The rise and rise of Gustav Mahler

In 1973 the musicologist Henry-Louis de la Grange published the first volume of his landmark biography of Gustav Mahler. The editor of Piano Quarterly commissioned Glenn Gould to review it, and Gould being Gould, he didn’t hold back. Then, as now, Gould had a reputation as a provocateur: the pianist whose swinging, ice-cool Bach intoxicated or infuriated according to temperament. His writing, too, was caustic and irrepressible – applying the same wit and forensic intellect to Hindemith and Petula Clark alike. His review (reprinted in 1984 in The Glenn Gould Reader) appeared under the title Data Bank on the Upward-Scuttling Mahler.

It’s as sardonic as you’d expect. Gould ranges briskly over Mahler’s performance history and de la Grange’s book, and he’s no respecter of orthodox pieties (it’d be a brave male writer today who referred to Alma Mahler as a ‘concert-hall courtesan’). The book’s foreword, by Karlheinz Stockhausen (‘who with each passing pronouncement seems more and more like a character invented by Hermann Hesse’), suggests that ‘readers of this book will be magically transformed into Mahler’. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that’, observes Gould.

The only jolt – the one thing that really dates Gould’s writing – is the basic assumption underlying the whole piece: that Mahler is not, necessarily, a composer who needs to be taken seriously. This is early 1974 and in the Anglosphere, at least (the story in Central Europe is more complicated), Mahler is rising but he is not yet a first-rank figure. He is not – to use a loaded and much-abused term – part of the canon.

Does that come as such a surprise? Your answer probably depends upon your age. In the 2010s I ran a training orchestra for undergraduate musicians. They had grown up in a musical universe where Mahler’s symphonies were the backbone of the repertoire, and were bewildered when I told them that in my own teens (the 1980s) this had not been the case. I’d known professional musicians who still regarded Mahler as a fad, and when my father bought his treasured LP set of Mahler’s Seventh, he warned me that it was ‘modern music’. It might have been the first moment at which I realised that I’d lived through a generational shift.

Jump forward: the 2026 BBC Proms season provides a useful data bank for trends in the English-speaking concert hall. For 131 years the Proms has combined a determinedly audience-friendly approach to programming with a willingness to gamble on the new (or newly-fashionable). The festival also has a searchable performance database, which tells us that the 2026 season features four of Mahler’s nine completed symphonies, including two performances of the First Symphony in which the Aurora Orchestra performs this hour-long work from memory.

There are also performances of Das Lied von der Erde and the Rückert-Lieder, plus Britten’s transcription of a movement from Mahler’s Third Symphony – created in 1941 and now regularly held up (not unfairly) as evidence of how far Britten’s sensibilities were ahead of his time. A typical 21^st century Proms season, in other words. Old masters like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky can only dream of being represented so comprehensively, though the question is not whether Mahler’s work merits this level of exposure. Indisputably, musicians want to play his symphonies and audiences want to hear them. They speak to our times: QED.

No, what’s fascinating is that tastes have changed so swiftly and so completely. Between 1895 and 1962, only two Mahler symphonies (the First and Fourth) were played in full at the Proms – a total of nine performances in 67 years, to frequently bemused reviews. That was the norm. The textbooks in my school music library assured me (like Penguin’s classic 1949 paperback The Symphony) that Mahler was ‘vulgar’ and said he ‘seldom knew where he was going’. A 1955 volume in the authoritative Master Musicians series simply bundled him together with Bruckner as an Austrian curiosity. Neither composer was deemed to warrant a book to himself.

Naturally, Mahler is far from unique in this. The current popularity of huge areas of the baroque repertoire (including Monteverdi, Vivaldi and many of Handel’s operas) dates substantially from the explosion in historically informed performance in the late 1970s, and the compact disc boom (all that crisp digital sound) that followed in the 1980s. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was first heard at the Proms in 1984. Meanwhile Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony had to wait 40 years between its second Proms performance (as wartime propaganda) in 1943 and its third (on its own merits) in 1983. Since the millennium, there have been signs that Lili Boulanger and Erich Korngold, among others, are creeping back into the Proms repertoire.

Popular culture, meanwhile, has preserved a few relics of the moment just before the consensus finally swung in Mahler’s favour. ‘Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s?’ name-drops one of the ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ in Stephen Sondheim’s Company (1970) – Mahler is now the cultural insider-knowledge of a Manhattan sophisticate. ‘Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?’ asks Rita’s pseud-ish housemate Trish in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita (1980). By then, Mahler was a student cult; the sonic equivalent of a battered Milan Kundera paperback. And by 2000, neither joke worked any more. Mahler had become a classic, like Beethoven or Brahms. He was in the canon. As far as a new generation knew, he always had been.

A happy outcome? Unquestionably, if you love the music. That needn’t prevent us from mourning the era when a rare Mahler performance was a keenly awaited adventure – or wondering whether sounds and emotions that were once startling in their strangeness and originality should ever have become quite so routine. The same, of course, can be said for Beethoven, though I suspect that Mahler the man would have been appalled by the degree to which he has eclipsed his own idols. The immensity and ubiquity of Mahler’s symphonies have made Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert sound like chamber music.

Again, that’s not wholly unhealthy, though it collapses the perspective in which Mahler expected his own music to be heard. His imaginative world assumes a deep knowledge of those composers; and of Gluck, Weber, Johann Strauss and more – a whole lineage of musicians whom Mahler regarded as models but whom we no longer hear quite so much because we’ve been conditioned to crave size and a certain kind of sublimity. In other words, to crave Mahler.

Still, from second-rate oddball to pinnacle of the concert-hall canon in just over a century: as Gould perceived, that’s some impressive upward-scuttling. Clearly it’s rash to assume that what we hear now is what we’ve always heard, and that the modern concert hall canon is fixed (or even very old). By those with a political agenda, that last notion is typically attributed to institutional ‘gatekeepers’ (the left-wing belief in a world run by shadowy puppet-masters dies hard). But as we’ve seen, within living memory many ‘gatekeepers’ – if we mean broadcasters, critics, performers and scholars – were still adamant that Gustav Mahler was not to be admitted.

Yet here he is, regardless. Other broadcasters, critics, performers and scholars made Mahler’s case, and gradually – then overwhelmingly – the music-loving public started to agree. The canon, it turns out, is not immutable, and gatekeepers admit as well as exclude. Lesson: I’m not sure, really, beyond the eternal advice to keep open ears and open minds, and to remember that you, the listener, remain the only legitimate arbiter of what you enjoy. To paraphrase Thomas Beecham: you don’t need to know about music, you just have to like the sound it makes. And who, nowadays, doesn’t like Mahler? Genius, given time and encouragement, continues to find a way. Let’s see who scuttles up next.