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Over the next several weeks I’ll be devoting my posts to Gustav Mahler and his Fifth Symphony, ahead of a special presentation of that work at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony. The starting point is Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, site of a complex nexus of art and politics and home to some of the world’s most sophisticated music making. The city’s most closely scrutinized and influential performer was Mahler, whose work as a conductor [particularly with the Court Opera] was central to Viennese concert life.

Mahler at the Vienna Court Opera, 1903

As a student I researched this period and Mahler’s role in it extensively and spent several months in Vienna on an academic research grant. My primary guide to the city and its turn-of-the-century life was one of the best cultural histories about any place or time, Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna – highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the dawn of artistic modernism in the Austrian capitol. Schorske’s out-of-print essay Gustav Mahler: Formation and Transformation includes an excellent consideration of Mahler’s work as an opera and orchestra conductor within the performance culture of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.