Mahler as a Jew in the Literature

Gustav Mahler was a Jew from the Czech Lands which were part of the Austrian empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A combination of his fame as composer and conductor with the effects of longstanding antisemitism in the German-speaking countries results in a wide spectrum of musicological writings addressing the effect of his Jewish background on his work. Antisemitic commentary on Mahler's work, begun in his own lifetime, is widely known, but prosemitic and neutral assessment has not been afforded comparable study by present-day historians. This is unfortunate, since positive representations of the effect of Mahler's Jewish identity on his work have a longer history in the Mahler literature than those others which, essentially, ended with the Third Reich. In this essay, comparative balances between the two extremes will be examined, with examples from Mahler's contemporaries through the Nazi period and since.