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Mahler was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day, but he has since come to be acknowledged as among the most important post-romantic composers – a remarkable feat for a figure whose mature creativity was entirely concentrated in just two genres: song and symphony.
Mahler's harmonic writing was at times highly innovative, and only long familiarity can have blunted the effect of the chords constucted in 'perfect fourths' which lead to the 'first subject' of the Seventh Symphony, or the remarkable (and unclassifiable!) 9-note 'crisis' sonority that erupts into the first movement of the Tenth.
Mahler's difficulties in getting his works accepted led him to say "My time will come"; that time came in the mid 20th century, at a point when the development of the LP was allowing repeated hearings of the long and complex symphonies in competent and well-recorded performances.
In 1880Mahler accepted a conducting post at a summer theatre at Bad Hall, and he was engaged in a similar capacity in 1881 and 1883 at the theatres in Ljubljana and Olomouc.
The largest-scale of Mahler's symphonies is Sym.8, the so-called 'Symphony of a Thousand', in which the second part is a vast synthesis of forms and media embodying the setting of the final scene of Goethe's Faust as an amalgam of dramatic cantata, oratorio, song cycle, Lisztian choral symphony and instrumental symphony.
Mahler's extension of symphonic form, of the symphony's expressive scope and the use of the orchestra (especially the agonized timbres he obtained by using instruments, particularly wind, at the top of their compass) represent a pained farewell to Romanticism; different aspects were followed up by the Second Viennese School, Shostakovich and Britten.
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