Relevant aspects in the training of composer Gustav Mahler
Relevant aspects in the training of composer Gustav Mahler

Summary/Abstract: Mahler will remain a bard of his times, the permanent witness of the suffering and injustice lived by himself and his people. Despite various turning points, Mahler the child often found refuge in nature and music. His thinking and creation were greatly influenced by the first fourteen years of his childhood. Won over by Czech folklore, whose echoes can sometimes be heard in his later melodic developments, and by German musical traditions, that he had become acquainted with while listening to the music being played on Sundays in the town’s central park, and in the house of his new neighbours in Iglau (the so-called Hausmusk), the child was equally influenced by another form of city music – military music. The child was charmed not only by music, but also by the stories told by Nanni – the nursemaid of children living nearby, that his family had also adopted. Among the first teachers Mahler had in Iglau, the most important are Heinrich Fischer – the conductor of the choir and a professor of chromatic scales at the local high-school – and Wenzel Pressburg, one of the students of Anton Bruckner. In what concerns the merit of creating cycles of lieds, Mahler continued the concept that Schubert inaugurated, and Schumann reprised under various forms (or Brahms, in the cycle Magelone’s Romances). In what concerns the interpretation design, this composer from the late Romantic period was the first of the creators of this genre who called the orchestra to collaborate with the solo voice. 1875 is the year that a 15-year old Gustav Mahler headed towards the famous Vienna Conservatory, where he had Hugo Wolf as a mate and the prestigious Iulius Epstein and especially Anton Bruckner as teachers

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