Richard Mahler Accomplishments

As a composer, Mahler all his life stood in a shadow of his far more famous friend and rival, Richard Strauss (1864-1949). While the audience in Europe saluted Strauss’ tone poems and his operas with enthusiasm, Mahler received recognition as an up-and-coming director/conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, but remained controversial as a composer. Although Mahler failed to win a well-deserved recognition as a successful composer during his lifetime, Mahler’s symphonies have become a firmly established part of the orchestral repertoire in America, as well as in many countries of Europe and Asia today. According to German statistics, Mahler ranks high in public favor- below Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, but above Haydn, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.
It is calm and passionate, traditional and innovative, full of irony and the sublime. Mahler once said “the more music develops, the more complicated the apparatus becomes to express the composer’s ideas”. Although in October 1900, shortly before the completion of the Fourth, Mahler made a public statement in Munich against program music, and therefore, withdrew the programs of his earlier symphonies, it is evident that Mahler had extramusical ideas when he composed. We can find pictorial details and poetic ideas related to his works in his letters and conversations with his
We can find that the entries in the round Bruder Martin are often introduced by unexpected tone colors: double-bass solo in a high register (m.3); muted cellos (m.11); four muted horns and harp (m.21), to name just a few. As the funeral march continues, there are striking timbre combinations: oboes and trumpets at No.5 ; strings playing col legno, with Turkish cymbals, to accompany the trivial motifs of the woodwinds at No.6. When one examines this movement carefully, one can see that Mahler dealt with the counterpoint in an very interesting manner. At No.16, the trumpet melody interweaving with the round melody, as well as a rhythmical melody played by two voices in the high woodwinds. The contrast between the three melodies, which are arranged in three layers, is