Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Symphony No. 9

The great Viennese symphonic tradition found wor1hy successors in two composers of very different temperament and background, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. The latter, indeed, extended the form in an extraordinary way that has had a far-reaching effect on the course of Western music, among other things creating a symphonic form that included in it the tradition of song in a varied tapestry of sound par1icularly apt for a twentieth century that has found in Mahler’s work a reflection of its own joys and sorrows.

Mahler was to express succinctly enough his position in the world. He saw himself as three times homeless, a native of Bohemia in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the whole world. The second child of his parents, and the first of four1een to survive, he was born in Kaliste in Bohemia in 1860. Soon after his birth his family moved to Jihlava, where his