10 - Mahler as conductor in the opera house and concert hall

Summary

Mahler was taught piano, harmony and composition at the Vienna Conservatoire but did not study conducting, ‘the hardest thing’, as he later said. He was simply thrown in at the deep end and left to sink or swim. The art of the conductor (at the time usually referred to as Kapellmeister) was still so inextricably linked with composition, that the introduction of conducting as a subject in its own right had for far too long been considered unnecessary, and was only introduced in Vienna in 1909, when the Conservatoire of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was turned into a state academy. After all, had not the great German conductors of the nineteenth century, Weber, Mendelssohn and Wagner, all been composers? Even the younger Hans von Bülow could lay claim to an extensive compositional output, albeit one which was scarcely acknowledged. Section nine of Mahler's 1883 contract as Musical and Choral Director in Kassel still specified the duty to supply musical arrangements and, at the request of the management, to ‘provide compositions’ for special occasions. Even his Kapellmeister contract in Vienna of 15 April 1897 committed him to produce ‘new compositions or orchestrations deemed necessary by the management’.