Mahler: where to start with his music

Conceived on a massive scale, Gustav Mahler’s seismic symphonies draw on the folk poetry of his native Bohemia and include the longest ever written by a major composer

During his lifetime and in the decades after his death, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was primarily regarded as an outstanding conductor. It has only been in the last 60 years or so that his significance as a composer has been fully appreciated. Now, his symphonies are seen as perhaps the most important since Beethoven’s, linking the romanticism of the 19th century with the modernism of the 20th, and only rivalled for originality among his contemporaries by those of Sibelius.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3faLYGc