Vienna celebrates centenary of Mahler's death

The prestigious Vienna State Opera will this week mark - along with the rest of the world of classical music - the 100th anniversary of the death of composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).

The Austrian capital's legendary Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Italian maestro Daniele Gatti, will perform Mahler's last completed symphony, the Ninth, in a special memorial concert in the opera house on Wednesday.

Last year was already an anniversary year for Mahler, marking 150 years since his birth in Kalischt in what is now the Czech Republic on July 7, 1860.

But this year's centenary celebrations promise to make an even bigger splash, with a complete International Mahler Festival in Leipzig, in Germany, from May 17-29 and a whole month of festivities in Jihlava, in the Czech Republic from May 17-June 20.

The annual Salzburg Festival, one of the world's leading summer music festivals, dedicates an entire series of concerts to Mahler in July and August, including the rarely-performed early masterpiece "Das klagende Lied" with the Vienna Philharmonic under French conductor Pierre Boulez, one of the champions of Mahler's works.

And both of Vienna's two main concert houses - the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus - have invited some of the world's leading orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, for a series of major concerts covering Mahler's symphonies and orchestral song-cycles.

Mahler first came to Vienna at the age of 15 to study piano and composition at the conservatory of music.

He bagan his conducting career as "kapellmeister" in Bad Hall in Upper Austria in 1880, worked for brief stints in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Olomouc in the Czech Republic, Kassel and Leipzig in Germany and then Prague and Budapest, before moving to Hamburg in 1891.

Finally, he was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera (now the State Opera) in 1897, a position which he retained until 1907.

In 1908, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he also conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time a year later.

Mahler's own oeuvre comprises mainly nine completed symphonies, an unfinished Tenth, and orchestral songs and song-cycles, including "Das Lied von der Erde" (The Song of the Earth).

His music was frequently derided as cacophonous in his own lifetime and almost completely neglected for decades after his death. But he was rediscovered by conductors such as Leonard Bernstein in the second half of the 20th century and is now one of the most widely performed composers.