In the century following his death,
Mahler’s symphonies made an increasingly triumphant journey from the fringes of
the repertoire to the centre. Initially progress was slow: Mahler had his early
champions, but the unwieldy lengths and practical demands of the symphonies –
from choirs and vocal soloists to mandolins and giant hammers – made them
unsuited to less-ambitious concert programmes. It was in the 1960s that
Mahler’s music started to achieve greater popular success. Through the advocacy
of conductors such as Bernard Haitink and Rafael Kubelik in Europe and Leonard
Bernstein and Maurice Abravanel in the United States, the symphonies were
presented to audiences more receptive to the scale of Mahler’s conception.
In the decades
that followed, a new generation of conductors emerged – including Claudio
Abbado, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa…
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