This chapter explores the circumstances of Mahler’s childhood – the physical, social, and psychological conditions in which he was raised – taking at face value his claim that the character of an artist was determined by his experiences between the ages of four and eleven. The external factors of his upbringing, including the physical surroundings and economic circumstances of the family and their social position and religious engagement as part of the first generation of emancipated Jews in the Habsburg empire, created a set of emotional and psychological conditions that we now know to be characteristic of Mahler’s family: ill-matched parents and frequent conflict, the illness and death of half of his siblings, and the outsized presence of Mahler’s raw talent within these family dynamics. The survey of relevant details presented here clarifies the range of experiences in the young composer’s background as he turned in the mid-1870s to serious musical endeavors.

Mahler’s move to Vienna in 1875 brought him into contact with a thriving culture of young intellectuals, many of whom would go on to become social, political, and artistic leaders in the new century. The center of gravity of this group was the University of Vienna, where Mahler enrolled in 1877 (concurrently with his last year at the Conservatory). This chapter lays out the University’s distinctively modern blend of Enlightenment humanism and rational science, surveying important figures on the faculty (the philosopher Franz Brentano, the physicist Ernst Mach) and those among Mahler’s student cohort (Engelbert Pernerstorfer, Victor and Sigmund Adler, Max Gruber, Heinrich Braun, and, above all, Siegfried Lipiner). Organizations founded by these students also receive consideration, among them the Academic Wagner Society, the Pythagoreans, the Saga Society, and the Pernerstorfer Circle; in these venues Mahler encountered many of the ideas that would drive the main artistic decisions of his career.

The composers, performers, teachers, and fellow pupils with whom Mahler rubbed elbows during his first period as a resident of Vienna represented the upper echelon of European musical culture. He was both eager and well suited to make the most of this opportunity; his musical ability, his capacity for work, and his fervent sense of ethical responsibility to the art encouraged him to draw all he could from this rich array of colleagues. This chapter presents salient information on these figures, concentrating on teachers (Josef Hellmesberger, Julius Epstein, Robert Fuchs, and Franz Krenn), student colleagues (Ludwig Krzyzanowski, Hugo Wolf, Hans Rott, and Arnold Rosé), and establishment figures (Johannes Brahms, Eduard Hanslick, and the peculiar outsider Anton Bruckner). By the time of his departure in 1883, Mahler would know the city from the inside, but that experience would not protect him in his maturity from the hard lessons learned by so many of his teachers, peers, and idols: that living as a Viennese musician inevitably left scars.