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Classical music Tumblress Sandra has been sharing images from her recent trip to Vienna, including this detail of Joseph Maria Olbrich’s stunning Secession building [my favorite architectural curiosity in a city full of them, and previously considered here in the context of Vienna’s musical life.]

By the time he began work on the Fifth Symphony in 1901 Mahler was becoming increasingly involved with a circle of pioneering modernist artists organized around the Vienna Secession. That year he courted Alma Schindler, daughter of one of the group’s founders, Karl Moll. Mahler’s closest artistic collaborator at the Court Opera, stage designer Alfred Roller, was also a member of the Secession.

In 1902 Mahler conducted his own arrangement of Beethoven’s music for the opening of a major Secession exhibit dedicated to the composer. Art historians have noted a facial resemblance between the heroic knight/Beethoven figure and Mahler in the frieze created by Gustav Klimt for the exhibit:

Gustav Klimt – Knight Detail, from the Beethoven Frieze
The Beethoven Exhibition, Vienna Secession, 1902

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.