britten hard - 'entirely clean and transparent, the material remarkable, the melodic shapes highly original' - and the orchestral transparency stayed with him.