Gustav Mahler

Forthright and bold as Mahler's symphonies may appear, they are also works of remarkable subtlety and ambiguity

- Stephen Johnson

Sometimes the music really is like the man - the one the composer Ethel Smyth compared to a bomb cased in razor-edges'. Listening to Mahler's music, and especially to those huge, outrageously ambitious symphonies, can be like being at the centre of a controlled explosion. But Smyth is describing Mahler's 'work face' the face he adopted for coercing, seducing, even terrifying singers and orchestral musicians in pursuit of his vision. There was also Mahler the doting father, Mahler the meditative, exultant Alpine walker and cyclist, the Mahler whose exquisite song from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', reveals him ‘lost… in my heaven, in my love, in my song’, who famously described his symphonies as ‘like the world’, a musical world that ‘must embrace everything’.

As we listen to those symphonies, even when the music is pinning us to the backs of our chairs, we can sense that world embrace in the kaleidoscopic symbolic ‘sampling’ of real-world sounds Mahler crams into those immense, teeming scores: rural, urban high- and low-society song and dance, playground chants, military fanfares and funeral marches, birdsong… Yet there’s also a sense that the ‘world’ being embraced is something richer and stranger than what we like to call the ‘real’ world – the world that is ourselves, our own souls. Like his literary hero Dostoevsky, whom Mahler once called ‘my best friend’, he presents us with the fullness of being, in all its richness, joys and horrors, extremes of dark and light – and also, most importantly of all, in its internal contradictions.