Gustav Mahler is largely considered one of the most talented symphonic composers of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. His musical output comprised mainly of symphonic and song cycles requiring mammoth orchestras and often choruses. Sadly, Mahler never experienced popularity as a composer during his lifetime, not nearly as much as Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, or even Tchaikovsky, but his talents as interpretive artist on the conductor's podium earned him many accolades and prestigious assignments as music director to famous orchestras. Mahler was born in Kaliste, Bohemia on July 7, 1860, to a distillery manager father and a homemaker mother. Gustav was the second of twelve children, of which five died in infancy and three others did not live to mature adulthood. The constant conflicts between Gustav's domineering and abusive father and his weak mother helped to shape his compositional style, always reflecting on the struggle between good and evil, happy and sad, strong and weak, etc. Mahler showed musical talent at an early age, and by the age of eight years, he was already composing music influenced by military marches played at the nearby barracks. His parents eagerly encouraged his music studies, sending him to private tutors and ultimately to the Vienna Conservatory (1875-1878). Mahler's studies at the Conservatory got off to a slow start, but the final year at school was marked with him winning several composing awards. After graduation, for want of paying composing work, Mahler instead started conducting, typically directing light operas at second-rate orchestras. His insistence on complete artistic control of the entire production, from the stage costumes to the dramatic routines to how each and every note in the opera was played, earned him few friends among the orchestral players and performers but many positive reviews from critics. It was during these ten years after graduation from the Conservatory in which Mahler really began serious orchestral composing. Works written during this time included Das Klagend Lied (1880), Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) (1884), and his First Symphony (1888). It must be noted that Mahler conducted the premieres of each of his orchestral works. However, the premiere of his First, in Budapest in November 1889, was deemed a critical failure, since the audience was unaccustomed to the sound of this complex, modern work. Yet the First is perhaps his most approachable symphony, containing many Austrian Lieder themes and simple melodies. And, still, with a performance time of 55 to 60 minutes, it is his shortest symphony! Failures of Mahler the composer did not daunt Mahler the conductor, as his successes with the operas of Mozart, Wagner, and even some brand new works from Tchaikovsky earned him a reputation as a brilliant interpretive artist. Still, Mahler persevered, composing the Second Symphony (1892), a mammoth work of five movements requiring a full orchestra, female choral soloists, two choirs, an offstage brass band, and a pipe organ. His Third Symphony (1896) took this one step further, a six movement symphonic journey typically taking one hour and forty minutes to perform. During this time, Mahler was busy conducting orchestras and opera companies in Kassel (1883), Prague (1885), Leipzig (1886), Budapest (1888), Hamburg (1891), and Vienna (1894), but it was the musical director position at the Vienna Court Opera that he was aiming for. First, he had to overcome some family problems (both his parents died within months of each other, a younger brother fled to the United States, and another younger brother committed suicide), but, more importantly, Mahler's Jewish faith stood in the way of his career goal (Vienna was largely anti-Semitic during this time). To accommodate, he accepted a Roman Catholic baptism, and was promptly appointed musical director of the Vienna Hofoper Court Opera. Mahler's tenure at the Hofoper was tumultuous yet productive; he composed his Fourth Symphony (1901), thereby completing what many music historians agree wraps up his "Early Symphonies." His Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies (1903, 1904, 1905 respectively), all purely orchestral, make up his intermediate works. Although these works are increasingly modern and complex, they still contain some wonderful lyrical passages, especially the divinely beautiful Adagio from his 5th. Also, during this time he married Alma Schindler (a composer of fair talent herself), and they had two daughters, Maria (born 1902), and Anna (born 1904). Still, as director of The Hofoper, Mahler brought new high standards of performance unmatched anywhere else in the world. 1907 brought three tragic events to Mahler's life (ironically foreshadowed by the three "hammer blows" present in the Finale of his 6th Symphony): First, he was forced to resign from the Hofoper in somewhat acrimonious circumstances (chiefly disagreements as to what artistic direction he wanted to take the Hofoper), second, the diagnosis of the valve defect in his heart, and third, the death of his elder daughter (of Scarlet Fever). But by this point in his career Mahler had reached worldwide popularity as an orchestral and operatic conductor, and new work was not difficult to find. But it was composing that fueled his passions; The Eighth Symphony (1908) began the final series of Mahler's works. The Eighth is another work of Biblical proportions; a standard performance requires a full orchestra with enlarged brass and woodwind sections, eight soloists (three sopranos, two altos, a tenor, baritone, and bass), two full mixed choirs, a children's choir, several "unconventional" orchestral instruments (guitars, a harmonium, a piano, and a celesta), and, again, a pipe organ. Mahler disliked the alternate title bestowed upon this symphony, A Symphony of a Thousand, but indeed, during the premiere (in Munich in 1910), over one thousand performers were present. Amazingly, this lengthy and difficult work (only two movements but requiring 80-90 minutes to perform), was a huge success at its premiere; in attendance were many famous musicians, businesspeople, and royal families. Concluding Mahler's final works were Das Lied von der Erde (1908), the Ninth Symphony (1909), and an unfinished Tenth Symphony (1911), all of which he did not live to see or hear performed. The completed portions of the Tenth contain references to how Mahler lamented his crumbling marriage (by this time Alma was having an affair) yet it is considered perhaps the most pure form of Mahler's music (it contains many elements of modern 20th Century music). It was during concluding a winter season of conducting the New York Philharmonic Society in the spring of 1911 in which the heart condition diagnosed four years earlier caught up with Mahler; he traveled back to Austria to spend his final days near his family. He died late in the evening of May 18. Mahler's legacy took a long time to mature. His music, although complex and full of vivid imagery, failed to become popular in musical circles until fifty years after his death; it was primarily the efforts of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Otto Klemperer, and, more recently, Simon Rattle , who have introduced the works of Mahler to many. Mahler himself declared, "My time will come."
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 the music was discovered and championed 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.
Born in humble circumstances, Mahler showed 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 (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Mahler's ''œuvre'' is relatively small—for much of his life composing was a part-time activity, secondary to conducting—and is confined to the genres of symphony and song, except for one piano quartet. Most of his ten symphonies are very large-scale works, several of which employ soloists and choirs in addition to augmented orchestral forces. These works were often controversial when first performed, and were slow to receive critical and popular approval; an exception was the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Mahler's immediate musical successors were the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955, to honour the composer's life and work.
Bernhard Mahler, the pedlar's son and the composer's father, elevated himself to the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie by becoming a coachman and later an innkeeper. He bought a modest house in the village of Kaliště u Humpolce, on a straight line roughly half way between Prague in Bohemia and Brno in Moravia, in the geographic center of today's Czech Republic. Marie gave birth to the first of the couple's 14 children, a son Isidor, who died in infancy. Two years later, on 1860, their second son, Gustav, was born. Kaliště u Humpolce today has about 330 people; Mahler's birth house is a pension-hotel with its own website.
When he was four years old, Gustav discovered his grandparents' piano and took to it immediately. He developed his performing skills sufficiently to be considered a local ''Wunderkind'' and gave his first public performance at the town theatre when he was ten years old. Although Gustav loved making music, his school reports from the Jihlava Gymnasium portrayed him as absent-minded and unreliable in academic work. In 1871, in the hope of improving the boy's results, his father sent him to the New Town Gymnasium in Prague, but Gustav was unhappy there and soon returned to Jihlava. In 1874 he suffered a bitter personal loss when his younger brother Ernst died after a long illness. Mahler sought to express his feelings in music: with the help of a friend, Josef Steiner, he began work on an opera, ''Herzog Ernst von Schwaben'' ("Duke Ernest of Swabia") as a memorial to his lost brother. Neither the music nor the libretto of this work has survived.
Among Mahler's fellow students at the Conservatory was the future song composer Hugo Wolf, with whom he formed a close friendship. Wolf was unable to submit to the strict disciplines of the Conservatory and was expelled. Mahler, while sometimes rebellious, avoided the same fate only by writing a penitent letter to Hellmesberger. He attended occasional lectures by Anton Bruckner and, though never formally his pupil, was influenced by him. On 1877 he attended the disastrous premiere of Bruckner's Third Symphony, at which the composer was shouted down, and most of the audience walked out. Mahler and other sympathetic students later prepared a piano version of the symphony, which they presented to Bruckner. Along with many music students of his generation, Mahler fell under the spell of Richard Wagner, though his chief interest was the sound of the music rather than the staging. It is not known whether he saw any of Wagner's operas during his student years.
Mahler left the Conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the prestigious silver medal given for outstanding achievement. He then enrolled at Vienna University (he had, at Bernhard's insistence, sat and with difficulty passed the "matura", or entrance examination) and followed courses which reflected his developing interests in literature and philosophy. After leaving the University in 1879, Mahler made some money as a piano teacher, continued to compose, and in 1880 finished a dramatic cantata, ''Das klagende Lied'' ("The Song of Lamentation"). This, his first substantial composition, shows traces of Wagnerian and Brucknerian influences, yet includes many musical elements which musicologist Deryck Cooke describes as "pure Mahler". Its first performance was delayed until 1901, when it was presented in a revised, shortened form.
Mahler developed interests in German philosophy, and was introduced by his friend Siegfried Lipiner to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Theodor Fechner and Hermann Lotze. These thinkers continued to influence Mahler and his music long after his student days were over. Biographer Jonathan Carr says that the composer's head was "not only full of the sound of Bohemian bands, trumpet calls and marches, Bruckner chorales and Schubert sonatas. It was also throbbing with the problems of philosophy and metaphysics he had thrashed out, above all, with Lipiner."
In January 1883 Mahler became conductor at a run-down theatre in Olomouc (). He later wrote: "From the moment I crossed the threshold of the Olomouc theatre I felt like one awaiting the wrath of God." Despite poor relations with the orchestra, Mahler brought five new operas to the theatre, including Bizet's ''Carmen'', and won over the press that had initially been hostile to him. After a week's trial at the Royal Theatre in the Hessian town of Kassel, Mahler became the theatre's "Musical and Choral Director" from August 1883. The title concealed the reality that Mahler was subordinate to the theatre's Kapellmeister, Wilhelm Treiber, who disliked him and set out to make his life miserable. Despite the unpleasant atmosphere, Mahler had moments of success at Kassel. He directed a performance of his favourite opera, Weber's ''Der Freischütz'', and on 1884 conducted his own incidental music to Josef Viktor von Scheffel's play ''Der Trompeter von Säkkingen'' ("The Trumpeter of Säkkingen"), the first professional public performance of a Mahler work. An ardent but ultimately unfulfilled love affair with soprano Johanna Richter led Mahler to write a series of love poems which became the text of his song cycle ''Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen'' ("Songs of a Wayfarer").
In January 1884 the distinguished conductor Hans von Bülow brought the Meiningen Court Orchestra to Kassel and gave two concerts. Hoping to escape from his job in the theatre, Mahler unsuccessfully sought a post as Bülow's permanent assistant. However, in the following year his efforts to find new employment resulted in a six-year contract with the prestigious Leipzig Opera, to begin in 1886. Unwilling to remain in Kassel for another year, Mahler resigned in July 1885, and through good fortune was offered a standby appointment as an assistant conductor at the Neues Deutsches Theater (New German Theatre) in Prague.
In Leipzig Mahler befriended Carl von Weber, grandson of the composer, and agreed to prepare a performing version of Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera ''Die drei Pintos'' ("The Three Pintos"). Mahler transcribed and orchestrated the existing musical sketches, used parts of other Weber works, and added some composition of his own. The premiere at the Stadttheater in January 1888 was an important occasion at which Tchaikovsky was present, as were the heads of various opera houses. The work was well-received; its success did much to raise Mahler's public profile, and brought him financial rewards. His involvement with the Weber family was complicated by a romantic attachment to Carl von Weber's wife Marion which, though intense on both sides, ultimately came to nothing. At around this time Mahler discovered the German folk-poem collection ''Des Knaben Wunderhorn'' ("The Youth's Magic Horn"), which would dominate much of his compositional output for the following 12 years.
Mahler's new-found financial security enabled him to resign his Leipzig position in May 1888, after a dispute with the Stadttheater's chief stage manager. Without a post, Mahler returned to Prague to work on a revival of ''Die drei Pintos'' and a production of Peter Cornelius's ''Der Barbier von Bagdad''. This short stay ended unhappily, with Mahler's dismissal after an outburst during rehearsals. However, through the efforts of an old Viennese friend, Guido Adler, Mahler's name went forward as a potential director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest. He was interviewed, made a good impression, and was offered the post from October 1888.
There has been frequent speculation about lost or destroyed works from Mahler's early years. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg believed that the First Symphony was too mature to be a first symphonic work, and must have had predecessors. In 1938 Mengelberg revealed the existence of the so-called "Dresden archive", a series of manuscripts in the possession of the widowed Marion von Weber. The archive was almost certainly destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945; according to Mahler historian Donald Mitchell "the strong possibility remains that some important manuscripts, either early symphonies or parts of early symphonies, were to be found in Dresden."
In February 1889 Bernhard Mahler died; this was followed later in the year by the deaths both of Mahler's sister Leopoldine and his mother. Mahler himself suffered poor health, with attacks of haemorrhoids and migraine and a recurrent septic throat. Shortly after these family and health setbacks the premiere of the First Symphony, in Budapest on 1889, was a disappointment. The critic August Beer's lengthy newspaper review indicates that enthusiasm after the early movements degenerated into "audible opposition" after the Finale. Mahler was particularly distressed by the negative comments from his Vienna Conservatory contemporary, Viktor von Herzfeld, who had remarked that Mahler, like many conductors before him, had proved not to be a composer.
In 1891 Hungary's move to the political right was reflected in the opera house when Beniczky was replaced as intendant by Géza Zichy, a conservative aristocrat determined to assume artistic control over Mahler's head. Mahler began negotiating with the director of the Hamburg Stadttheater; in May 1891, having agreed to a contract there, he resigned his Budapest post. His final Budapest triumph was a performance of ''Don Giovanni'' which won him praise from Brahms who was present. During his Budapest years Mahler's compositional output had been limited to the ''Wunderhorn'' song settings that became Volumes II and III of ''Lieder und Gesänge'', and amendments to the First Symphony.
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". 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 a six-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. On 1893, at Hamburg's Ludwig Konzerthaus, 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 several 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 1895. Mahler's future 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 was disrupted by the suicide of his younger brother Otto.
At the Stadttheater Mahler introduced numerous new operas: 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. 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 Roman Catholicism in February 1897. Two months later Mahler was appointed to the Hofoper, provisionally as a staff conductor with the title of Kapellmeister.
Vienna, the imperial Habsburg capital, had recently elected an anti-Semitic conservative mayor, Karl Lueger, who had once proclaimed: "I myself decide who is a Jew and who isn't." In such a volatile political atmosphere Mahler needed an early demonstration of his German cultural credentials. He made his initial mark in May 1897 with much-praised performances of Wagner's ''Lohengrin'' and Mozart's ''Die Zauberflöte''. Shortly after the ''Zauberflöte'' triumph, Mahler was forced to take sick leave for several weeks, during which he was nursed by his sister Justine and his long-time companion, the viola player Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Mahler returned to Vienna in early August to prepare for Vienna's first uncut version of the ''Ring'' cycle. This performance took place on 24–, attracting critical praise and public enthusiasm. Mahler's friend Hugo Wolf told Bauer-Lechner that "for the first time I have heard the ''Ring'' as I have always dreamed of hearing it while reading the score." On 8 October Mahler was formally appointed to succeed Jahn as the Hofoper's director. 1897. According to La Grange the decree appointing Mahler to the directorship was dated and signed by the Lord Chamberlain on behalf of the Emperor on .|group= n}} His first production in his new office was Smetana's Czech nationalist opera ''Dalibor'', with a reconstituted finale that left the hero Dalibor alive. This production caused anger among the more extreme Viennese German nationalists, who accused Mahler of "fraternising with the anti-dynastic, inferior Czech nation". During Mahler's tenure a total of 33 new operas were introduced to the Hofoper; a further 55 were new or totally revamped productions. However, a proposal to stage Richard Strauss's controversial opera ''Salome'' in 1905 was rejected by the Viennese censors.
Early in 1902 Mahler met Alfred Roller, an artist and designer associated with the Vienna Secession movement. A year later, Mahler appointed him chief stage designer to the Hofoper, where Roller's debut was a new production of ''Tristan und Isolde''. The collaboration between Mahler and Roller created more than 20 celebrated productions of, among other operas, Beethoven's ''Fidelio'', Gluck's ''Iphigénie en Aulide'' and Mozart's ''Le nozze di Figaro''. In the ''Figaro'' production, Mahler offended some purists by adding and composing a short recitative scene to Act III.
In spite of numerous theatrical triumphs, Mahler's Vienna years were rarely smooth; his battles with singers and the house administration continued on and off for the whole of his tenure. While Mahler's methods improved standards, his histrionic and dictatorial conducting style was resented by orchestra members and singers alike. In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff. The anti-Semitic elements in Viennese society, long opposed to Mahler's appointment, continued to attack him relentlessly, and in 1907 instituted a press campaign designed to drive him out. By that time he was at odds with the opera house's administration over the amount of time he was spending on his own music, and was preparing to leave. Early in 1907 he began discussions with Heinrich Conried, director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, and in June signed a contract, on very favourable terms, for four seasons' conducting in New York. At the end of the summer he submitted his resignation to the Hofoper, and on 1907 conducted ''Fidelio'', his 648th and final performance there. In ten years, Mahler had brought new life to the opera house and cleared its debts, but had won few friends—it was said that he treated his musicians in the way a lion tamer treated his animals. His departing message to the company, which he pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered over the floor. After conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony on , Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December.
Within this same period Mahler's works began to be performed with increasing frequency. In April 1899 he conducted the Viennese premiere of his Second Symphony; 1901 saw the first public performance of his early work ''Das klagende Lied'', in a revised two-part form. Later that year, in November, Mahler conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, in Munich, and was on the rostrum for the first complete performance of the Third Symphony, at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein festival at Krefeld on 1902. Mahler "first nights" now became increasingly frequent musical events; he conducted the first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies at Cologne and Essen respectively, in 1904 and 1906. Four of the ''Rückert Lieder'', and ''Kindertotenlieder'', were introduced in Vienna on 1905.
Friends of the couple were surprised by the marriage and dubious of its wisdom. Burckhard called Mahler "that rachitic degenerate Jew", unworthy for such a good-looking girl of good family. On the other hand, Mahler's family considered Alma to be flirtatious, unreliable, and too fond of seeing young men fall for her charms. Mahler was by nature moody and authoritarian—Natalie Bauer-Lechner, his earlier partner, said that living with him was "like being on a boat that is ceaselessly rocked to and fro by the waves". Alma soon became resentful that, on Mahler's insistence that there could only be one composer in the family, she had given up her music studies. She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart". Mahler's requirement that their married life be organised around his creative activities imposed strains, and precipitated rebellion on Alma's part; the marriage was nevertheless marked at times by expressions of considerable passion, particularly from Mahler.
In the summer of 1907 Mahler, exhausted from the effects of the campaign against him in Vienna, took his family to Maiernigg. Soon after their arrival both daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Anna recovered, but after a fortnight's struggle Maria died on . Immediately following this devastating loss, Mahler learned that his heart was defective, a diagnosis subsequently confirmed by a Vienna specialist, who ordered a curtailment of all forms of vigorous exercise. The extent to which Mahler's condition disabled him is unclear; Alma wrote of it as a virtual death sentence, though Mahler himself, in a letter written to her on 1907, said that he would be able to live a normal life, apart from avoiding over-fatigue. The illness was, however, a further depressing factor; at the end of the summer the villa at Maiernigg was closed, and never revisited.
For its 1908–09 season the Metropolitan management brought in the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to share duties with Mahler, who made only 19 appearances in the entire season. One of these was a much-praised performance of Smetana's ''The Bartered Bride'' on 1909. In the early part of the season Mahler conducted three concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra. This renewed experience of orchestral conducting inspired him to resign his position with the opera house and accept the conductorship of the re-formed New York Philharmonic. He continued to make occasional guest appearances at the Met, his last performance being Tchaikovsky's ''The Queen of Spades'' on 1910.
Back in Europe for the summer of 1909, Mahler worked on his Ninth Symphony and made a conducting tour of the Netherlands. The 1909–10 New York Philharmonic season was long and taxing; Mahler rehearsed and conducted 46 concerts, but his programmes were often too demanding for popular tastes. His own First Symphony, given its American debut on 1909, was one of the pieces that failed with critics and public, and the season ended with heavy financial losses. The highlight of Mahler's 1910 summer was the first performance of the Eighth Symphony at Munich on , the last of his works to be premiered in his lifetime. The occasion was a triumph—"easily Mahler's biggest lifetime success", according to biographer Robert Carr— but was overshadowed by the composer's discovery, before the event, that Alma had begun an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. Greatly distressed, Mahler sought advice from Sigmund Freud, and appeared to gain some comfort from his meeting with the psychoanalyst. Alma agreed to remain with Mahler, although the relationship with Gropius continued surreptitiously. In a gesture of love, Mahler dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her.
On 22 May 1911 Mahler was buried in the Grinzing cemetery, as he had requested. Alma, on doctors' orders, was absent, but among the mourners at a relatively pomp-free funeral were Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as "the holy Gustav Mahler"), Bruno Walter, Alfred Roller, the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, and representatives from many of the great European opera houses. ''The New York Times'', reporting Mahler's death, called him "one of the towering musical figures of his day", but discussed his symphonies mainly in terms of their duration, incidentally exaggerating the length of the Second Symphony to "two hours and forty minutes". In London, ''The Times'' obituary said his conducting was "more accomplished than that of any man save Richter", and that his symphonies were "undoubtedly interesting in their union of modern orchestral richness with a melodic simplicity that often approached banality", though it was too early to judge their ultimate worth.
Alma Mahler survived her husband by more than 50 years, dying in 1964. She married Walter Gropius in 1915, divorced him five years later, and married the writer Franz Werfel in 1929. In 1940 she published a memoir of her years with Mahler, entitled ''Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters''. This account was criticised by later biographers as incomplete, selective and self-serving, and for providing a distorted picture of Mahler's life. The composer's daughter Anna Mahler became a well-known sculptor; she died in 1988. The International Gustav Mahler Society was founded in 1955 in Vienna, with Bruno Walter as its first president and Alma Mahler as an honorary member. The Society aims to create a complete critical edition of Mahler's works, and to commemorate all aspects of the composer's life.
Deryck Cooke and other analysts have divided Mahler's composing life into three distinct phases: a long "first period", extending from ''Das klagende Lied'' in 1880 to the end of the ''Wunderhorn'' phase in 1901; a "middle period" of more concentrated composition ending with Mahler's departure for New York in 1907; and a brief "late period" of elegiac works before his death in 1911.
The main works of the first period are the first four symphonies, the ''Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen'' song cycle and various song collections in which the ''Wunderhorn'' songs predominate. In this period songs and symphonies are closely related and the symphonic works are programmatic. Mahler initially gave the first three symphonies full descriptive programmes, all of which he later repudiated. He devised, but did not publish, titles for each of the movements for the Fourth Symphony; from these titles the German music critic Paul Bekker conjectured a programme in which Death appears in the Scherzo "in the friendly, legendary guise of the fiddler tempting his flock to follow him out of this world".
The middle period comprises a triptych of purely instrumental symphonies (the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh), the ''Rückert'' songs and the ''Kindertotenlieder'', two final ''Wunderhorn'' settings and, in some reckonings, Mahler's last great affirmative statement, the choral Eighth Symphony. Cooke believes that the Eighth stands on its own, between the middle and final periods. Mahler had by now abandoned all explicit programmes and descriptive titles; he wanted to write "absolute" music that spoke for itself. Cooke refers to "a new granite-like hardness of orchestration" in the middle-period symphonies, while the songs have lost most of their folk character, and cease to fertilise the symphonies as explicitly as before.
The works of the brief final period—''Das Lied von der Erde'', the Ninth and (incomplete) Tenth Symphonies—are expressions of personal experience, as Mahler faced death. Each of the pieces ends quietly, signifying that aspiration has now given way to resignation. Cooke considers these works to be a loving (rather than a bitter) farewell to life; the composer Alban Berg called the Ninth "the most marvellous thing that Mahler ever wrote". None of these final works were performed in Mahler's lifetime.
Early critics maintained that Mahler's adoption of many different styles to suit different expressions of feeling meant that he lacked a style of his own; Cooke on the other hand asserts that Mahler "redeemed any borrowings by imprinting his [own] personality on practically every note" to produce music of "outstanding originality." Music critic Harold Schonberg sees the essence of Mahler's music in the theme of struggle, in the tradition of Beethoven. However, according to Schonberg, Beethoven's struggles were those of "an indomitable and triumphant hero", whereas Mahler's are those of "a psychic weakling, a complaining adolescent who ... enjoyed his misery, wanting the whole world to see how he was suffering." Yet, Schonberg concedes, most of the symphonies contain sections in which Mahler the "deep thinker" is transcended by the splendour of Mahler the musician. The initial connection between song and symphony occurs with the song-cycle ''Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen'' and the First Symphony. Although this early evidence of cross-fertilisation is important, it is during Mahler's extended ''Wunderhorn'' phase, in which his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies were written, that the song and symphony genres are consistently intermingled. Themes from the ''Wunderhorn'' song ''Das himmlische Leben'' ("The Heavenly Life"), composed in 1892, became a key element in the Third Symphony completed in 1896; the song itself forms the finale to the Fourth (1900) and its melody is central to the whole composition. For the Second Symphony, written between 1888 and 1894, Mahler worked simultaneously on the ''Wunderhorn'' song, ''Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt'' ("The Sermon of St Anthony of Padua to the Fishes"), and on the Scherzo based on it which became the symphony's third movement. Another ''Wunderhorn'' setting from 1892, ''Urlicht'' ("Primal Light"), is used as the Second Symphony's fourth (penultimate) movement.
In Mahler's middle and late periods, the song-symphony relationship is less direct. However, musicologist Donald Mitchell notes specific relationships between the middle period songs and their contemporaneous symphonies—the second ''Kindertotenlieder'' song and the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the last ''Kindertotenlieder'' song and the Sixth Symphony finale. Mahler's last work employing vocal and orchestral forces, ''Das Lied von der Erde'', is subtitled "A Symphony..."—Mitchell categorises it as a "song ''and'' symphony".
The range of musical moods, Cooke maintains, comes from Mahler's "amazing orchestration" which, in the writer's view, defies analysis—"it speaks for itself". Franklin lists specific features which are basic to Mahler's style: extremes of volume, the use of off-stage ensembles, unconventional arrangement of orchestral forces, and frequent recourse to popular music and dance forms such as the ländler and the waltz. Musicologist Vladimír Karbusický maintains that the composer's Jewish roots had lasting effects on his creative output; he pinpoints the central part of the third movement of the First Symphony as the most characteristically "Yiddish" music in Mahler's work. The Czech composer-journalist Max Brod has also identified Jewish tunes and rhythms in Mahler's music.
A technical device much used by Mahler is that of "progressive tonality", which Deryck Cooke describes as "the procedure of resolving a symphonic conflict in a different key from that in which it was stated", and which is often used "to symbolise the gradual ascendancy of a certain value by progress from one key to another over the whole course of a symphony". This technique was also used by Mahler's Danish contemporary Carl Nielsen. Mahler first employed the device in an early song, ''Erinnerung'' ("Memory"), and thereafter used it freely in his symphonies. For example, the predominant key of the First Symphony is D major; at the beginning of the Finale, the "conflict" movement, the key switches to F minor, and only after a lengthy battle gets back to D, near the end. The Second Symphony begins in C minor and ends in E flat. The movements of the Fifth Symphony progress successively from C-sharp minor to A minor, then D major, F major and finally to D major. The Sixth Symphony, unusually for Mahler, begins and ends in the same key, A minor, signifying that in this case the conflict is unresolved.
Mahler's friend Guido Adler calculated that at the time of the composer's death in 1911 there had been more than 260 performances of the symphonies in Europe, Russia and America, the Fourth Symphony with 61 performances given most frequently (Adler did not enumerate performances of the songs). In his lifetime, Mahler's works and their performances attracted wide interest, but rarely unqualified approval; for years after its 1889 premiere critics and public struggled to understand the First Symphony, described by one critic after an 1898 Dresden performance as "the dullest [symphonic] work the new epoch has produced." The Second Symphony was received more positively, one critic calling it "the most masterly work of its kind since Mendelssohn". Such generous praise was rare, particularly after Mahler's accession to the Vienna Hofoper directorship. His many enemies in the city used the anti-Semitic and conservative press to denigrate almost every performance of a Mahler work; thus the Third Symphony, a success in Krefeld in 1902, was treated in Vienna with critical scorn: "Anyone who has committed such a deed deserves a couple of years in prison."
A mix of enthusiasm, consternation and critical contempt became the normal response to new Mahler symphonies, although the songs were better received. After his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies failed to gain general public approval, Mahler was convinced that his Sixth would finally succeed. However, its reception was dominated by satirical comments on Mahler's unconventional percussion effects—the use of a wooden mallet, birch rods and a huge square bass drum. Viennese critic Heinrich Reinhardt dismissed the symphony as "Brass, lots of brass, incredibly much brass! Even more brass, nothing but brass!" The one unalloyed performance triumph within Mahler's lifetime was the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich, on 1910, advertised by its promoters as the "Symphony of a Thousand". At its conclusion, applause and celebrations reportedly lasted for half an hour.
Before Mahler's music was banned as "degenerate" during the Nazi era, the symphonies and songs were played in the concert halls of Germany and Austria, often conducted by Bruno Walter and Mahler's younger assistant Otto Klemperer and Willem Mengelberg. In Austria, Mahler's work experienced a brief renaissance between 1934 and 1938, a period known today as 'Austrofascism', when the authoritarian regime with the help of Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter, who were both on friendly terms with the new chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, sought to make Mahler into a national icon (with a status comparable to that of Wagner in Germany). Mahler's music was performed during the Nazi era in Berlin in early 1941 and in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands by Jewish orchestras and for Jewish audiences alone; works performed included the Second Symphony (Berlin), the First and Fourth Symphonies, and the Songs of a Wayfarer (Amsterdam).
Deryck Cooke argues that Mahler's popularity escalated when a new, postwar generation of music-lovers arose, untainted by "the dated polemics of anti-romanticism" which had affected Mahler's reputation in the inter-war years. In this more liberated age, enthusiasm for Mahler expanded even into places—Spain, France, Italy—which had long been resistant to him. Robert Carr's simpler explanation for the 1950s Mahler revival is that "it was the long-playing record [in the early 1950s] rather than the ''Zeitgeist'' which made a comprehensive breakthrough possible. Mahler's work became accessible and repeatable in the home." In the years following his centenary in 1960, Mahler rapidly became one of the most performed and most recorded of all composers, and has largely remained thus. In Britain and elsewhere, Carr notes, the extent of Mahler performances and recordings has replaced a relative famine with a glut, bringing problems of over-familiarity. Harold Schonberg comments that "it is hard to think of a composer who arouses equal loyalty", adding that "a response of anything short of rapture to the Mahler symphonies will bring [to the critic] long letters of furious denunciation".
In a letter to Alma dated 16 February 1902, Mahler wrote, with reference to Richard Strauss: "My day will come when his is ended. If only I might live to see it, with you at my side!" Carr observes that Mahler could conceivably have lived to see "his day"; his near-contemporary Richard Strauss survived until 1949, while Sibelius, just five years younger than Mahler, died only in 1957.
Among other composers whose work carries the influence of Mahler, Mitchell lists America's Aaron Copland, the German song and stage composer Kurt Weill, Italy's Luciano Berio, Russia's Dmitri Shostakovich and England's Benjamin Britten. In a 1989 interview the pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy said that the connection between Mahler and Shostakovich was "very strong and obvious"; their music represented "the individual versus the vices of the world." Mitchell highlights Britten's "marvellously keen, spare and independent writing for the wind in ... the first movement of the Cello Symphony of 1963 [which] clearly belongs to that order of dazzling transparency and instrumental emancipation which Mahler did so much to establish". Mitchell concludes with the statement: "Even were his own music not to survive, Mahler would still enjoy a substantial immortality in the music of these pre-eminent successors who have embraced his art and assimilated his techniques."
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Leonard Bernstein ( ; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to ''The New York Times'', he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for ''West Side Story'', as well as ''Candide'', ''Wonderful Town'', ''On the Town'' and his own ''Mass''.
Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954, continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting while performing piano concertos simultaneously.
As a composer he was prolific, writing symphonies, ballet music, operas, chamber music, pieces for the piano, other orchestral and choral works, and other concert and incidental music, but the tremendous success of ''West Side Story'' remained unequaled by his other compositions.
His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a bookstore in downtown Lawrence; it is standing today on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam initially opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestra concerts in his teenage years and eventually supported his music education. At a very young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began learning the piano seriously when the family acquired his cousin Lillian Goldman's unwanted piano. As a child, Bernstein attended the Garrison Grammar School and Boston Latin School. As a child he was very close to his younger sister Shirley, and would often play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth including Helen Coates who later became his secretary.
After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, amongst others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston, the author of many harmony and counterpoint textbooks. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis (1939) entitled ''"The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music"'' (reproduced in his book ''Findings''), Bernstein's main intellectual influence at Harvard was probably the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life. One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson, with whom he played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play ''The Birds'' in the original Greek. Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet ''Fancy Free''. During his time at Harvard he was briefly an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club. Bernstein also mounted a student production of ''The Cradle Will Rock'' directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a friend and influence (both musically and politically) on Bernstein.
Bernstein also met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at this time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos's charisma and power as a musician was a major influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he probably influenced some of Bernstein's later habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and perhaps his interest in Mahler. The other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and then at a party afterwards on Copland's Birthday in 1938. At the party Bernstein played Copland's ''Piano Variations'', a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland's student as such, Bernstein would regularly seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would often cite him as "his only real composition teacher".
After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939 (graduating with a B.A. ''cum laude''), he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (who anecdotally is said to have given Bernstein the only "A grade" he ever awarded), piano with Isabelle Vengerova, orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle. Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears to not to have much enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although often in later life he would mention Reiner when discussing his important teachers.
Bernstein's friendships with Copland (who was very close to Koussevitsky) and Mitropoulos were important in him being recommended for a place in the class. Other students in the class included Lukas Foss who also became a lifelong friend. Koussevitsky perhaps did not teach Bernstein much basic conducting technique (which he had already developed under Reiner), but instead became a sort of father figure to him, and was perhaps the major influence on Bernstein's emotional way of interpreting music. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky's conducting assistant and would later dedicate his ''second symphony, "The Age of Anxiety''" to him.
On November 14, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he made his major conducting debut at sudden notice —and without any rehearsal—after Bruno Walter came down with the flu. The next day, ''The New York Times'' carried the story on their front page and their editorial remarked, "It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves." He became instantly famous because the concert was nationally broadcast, and afterwards started to appear as a guest conductor with many US orchestras. The program included works by Schumann, Miklos Rozsa, Wagner and Richard Strauss's ''Don Quixote'' with soloist Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the orchestra. Before the concert Bernstein briefly spoke to Bruno Walter who discussed particular difficulties in the works he was to perform. It is possible to hear this concert (apart from the Wagner work) on a recording of the CBS radio broadcast that has been issued on CD by the orchestra. From 1945–47 Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra which had been founded the previous year by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The orchestra (with support from the Mayor) was aimed at a different audience with more modern programs and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic.
In addition to becoming known as a conductor, Bernstein also emerged as a composer in the same period. In January 1944 he conducted the premiere of his ''Jeremiah Symphony'' in Pittsburgh. His score to the ballet ''Fancy Free'' choreographed by Jerome Robbins opened in New York in April 1944 and this was later developed into the musical ''On the Town'' with lyrics by Comden and Green that opened on Broadway in December 1944.
After World War II, Bernstein's career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1946 he made his first trip to Europe conducting various orchestras and recorded Ravel's ''Piano Concerto in G'' as soloist and conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In 1946, he conducted opera for the first time, with the American première at Tanglewood of Benjamin Britten's ''Peter Grimes,'' which had been a Koussevitzky commission. That same year, Arturo Toscanini invited Bernstein to guest conduct two concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, one of which again featured Bernstein as soloist in the Ravel concerto.
In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a life-long association with Israel. The next year he conducted an open air concert for troops at Beersheba in the middle of the desert during the Arab-Israeli war. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967, he conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded his symphonies and other works with the Israel Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon.
In 1949, he conducted the world première of the ''Turangalîla-Symphonie'' by Olivier Messiaen, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Part of the rehearsal for the concert was released on CD by the orchestra. When Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestral and conducting departments at Tanglewood, holding this position for many years.
In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world première of the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives which was written around half a century earlier but never performed. Throughout his career Bernstein often talked about the music of Ives who died in 1954. The composer, old and frail, was unable (or some reports say "unwilling") to attend the concert, but his wife attended. He reportedly listened to a radio broadcast of it on a radio in his kitchen some days later. A recording of the "premiere" was released in a 10 CD box set ''Bernstein LIVE'' by the orchestra, but the notes indicate it was a repeat performance from three days later, and this is perhaps what Ives heard. In any case reports also differ on Ives' exact reaction, but some suggest he was thrilled and danced a little jig. Bernstein recorded the 2nd symphony with the orchestra in 1958 for Columbia and 1987 for Deutsche Grammophon. There is also a 1987 performance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra available on DVD.
Bernstein was a visiting music professor from 1951–56 at Brandeis University and he founded the Creative Arts Festival there in 1952. He conducted various productions at the first festival including the premiere of his opera ''Trouble in Tahiti'' and Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's ''Threepenny Opera''. The festival was named after him in 2005, becoming the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. In 1953 he was the first US conductor to appear at La Scala in Milan, conducting Maria Callas in Cherubini's ''Medea''. The same year he produced his score to the musical ''Wonderful Town'' at very short notice, working again with old friends Comden and Green who wrote the lyrics.
In 1954 Bernstein made the first of his television lectures for the CBS arts program Omnibus. The live lecture, entitled "Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony", involved Bernstein explaining the work with the aid of musicians from the former NBC Symphony Orchestra (recently renamed the "Symphony of the Air") and a giant page of the score covering the floor. Bernstein subsequently performed concerts with the orchestra and recorded his Serenade for Violin with Isaac Stern. Further Omnibus lectures followed in 1955-8 (later on ABC and then NBC) covering Jazz, Conducting, American Musical Comedy, Modern Music, J.S. Bach and Grand Opera. These programs were made available in the USA in a DVD set in 2010.
In late 1956 Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in concerts that were to have been conducted by Guido Cantelli, who had tragically been killed in an air crash in Paris. This was the first time Bernstein had conducted the orchestra in subscription concerts since 1951. Partly due to these appearances, Bernstein was named the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, replacing Dimitri Mitropoulos. He began his tenure in that position in 1958 having held the post jointly with Mitropoulos in 1957-8. In 1958 Bernstein and Mitropoulos took the New York Philharmonic on tour to South America. In his first season in sole charge Bernstein included a season-long survey of American classical music. Themed-programming of this sort was fairly novel at that time compared to the present day. Bernstein held the Music Directorship until 1969 (with a sabbatical in 1965) although he continued to conduct and make recordings with the orchestra for the rest of his life and was appointed "Laureate Conductor".
He became a well-known figure in the United States through his series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his ''Omnibus'' programs. His first Young People's Concert was televised a few weeks after his tenure as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic began. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. The Bernstein Young People's Concerts were the first, and probably the most influential series of music appreciation programs ever produced on television, and were highly acclaimed by critics. Some of Bernstein's music lectures were released on records, with at least one winning a Grammy award. The programmes were shown in many countries around the world, often with Bernstein dubbed into other languages. Twenty-five of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video.
Prior to taking over the New York Philharmonic Bernstein produced the music for two shows. The first was for the operetta Candide which was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's novel. The second was Bernstein's collaboration with the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the writer Arthur Laurents and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim to produce the musical ''West Side Story''. The first three had worked on it intermittently since Robbins first suggested the idea in 1949. Finally, with the addition of Sondheim to the team and a period of concentrated effort, it received its Broadway premiere in 1957 and has since proven to be Bernstein's most popular and enduring score.
In 1959, he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS. A highlight of the tour was Bernstein's performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to the US, they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He recorded it for a second time with the orchestra on tour in Japan in 1979. Bernstein seems to have limited himself to only conducting certain Shostakovich symphonies: 1, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 14. He made two recordings of Shostakovich's ''Leningrad Symphony,'' one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s and another one recorded live in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the only recording he ever made with them (along with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1).
Other non-US composers that Bernstein championed to some extent at the time include the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (who was perhaps then only a little known in the US) and Jean Sibelius, whose popularity had perhaps by then started to fade. Bernstein eventually recorded a complete cycle in New York of Sibelius's symphonies and three of Nielsen's symphonies (Nos. 2, 4, and 5), as well as conducting recordings of his violin, clarinet and flute concertos. He also recorded Nielsen's 3rd Symphony with the Royal Danish Orchestra after a critically acclaimed public performance in Denmark. Bernstein championed US composers, especially those that he was close to like Aaron Copland, William Schuman and David Diamond. He also started to more extensively record his own compositions for Columbia Records. This included his 3 symphonies, his ballets and the ''Symphonic Dances'' from ''West Side Story'' with the New York Philharmonic. He also conducted an LP of his 1944 musical ''On The Town,'' the first (almost) complete recording of the original featuring several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (The 1949 film version only contains four of Bernstein's original numbers.)
In one oft-reported incident, in April 1962 Bernstein appeared on stage before a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the pianist Glenn Gould. During rehearsals, Gould had argued for tempi much broader than normal, which did not reflect Bernstein's concept of the music. Bernstein gave a brief address to the audience starting with "Don't be frightened; Mr Gould is here..." and going on to "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter)—the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder). The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, depending on the people involved." This speech was subsequently interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for ''The New York Times'', as abdication of personal responsibility and an attack on Gould, whose performance Schonberg went on to criticize heavily. Bernstein always denied that this had been his intent and has stated that he made these remarks with Gould's blessing. Throughout his life, he professed admiration and friendship for Gould. Schonberg was often (though not always) harshly critical of Bernstein as a conductor during his tenure as Music Director. However his views were not shared by the audiences (with many full houses) and probably not by the musicians themselves (who had greater financial security arising from Bernstein's many TV and recording activities amongst other things).
In 1962 the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in the new Lincoln Center. The move was not without controversy because of acoustic problems with the new hall. Bernstein conducted the gala opening concert featuring vocal works by Mahler, Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, and the premiere of Aaron Copland's ''Connotations'', a serial-work that was merely politely received. During the interval Bernstein kissed the cheek of the President's wife Jacqueline Kennedy, a break with protocol that was commented on at the time. In 1961 Bernstein had conducted at President John F. Kennedy's pre-inaugural gala, and he was an occasional guest in the Kennedy White House. He also conducted at the funeral mass in 1968 for the late President Kennedy's brother Robert Kennedy.
In 1964 Bernstein conducted Franco Zeffirelli's production of Verdi's ''Falstaff'' at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti's production of the same opera with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. During his time in Vienna he also recorded the opera for Columbia Records and conducted his first subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (which is made up of players from the Vienna State Opera) featuring Mahler's ''Das Lied von der Erde'' with Fischer-Dieskau and James King. He returned to the State Opera in 1968 for a production of Der Rosenkavalier and in 1970 for Otto Schenk's production of Beethoven's ''Fidelio''. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to ''Trouble in Tahiti,'' ''A Quiet Place.'' with the ORF orchestra. Bernstein's final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's ''Khovanshchina'', he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a cheering audience.
With his commitment to the New York Philharmonic and his many other activities, Bernstein had little time for composition during the 1960s. The two major works he produced at this time were his ''Kaddish Symphony'' dedicated to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the ''Chichester Psalms'' which he produced during a sabbatical year he took from the Philharmonic in 1965 to concentrate on composition. To try and have more time for composition was probably a major factor in his decision to step down as Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1969, and to never accept such as position anywhere again.
In 1970 Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna as a celebration of Beethoven's 200th birthday. It featured parts of Bernstein's rehearsals and performance for the Otto Schenk production of ''Fidelio'', Bernstein playing the 1st piano concerto and the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and the young Placido Domingo amongst the soloists. The program was first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS in the US on Christmas Eve 1971. The show, originally entitled ''Beethoven's Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna,'' won an Emmy and was issued on DVD in 2005.
Like many of his friends and colleagues, Bernstein had been involved in various left wing causes and organizations since the 1940s. He was blacklisted by the US State Department and CBS in the early 1950s, but unlike others his career was not greatly affected, and he was never required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His political life received substantial press coverage though in 1970 due to a gathering hosted at his Manhattan apartment. Bernstein and his wife held the event seeking to raise awareness and money for the defense of several members of the Black Panther Party against a variety of charges. ''The New York Times'' initially covered the gathering as a lifestyle item, but later posted an editorial harshly unfavorable to Bernstein following generally negative reaction to the widely publicized story. This reaction culminated in June 1970 with the appearance of "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", an essay by satirist Tom Wolfe featured on the cover of the ''New York'' Magazine. The article contrasted the Bernsteins' comfortable lifestyle in one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods with the anti-establishment politics of the Black Panthers. It led to the popularization of "radical chic" as a critical term. Both Bernstein and his wife Felicia responded to the criticism, arguing that they were motivated not by a shallow desire to express fashionable sympathy but by their concern for civil liberties.
Bernstein's major compositions during the 1970s were probably his ''MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers''; his score for the ballet ''Dybbuk''; his orchestral vocal work ''Songfest''; and his US bicentenary musical ''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue'' written with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner which was his first real theatrical flop, and last original broadway show. The world premiere of Bernstein's ''MASS'' took place on September 8, 1971. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., it was partly intended as an anti-war statement. Hastily written in places, the work represented a fusion not only of different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also of different musical styles including classical and rock music. It was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. In the present day it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era – in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.
In 1972 Bernstein recorded Bizet's ''Carmen,'' with Marilyn Horne in the title role and James McCracken as Don Jose, after leading several stage performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The recording was one of the first in stereo to use the original spoken dialogue between the sung portions of the opera, rather than the musical recitatives that were composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet's death. The recording was Bernstein's first for Deutsche Grammophon and won a Grammy.
Bernstein was appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, and delivered a series of six televised lectures on music with musical examples played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Taking the title from a Charles Ives work, he called the series "The Unanswered Question"; it was a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrowed terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. The lectures are presently available in both book and DVD form. Noam Chomsky wrote in 2007 on the Znet forums about the linguistic aspects of the lecture: "I spent some time with Bernstein during the preparation and performance of the lectures. My feeling was that he was onto something, but I couldn't really judge how significant it was."
A major period of upheaval in Bernstein's personal life began in 1976 when he took the decision that he could no longer repress his homosexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the writer Tom Cothran. The next year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978. Cothran himself died of AIDS in 1981. Bernstein is reported to have often spoken of his terrible guilt over his wife's death. Most biographies of Bernstein describe that his lifestyle became more excessive and his personal behavior sometimes cruder after her death. However his public standing and many of his close friendships appear to have remained unaffected, and he resumed his busy schedule of musical activity.
In 1978, Bernstein return to the Vienna State Opera to conduct a revival of the Otto Schenk production of ''Fidelio,'' now featuring Gundula Janowitz and Rene Kollo in the lead roles. At the same time, Bernstein made a studio recording of the opera for Deutsche Grammophon and the opera itself was filmed by Unitel and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006. In May 1978, the Israel Philharmonic played two US concerts under his direction to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Orchestra under that name. On consecutive nights, the Orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In 1979, Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the first and only time, in two charity concerts for Amnesty International involving performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The invitation for the concerts had come from the orchestra and not from its principal conductor Herbert von Karajan. There has been speculation about why Karajan never invited Bernstein to conduct his orchestra. (Karajan did conduct the New York Philharmonic during Bernstein's tenure.) The full reasons will probably never be known – reports suggest they were on friendly terms when they met, but sometimes practiced a little mutual one-upmanship. One of the concerts was broadcast on radio and was posthumously released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.
In 1982 in the US, PBS aired an 11-part series of Bernstein's late 1970s films for Unitel of the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies and various other works. Bernstein gave spoken introduction and actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the programs, reading from Beethoven's letters. The original films have since been released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon. In addition to conducting in New York, Vienna and Israel, Bernstein was a regular guest conductor of other orchestras in the 1980s. These included the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam with whom he recorded Mahler's First, Fourth, and Ninth Symphonies amongst other works; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich with whom he recorded Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'', Haydn's ''Creation'', Mozart's ''Requiem'' and ''Mass in C Minor''; and the orchestra of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome with whom he recorded some Debussy and Puccini's ''La Boheme''.
In 1982, he and Ernest Fleischmann founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute as a summer training academy along the lines of Tanglewood. Bernstein served as Artistic Director and taught conducting there until 1984. Around the same time he performed and recorded some of his own works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein was also at the time a committed supporter of Nuclear Disarmament. In 1985 he took the European Community Youth Orchestra in a "Journey for Peace" tour around Europe and to Japan.
In 1985, he conducted a recording of ''West Side Story'', the first time he had conducted the entire work. The recording, featuring what some critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless an international bestseller. A TV documentary showing the making of the recording was made at the same time and is available on DVD.
In his later years, Bernstein's life and work was celebrated around the world (as it has been since his death). The Israel Philharmonic celebrated his involvement with them at Festivals in Israel and Austria in 1977. In 1986 the London Symphony Orchestra mounted a Bernstein Festival in London with one concert that Bernstein himself conducted attended by the Queen. In 1988 Bernstein's 70th Birthday was celebrated by a lavish televised gala at Tanglewood featuring many performers who had worked with him over the years.
In December 1989 Bernstein conducted live performances and recorded in the studio his operetta ''Candide'' with the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The use of opera singers in some roles perhaps fitted the style of operetta better than some critics had thought was the case for West Side Story, and the recording (released posthumously in 1991) was universally praised. One of the live concerts from the Barbican Centre in London is available on DVD. ''Candide'' had had a troubled history, with many re-writes and writers involved. Bernstein's concert and recording were based on a "final" version that had been first performed by Scottish Opera in 1988. The opening night (which Bernstein attended in Glasgow) was conducted by Bernstein's former student John Mauceri.
On December 25, 1989, Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus (Playhouse) as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had conducted the same work in West Berlin the previous day. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the ''Ode to Joy,'' substituting the word ''Freiheit'' (freedom) for ''Freude'' (joy). Bernstein, in his spoken introduction said that they had "taken the liberty" of doing this because of a "most likely phony" story, apparently believed in some quarters, that Schiller wrote an "Ode to Freedom" that is now presumed lost. Bernstein added, "I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing."
In the summer of 1990, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Like his earlier activity in Los Angeles, this was a summer training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood, and is still in existence. Bernstein was already at this time suffering from the lung disease that would lead to his death. In his opening address Bernstein said that he had decided to devote what time he had left to education. A video showing Bernstein speaking and rehearsing at the first Festival is available on DVD in Japan.
Bernstein made his final performance as a conductor at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" from ''Peter Grimes'', and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. He suffered a coughing fit in the middle of the Beethoven performance which almost caused the concert to break down. The concert was later issued on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.
He announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990, and died of pneumonia and a pleural tumor five days later. He was 72 years old. A longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema from his mid-50s. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, construction workers removed their hats and waved, yelling "Goodbye, Lenny." Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler's Fifth lying across his heart.
Bernstein's conducting was characterized by extremes of emotion with the rhythmic pulse of the music conveyed visually through his balletic podium manner. Musicians often reported that his manner in rehearsal was the same as in concert. As he got older his performances tended to be overlaid to a greater extent with a personal expressiveness which often divided critical opinion. Extreme examples of this style can be found in his Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Nimrod from Elgar's ''Enigma Variations'' (1982), the end of Mahler's 9th Symphony (1985), and the finale of Tchaikovsky's ''Pathetique Symphony'' (1986), where in each case the tempos are well below those typically chosen.
Bernstein performed a wide repertoire from the baroque era to the 20th century, although perhaps from the 1970s onwards he tended to focus more on music from the romantic era. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler and with American composers in general, including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and of course himself. Some of his recordings of works by these composers would likely appear on many music critics' lists of recommended recordings. A list of his other well-thought-of recordings would probably include individual works from Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Nielsen, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, among others. His recordings of ''Rhapsody in Blue'' (full-orchestra version) and ''An American in Paris'' for Columbia Records, released in 1959, are considered definitive by many, although Bernstein cut the ''Rhapsody'' slightly, and his more 'symphonic' approach with slower tempi is quite far from Gershwin's own conception of the piece, evident from his two recordings. (Oscar Levant, Earl Wild, and others come closer to Gershwin's own style.) Bernstein never conducted Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, or ''Porgy and Bess,'' although he did discuss the latter in his article ''Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?'', originally published in ''The New York Times'' and later reprinted in his 1959 book ''The Joy of Music.''
In addition to being an active conductor, Bernstein was a very influential teacher of conducting. During his many years of teaching at Tanglewood and elsewhere, he directly taught or mentored many conductors who are performing now, such as Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Alexander Frey, Paavo Järvi, John Mauceri, Eiji Oue, Seiji Ozawa (who made his US TV debut as the guest conductor on one of the ''Young People's Concerts''), Carl St.Clair, and Michael Tilson Thomas. He also undoubtedly influenced the career choices of many US musicians who grew up watching his television programmes in the 1950s and 60s.
His later recordings (starting with Bizet's Carmen in 1972) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia Masterworks label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Gustav Mahler's ''Song of the Earth'' and Mozart's 15th piano concerto and "Linz" symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca Records (1966); Berlioz's ''Symphonie fantastique'' and ''Harold in Italy'' (1976) for EMI; and Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' (1981) for Philips Records, a label that like Deutsche Grammophon was part of PolyGram at that time. Unlike his studio recordings for Columbia Masterworks, most of his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings were taken from live concerts (or edited together from several concerts with additional sessions to correct errors). Many replicate repertoire that he recorded in the 1950s and 60s.
In addition to his audio recordings, many of Bernstein's concerts from the 1970s onwards were recorded on motion picture film by the German film company Unitel. This included a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies (with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra), as well as complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann symphonies recorded at the same series of concerts as the audio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon. Many of these films appeared on Laserdisc and are now on DVD.
In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories including several for recordings released after his death. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.
Despite the fact that he was a popular success as a composer, Bernstein himself is reported to have been disillusioned that some of his more serious works were not rated more highly by critics, and that he himself had not been able to devote more time to composing because of his conducting and other activities. Professional criticism of Bernstein's music often involves discussing the degree to which he created something new as art versus simply skillfully borrowing and fusing together elements from others. In the late 1960s, Bernstein himself reflected that his eclecticism was in part due to his lack of lengthy periods devoted to composition, and that he was still seeking to enrich his own personal musical language in the manner of the great composers of the past, all of whom had borrowed elements from others. Perhaps the harshest criticism he received from some critics in his lifetime though was directed at works like his ''Kaddish Symphony'', his ''MASS'' and the opera ''A Quiet Place'', where they found the underlying message of the piece or the text as either mildly embarrassing, clichéd or offensive. Despite this, all these pieces have been performed, discussed and reconsidered since his death.
Although he taught conducting, Bernstein was not a teacher of composition as such, and he has no direct composing heirs. Perhaps the closest are composers like John Adams who from the 1970s onwards indirectly adopted elements of his eclectic, theatrical style.
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ar:ليونارد برنستاين be:Леанард Бернштэйн bg:Ленард Бърнстейн ca:Leonard Bernstein cs:Leonard Bernstein cy:Leonard Bernstein da:Leonard Bernstein de:Leonard Bernstein es:Leonard Bernstein eo:Leonard Bernstein fa:لنارد برنستاین fr:Leonard Bernstein gl:Leonard Bernstein ko:레너드 번스타인 hr:Leonard Bernstein id:Leonard Bernstein it:Leonard Bernstein he:ליאונרד ברנשטיין ka:ლენარდ ბერნსტაინი la:Leonardus Bernstein lt:Leonard Bernstein hu:Leonard Bernstein nl:Leonard Bernstein ja:レナード・バーンスタイン no:Leonard Bernstein nn:Leonard Bernstein pl:Leonard Bernstein pt:Leonard Bernstein ro:Leonard Bernstein ru:Бернстайн, Леонард simple:Leonard Bernstein sk:Leonard Bernstein sl:Leonard Bernstein sh:Leonard Bernstein fi:Leonard Bernstein sv:Leonard Bernstein th:เลนนาร์ด เบิร์นสไตน์ tr:Leonard Bernstein uk:Леонард Бернстайн vi:Leonard Bernstein war:Leonard Bernstein zh:伦纳德·伯恩斯坦This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.
The first fruits of this were his cantatas ''Le visage nuptial'' and ''Le soleil des eaux'' for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the ''Second Piano Sonata'' of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism.
Boulez quickly became one of the philosophical leaders of the post-war movement in the arts towards greater abstraction and experimentation. Many composers of Boulez's generation taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany. The so-called Darmstadt School composers were instrumental in creating a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervor; an international, even cosmopolitan style, a style that could not be 'co-opted' as propaganda in the way that the Nazis used, for example, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Boulez was in contact with many composers who would become influential, including John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Early in his career, he performed as a specialist on the ondes Martenot.
These criticisms, combined with what Boulez felt was a lack of expressive flexibility in the language, as he outlined in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land..." had already led Boulez to refine his compositional language. He loosened the strictness of his total serialism into a more supple and strongly gestural music, and did not publicly reveal much about these techniques, which limited further discussion. His first venture into this new kind of serialism was a work for 12 solo voices titled ''Oubli signal lapidé'' (1952), but it was withdrawn after a single performance. Its material was reused in the 1970 composition ''Cummings ist der Dichter''.
Boulez described one of the work's innovations, called "pitch multiplication", in several articles, most importantly in the chapter "Musical Technique" in Boulez 1971. It was Lev Koblyakov, however, who first described its presence in the three "L'artisanat furieux" movements of ''Le marteau sans maître'', and in his 1981 doctoral thesis. However, an explanation of the processes themselves was not made until 1993. Other techniques used in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were first described by Ulrich Mosch, and later fully elaborated by him.
During the time that Boulez was testing these new ideas, those colleagues who had never been entirely comfortable with the prominence of a rigorous musical language, such as György Ligeti, had brought a convincing musical counter argument to Boulez's musical ideals. In a poetic twist, Boulez had moved from peerless respect for ''Le marteau sans maître'' to seeming defeat with ''Pli selon pli'' (Fold upon fold), which sets a Stéphane Mallarmé poem about the tripping impotence of a swan, unable to take flight from a frozen lake.
The desire to expand unrealized possibilities has also lead Boulez to create related works in series. His early twelve miniatures for piano, ''Notations'' (1945), has, since the 1970s, been in the process of being expanded as an orchestral cycle. To date, at least seven movements have been completed, although only five have been performed. The material contained in ''Anthèmes'' for solo violin was later expanded into an extended composition for violin and electronics ''Anthèmes 2'' and Boulez is currently developing it further into a large-scale work for violin and orchestra. ''Incises,'' a short work for solo piano, has since exploded into ''Sur Incises'' for three percussive groups (pianos, harps, percussion) in two very extended movements.
At IRCAM, Boulez created an environment where composers would have at hand the best performers available, and where the most advanced technology and computer scientists would be at their service. Boulez now began to explore the use of electronic sound transformation in real time. Previously, electronic music had to be recorded to tape, which thus 'fixed' it. The temporal aspect of any live music making in which it played a part had to be coordinated with the tape exactly. Boulez found this impossibly restrictive. Now at IRCAM, he composed ''Répons'', for six soloists, chamber orchestra, and live electronics. With the assistance of Andrew Gerzso Boulez fashioned a work in which the computer captured the resonance and spatialization of sounds created by the ensemble and processed them in real time.
Boulez is particularly famed for his polished interpretations of twentieth century classics—Alban Berg, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Edgard Varèse—as well as for numerous performances of contemporary music. Clarity, precision, rhythmic agility and a respect for the composers' intentions as notated in the musical score are the hallmarks of his conducting style. In 1984, he collaborated with Frank Zappa and conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain, who performed three of Zappa's pieces. He never uses a baton, conducting with his hands alone. His nineteenth century repertoire focuses upon Ludwig van Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann and especially Richard Wagner. His recording of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony has met with considerable critical acclaim. In 1974, he also recorded Maurice Ravel's then little-known orchestral version of "Une Barque sur l'océan" from ''Miroirs'', when there was still no printed score. The score was published only in 1983, and even then only in the first of two slightly different versions Ravel had made.
During his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he was criticized, even by members of the orchestra, for his concentration on modern repertoire at the expense of works by earlier composers. Nonetheless, Boulez' controversial "Rug" concerts of contemporary music with members of the New York Philharmonic played a significant role in "bridging" the widening gap between the New York downtown music scene with concerts of "uptown" music, directed primarily at Columbia University by a former classmate at the Paris Conservatoire and a pupil of Leibowitz, Jacques-Louis Monod. In his 1981 volume of compilation of reviews from ''The New York Times'', ''Facing the Music'', critic Harold C. Schonberg includes a column in which he details how unhappy some members of the New York Philharmonic orchestra were with Boulez during his tenure.
Boulez has also conducted opera productions and made several recordings of opera. He joined the Bayreuth Festival's roster for 1966's ''Parsifal'', after Hans Knappertsbusch died. Subsequently, he was the conductor for the 1976 centenary production of Richard Wagner's ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'', directed by Patrice Chéreau, recordings of which were commercially released in audio and video formats. Boulez reunited with Chéreau for a late seventies production of Alban Berg's ''Lulu'' at the Paris Opera (the first-ever production of the completed opera) and a 2007 production originating at Vienna's Theater an der Wien, later traveling to Amsterdam, of Leoš Janáček's ''From the House of the Dead'', in what Boulez said was the last opera production that he would ever conduct. In 2004 and 2005, Boulez returned to Bayreuth to conduct a controversial new production of ''Parsifal'' directed by Christoph Schlingelsief. Other operas Boulez conducted include Berg's ''Wozzeck'' (Opéra National de Paris), Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' (Bayreuth, Japan tour), Bartók's ''Bluebeard's Castle'' (Aix-en-Provence Festival, choreographed by Pina Bausch, and concert performances), Debussy's ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' (productions for Covent Garden and WNO and concert performances with the Cleveland Orchestra) and Arnold Schoenberg's ''Moses und Aron'' (Amsterdam and Salzburg). On August 15, 2008, he conducted a concert of the music of Leoš Janáček for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, preceded by a discussion of the music with Roger Wright, Director of the Proms, in the Royal College of Music. In 2010, Boulez finished recording his 15-year, multi-orchestra Mahler cycle for Deutsche Grammophon with the Adagio from Mahler's uncompleted Tenth Symphony with the Cleveland Orchestra.
Two interviews with Pierre Boulez were published in 2007 and 2008.
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an:Pierre Boulez ca:Pierre Boulez cy:Pierre Boulez da:Pierre Boulez de:Pierre Boulez et:Pierre Boulez es:Pierre Boulez fa:پیر بولز fr:Pierre Boulez ko:피에르 불레즈 it:Pierre Boulez he:פייר בולז la:Petrus Boulez mk:Пјер Булез nl:Pierre Boulez ja:ピエール・ブーレーズ no:Pierre Boulez pl:Pierre Boulez pt:Pierre Boulez ru:Булез, Пьер simple:Pierre Boulez fi:Pierre Boulez sv:Pierre Boulez uk:П'єр Булез zh:皮埃尔·布莱兹This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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