Next to Mozart and Beethoven, Gustav Mahler has emerged as the most popular and most often performed composer from the classical musical tradition since the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. In the wake of the collapse of a radical modernism in music during the last quarter of the 20th century, Mahler’s music has come to be understood as a kind of mirror of the art and culture, if not the personality, of the entire century. Underlying this widespread embrace and enthusiasm, however, is some degree of conflict and uncertainty about the nature of Mahler’s legacy. Was he the last great exponent of a late-romantic tradition marked by sentimentality, expressive excess, and a penchant for the theatrical and pathetic? Or was he a radical critic of romanticism, an innovator and precursor of a forward-looking modernism? The Bard Music Festival will explore Mahler’s music in the context of his contemporaries. Questions concerning Mahler’s originality, his connection to religion and his Jewish identity, his personal life and the role of his relationship with his legendary wife, Alma, and his ties to musical traditions will be examined as the festival moves through the composer’s life from his student days in Vienna to his last years in New York. Music of his conservatory friends Hans Rott and Hugo Wolf will be heard alongside works by famous contemporaries, including Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Bruckner and Brahms, as well as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, will be placed in the context of Mahler’s career. Audiences will have a chance to encounter the music of Bruno Walter, Felix Weingartner, and Alma Mahler. The large symphonic works will be presented in a manner that both approximates and replicates their first performances. Das Lied von der Erde is paired with the Second Symphony, and the Sixth Symphony will be performed with both a different sequence of movements and the works Mahler himself included when he conducted it. The festival will conclude its 13th season, its last open-air concert under a tent before moving into the new Performing Arts Center designed by Frank Gehry, with a performance of Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 8. Despite Mahler’s popularity, the deep affection contemporary audiences have for his music, and his prominence as a popular icon in film and fiction, the answer to the question of who Gustav Mahler was and what his music is all about has never been settled to anyone’s satisfaction. The Bard Music Festival hopes to help first-time listeners and loyal enthusiasts unravel the many inconsistent layers of interpretation and commentary, guided in part by scholars and performers with different points of view. During the two weekends of the festival, American audiences will have the unique chance to hear examples of popular and folk music from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ranging from examples of the Viennese operetta, popular song, Schrammel music, rural Moravian and Bohemian music, and examples of Jewish music in Vienna and the Habsburg empire. Between the first two weekends, the public is invited to attend symposia on the art and culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the intellectual migration to America after 1933, which was crucial to the introduction and interpretation of Mahler to audiences and musicians alike in America. In conjunction with the Bard Music Festival this year Bard will be hosting a three-day conference entitled Contested Legacies: A Conference on the German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom, 1930-45.   back to top