Mahler: Origins and Legacies
Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (Kaliště), near Humpolec, Bohemia, on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. His song “Ablösung im Sommer” goes back to about 1890.
Mahler did the main work on his Third Symphony in the summers of 1895 and 1896. He made final revisions in May 1899 and conducted the first complete performance at the Festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein at Krefeld on June 9, 1902. Ernst Kunwald introduced the Third Symphony in the United States at the Cincinnati May Festival, May 9, 1914. Alfred Hertz conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performances in December 1921. The most recent performances here were given in October 1987 with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.
The Symphony No. 5 was composed in 1901‑02. Mahler led the first performance with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne on October 18, 1904. Frank van der Stucken conducted the first North American performance with the Cincinnati Symphony on March 25, 1905. The San Francisco Symphony first played the work, with Josef Krips conducting, in May 1970. The most recent performances, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, were given in October 2005; the concerts were recorded live and released on the SFS Media label as part of the Symphony’s Mahler project.
Details of the genesis of the Songs of a Wayfarer are not clear. Most probably, Mahler composed them for voice and piano with the title Geschichte eines fahrenden Gesellen (Story of a Wayfarer) in 1883-84, using themes from two of them in his Symphony No. 1, which was begun at about the same time and completed in 1888. The orchestration was completed in 1896, and the first performance of the cycle with orchestra took place on March 16 of that year in Berlin; the singer was Dutch baritone Anton Sistermans, and the composer conducted the Berlin Philharmonic. The first complete performance in the United States was given by baritone Paul Draper, with Karl Muck conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in February 1915. The San Francisco Symphony first presented the work in February 1946 with soloist Marian Anderson, and Pierre Monteux conducting. Thomas Hampson was soloist in the most recent performances, in April 1999, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting.
Mahler composed the Symphony No. 7 during the summers of 1904 and 1905. He conducted the first performance on September 19, 1908, in Prague. Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony gave the first North American performance on April 15, 1921. The San Francisco Symphony first played the work under the direction of Seiji Ozawa in December 1976; the most recent performances, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, were given in June 2006.
The Ninth Symphony was begun in spring 1909 and the orchestral draft finished that fall. On April 1, 1910, the work was complete. Bruno Walter conducted the first performance with the Vienna Philharmonic on June 26, 1912. The symphony was introduced in North America by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky conducting, in October 1931. The San Francisco Symphony first played the Ninth in April 1965, under the direction of Josef Krips. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the work here most recently, in October 2004; the performances were recorded live and released on the SFS Media label as part of the Symphony’s Mahler project.
Mahler did most of the work on his First Symphony in February and March 1888, having begun to sketch it three years earlier and using material going back to the 1870s. He revised the score extensively on several occasions. We hear the symphony in this series of concerts according to the second edition (the last edition published during Mahler’s lifetime), dated 1906. Mahler himself conducted the first performance of the work, then called Symphonic Poem in Two Parts, with the Budapest Philharmonic on November 20, 1889. He introduced the symphony, by then in its final four‑movement form, in the United States at a New York Philharmonic concert on December 16, 1909. Alfred Hertz conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performances in January 1921. The most recent performances, in January 2008, were given under the direction of Myung-Whun Chung.
Julius Fučik, whose music we also hear on this program, was born in Prague (the part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) on July 18, 1872, and died in Berlin on September 1916. He wrote his Florentiner Marsch in 1907. These are the first performances by the San Francisco Symphony. Another composer we hear from is Gaetano Donizetti, who was born in Bergamo (Lombardy), Italy, on November 29, 1797, and died there on April 8, 1848. His opera Dom Sébastien, Roi de Portugal was first performed on November 13, 1843, at the Paris Opéra. These are the first performances by the San Francisco Symphony of the Funeral March from Dom Sébastien.
An Introduction to Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler once said he was thrice homeless—as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew everywhere in the world. The village where he was born is about sixty miles southeast of Prague, and the trumpet calls he heard from its military garrison ghost through his music. His father, first a carter, then the owner of a small liquor store which he parlayed into a reasonably successful distillery, was an intellectually awake, unhappy, brutal man; his mother, sweet, plain, and with a limp, was forced by her parents to marry Bernhard Mahler. Gustav was the second of their fourteen children; of the fourteen, eight died in infancy or childhood. Mahler’s sister Leopoldine died at twenty-six, and his brother Otto, also a talented musician, committed suicide at twenty-one. His brother Louis emigrated to Chicago, where he became a baker and eventually vanished.
A childhood memory, reported by Sigmund Freud, whom Mahler consulted in 1910: Once, when Bernhard Mahler was especially abusive to his wife, Gustav, unable to bear the scene, rushed from the house, all but crashing into an organ-grinder who was playing the popular song Ach, du lieber Augustin. Startling juxtapositions of the tragic and the frivolous became a hallmark of Mahler's style; indeed, no feature of his music was more disturbing to his early listeners.
Mahler was a poor student; nonetheless, a local businessman got him an audition with the pianist Julius Epstein at the Vienna Conservatory, who was immediately convinced that the fifteen-year-old was a remarkable musician. That fall, Mahler began his bumpy career at the Conservatory. At twenty, he took his first job as a conductor, leading the summer operetta season at Bad Hall near Linz. That was starting at the bottom with a vengeance, but over the next few years, Mahler climbed the career ladder, moving to Laibach (Ljubljana), Iglau (Jihlava), Olmütz (Olomouc), Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and eventually—in 1897—Vienna.
He was one of the great conductors of his generation. As in his composition, he never came down on the side of caution. Conducting was his source of income from that first summer of 1880 at Bad Hall until the end of his life, and of necessity he became a summer composer, finding retreats at Steinbach and later at Lake Wörth in Carinthia and Toblach (Dobbiaco) in the Dolomites.
The whirlwind that was the last chapter of Mahler's not very long but tumultuous life began in 1907. Four momentous things happened that year. On March 17, Mahler resigned the artistic directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, bringing to a close a ten-year term whose achievement has become legend. Mahler was, however, drained by the struggles that were the price of that achievement, worn down by anti-Semitic attacks, and feeling the need to give more time to the composition and performance of his own music. He was not, however, able to resist the lure of the podium nor to do without his income as a conductor, and on June 5, he signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he would make his debut in 1908.
On July 5, his daughter Maria, four and a half, died at the end of a two-week battle with scarlet fever and diphtheria. A few days after the funeral, a physician who had come to examine Mahler's exhausted wife and her seriously ill mother, responding to the composer's half-joking "As long as you're here you might as well have a look at me too," discovered that things were not as they should be with Mahler's heart. And so the dedicated hiker, cyclist, and swimmer, to say nothing of fiery conductor, was put on a regimen of depressingly restricted activity. Still, what happened from 1907 until 1911 is not the story of an invalid. These were years in which Mahler conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, composed Das Lied von der Erde and the Symphony No. 9, and did considerable work on the Tenth. In 1909 he terminated his association with the Met and began a three-year contract with the New York Philharmonic. He conducted his last Philharmonic concert on February 21, 1911. Then came the onset of a streptococcal blood infection, unsuccessful serum treatment in Paris, and, on May 18, death in a Vienna sanatorium.
“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler told Jean Sibelius. “It must be all-embracing.” Mahler took inspiration from popular tunes, military marches, grand opera, and a host of sources, fusing these into music of extremes, reflecting the sublime and the ridiculous, the tender and the violent: the world, as he said. He was revered by such groundbreaking figures of 20th-century music as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. He left his mark especially on Berg, and his work served as model to Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer who in his own massive symphonies encompassed the common and the grand.
Thanks to conductors such as Bruno Walter, Willem Mengelberg, and Otto Klemperer, Mahler’s music was never out of the repertory, though it was only in the 1960s, with the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein, that he became generally recognized as a great composer. To a new generation in mid-century, Mahler’s work spoke with uncannily prescient urgency. As did no other music in general circulation, it gave voice to alienation, despair, and yearning, and also to manic and grand exaltation. Mahler became someone who defined what we expect music to offer.
The Music
The text of Mahler’s song “Ablösung im Sommer” (Relief in Summer) is from the collection of folk poetry known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), among the best-known and most influential works in German literature. It is impossible to calculate the impression its texts made upon the nineteenth-century psyche, with their irresistible color and their atavistic sense of relationship to the land. Their publication was as if some long-lost legacy had been dropped into the hands of musicians, artists, and poets.
The Wunderhorn was the child of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, a conservative Junker and an Italian-German minstrel, who used manuscripts and direct contact with soldiers, shepherds, workers, and peasants to compile a treasury of folk literature. Their poems, songs, and sayings were freely altered and revised and published in 1805 and 1808. Gustav Mahler was a young conductor, struggling under the burden of the Leipzig Theater, when he discovered the book in the library of the great-grandchildren of Carl Maria von Weber. The Wunderhorn came to dominate an entire period of Mahler’s career, putting its touch on every one of his works, both vocal and programmatic as well as “absolute.” Between his first contact with the book and 1902, Mahler set twenty-two Wunderhorn texts, also incorporating them into several of his symphonies. “When he finally read the Wunderhorn,” wrote Bruno Walter, “he must have felt as though he was finding his home. Everything that moved him was there—nature, piety, longing, love, parting, night, death, the world of spirits, the tale of the mercenaries, the joy of youth, childhood, jokes, quirks, of humor, all pour out, as in his songs.”
“Ablösung im Sommer” tells of waiting for Lady Nightingale to start singing, taking up where the cuckoo has left off.
The Wunderhorn influence on Mahler’s orchestral music is immediately apparent in the Third Movement of the Symphony No. 3, a movement that opens by quoting “Ablösung im Sommer.” When Mahler was at work on his Third Symphony, he remarked that to “call it a symphony is really incorrect as it does not follow the usual form. The term ‘symphony’—to me, this means creating a world with all the technical means available.”
In the summer of 1895, Mahler escaped for some months from his duties as principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera. Installed in his new cabin at Steinbach on the Attersee, east of Salzburg, he began his Third Symphony, setting out to make a world that he titled The Happy Life—A Midsummer Night’s Dream (adding “not after Shakespeare, critics and Shakespeare mavens please note”).
Before he wrote any music, he worked out a scenario in five sections. His scenario changed as the work grew, and at its premiere in 1902 the program page showed no titles at all. “. . . [N]o music is worth anything if you first have to tell the listener what experience lies behind it,” Mahler wrote that year. Yet when we look at the titles he had conceived for the Third Symphony, we see an attempt to put into words the ideas, emotions, and associations that lay behind his musical choices. The quirky tune that permeates “Ablösung im Sommer” opens the third movement, whose title Mahler had revised to “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me” before he dropped his titles entirely. The entire movement spans almost twenty minutes, proceeding to transport us to a lovely nocturnal landscape with a posthorn calling from the distance, then back to raucous reality.
Gustav Mahler found inspiration from unlikely musical sources, including popular tunes of the time, folk songs, and military marches. You might expect that from a composer who believed that a symphony should be all-inclusive, reflecting the world. Mahler’s contemporary Julius Fučik was a composer of marches, hundreds of them. Fučik’s Florentine March, from 1907, is a work Mahler would have heard late in his life, but it is the kind of band music with which he had long been familiar. Another source seems to have been Donizetti’s opera Don Sebastian, King of Portugal. This story of the sixteenth-century Portuguese monarch and his 1578 expedition against the Moors was Donizetti’s attempt to compose a large-scale work that could hold its own against the sort of epic historical drama that Meyerbeer popularized, and here Donizetti all but abandons his trademark bel canto style. To offer context for the passage we will hear, the Funeral March: In Morocco, King Don Sebastian leads his forces against Moorish troops, who trounce the Portuguese army. Sebastian is wounded, but his life is saved when his lieutenant, on the verge of death himself, assumes the king’s identity. When the lieutenant dies, it is Sebastian who is thought to have expired. This bizarre case of mistaken identity reaches its climax back in Lisbon, where Sebastian witnesses his own funeral procession. The march that accompanies this procession, in the words of New York Times music critic Donal Henahan, “at one point [gives] out startling pre-echoes of Mahler.” The stately tread of Donizetti’s march is punctuated by odd dissonances before rising to a grand Meyerbeerian statement. It is in the restrained passages of this march that we hear suggestions of what Mahler would one day do as he made dirge-like music his own.
If any single movement can convey the essence of Mahler’s heartache, the Adagietto from the Symphony No. 5 is it. The orchestra is reduced to strings with harp, and one could go on learning forever from the uncanny sense of detail with which Mahler moves those few strands of sound. If the harp part were lost and one had to reconstruct it, figuring out the right harmonies would be easy, but nobody could ever guess Mahler’s hesitating rhythm or his sensitive spacing of those chords.
The Adagietto is cousin to one of Mahler’s songs, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—“I am Lost to the World.” It is not so much a matter of quotation or allusion as of drawing twice from the same well. Adagietto and song share characteristic features of contour, harmony, and texture. The song, which ends with the lines “I live alone in my heaven, in my loving, in my song,” conveys a sense of what Mahler wishes to tell us in this page of his symphony.
Mahler left his Songs of a Wayfarer as a marker to what may have been no more than an infatuation with Johanna Richter. She was a soprano at the opera house in the Hessian city of Kassel, where, at twenty-three years old, Mahler served as second conductor. He was already the composer of an amazing cantata, Das klagende Lied, as well as of a number of songs. With experience as a conductor in small theaters, he had made his start on the path to celebrity.
Most of the little we know about Mahler and Johanna Richter's love affair we gather from letters from Mahler to Fritz Lohr, a friend from student days in Vienna. Gustav and Johanna seem to have been the sort of lovers who spend much of their time down in the dumps, New Year's Eve 1884 being a particularly fraught occasion. The next day Mahler wrote to Lohr that he had spent the night in tears but also that he had written a cycle of songs dedicated to Johanna. “She does not know them. What could they tell her beyond what she knows already? . . . The songs are planned as though a traveling journeyman who has suffered some sort of fate sets out into the world and wanders musingly and alone.”
So the Songs of a Wayfarer are autobiography in poetry and music; one does well, however, to recall what Mahler wrote about his First Symphony—“I should like to stress that [it] goes far beyond the love story on which it is based, or rather, which preceded it in the life of its creator. That experience is the work’s point of departure but not its content.”
Mahler was a skillful writer of verse, and the songs his Wayfarer verses inspired are a miracle. We think of them as coming from the world of the First Symphony (itself the most amazing First Symphony this side of the Fantastique), and that is true of their thematic substance; we should, however, remember that by the beginning of 1896, when the Wayfarer songs were put into their final form, Mahler had finished six of his orchestral Wunderhorn settings, had composed his Second Symphony, and was close to completing his Third.
Mahler begins with a scurrying figure, quietly unsettling. Transformed into something slow, heavy, and mournful, it becomes the melody to which the young wandering journeyman expresses his dread of his former love's wedding day. With a touching change of musical gait and mood, he turns to nature in hope of consolation, just as Mahler himself would all his life, only to realize that for him spring is over and that there is no escaping his suffering. As Schumann sometimes liked to do, Mahler has the singer finish in mid-phrase so that the musical thought is completed in the accompaniment.
The second song opens with a theme happily familiar from the Symphony No. 1. How extraordinary is the effect of the pianissimo timpani roll when the forlorn boy realizes that none of nature's springtime rejoicing is for him.
The opening of the third song, the one in which the journeyman gives the most open expression to his pain and despair, introduces music of a force and fury not heard before in this cycle.
In the last of the Wayfarer songs, we encounter one of Mahler’s first funeral marches, a kind of music he would write all his life. This is also, as those who love their lieder will recognize, a “walking song” in the manner of the similar melancholy songs in Schubert's Winterreise. Like Schubert, Mahler knew how to use the pathos of major/minor alterations. The injunction “Ohne Sentimentalitat”—Without sentimentality—at the beginning of the song, and repeated twice more as “Nicht sentimental,” is of extreme importance. The orchestral writing is unforgettably beautiful, especially in the subtle ways in which the instruments double or almost double the voice. The words at the end speak of consolation in nature. The music concludes on a question mark.
Mahler was a master of night music, as heard in the last of the Wayfarer songs. He described his Seventh Symphony, which is sometimes subtitled Song of the Night, as having a symmetrical structure: three night pieces, with a finale representing bright day, and a first movement as foundation for the whole. Indeed, the first and last movements flank three character pieces, which are themselves symmetrical in that the first and third are called Nachtmusik.
Between these Nachtmusiken comes a Scherzo that Mahler marks “schattenhaft,” literally “like a shadow” but perhaps better rendered as “spectral.” Drums and low strings disagree about what the opening note should be. Notes scurry about, cobwebs brush the face, witches step out in a ghastly parody of a waltz. The Trio is consoling, almost.
The Seventh is a victory symphony, not a personal narrative but a journey from night to day. The focus is on nature—on the world humans inhabit more than on humans themselves. If the Seventh is a Romantic symphony, one should add that the “distancing” effect produced by the non‑narrative character of the music can also be perceived as Classical. For that matter, Mahler’s refusal to issue a program for the Seventh is also part of the work’s Classical temper.
The Ninth Symphony is the last score Mahler completed. Some part of him would have wanted it so, for, with Beethoven’s Ninth and Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth in mind, he entertained a deep-rooted superstition about symphonies and the number nine. But Mahler cannot have meant it as an actual farewell. Within days of completing the Ninth Symphony, he plunged into composing a Tenth. He had made significant progress on that work when he died of a blood infection seven weeks before his fifty-first birthday.
Mahler wrote the Ninth Symphony in the wake of his young daughter Maria’s death, and after he himself was diagnosed with a heart ailment. Yet this was also a time of continued musical activity, and if the Ninth Symphony is elegiac, it exhibits that quality in the broadest sense, Mahler transforming personal experience into universal art.
The Ninth Symphony’s first movement is Mahler’s greatest achievement in symphonic composition, the high point in his practice of the subtle art of transition, organic expansion, and continuous variation. The second movement returns us forcefully to earth. Mahler loved the vernacular, and here is one of his fantastical explorations of dance music.
Then comes the Rondo burleske, music of violent urgency. It opens by hurling three distinct motifs at us. That concentration is fair warning of what is to follow, presented with a virtuosic display of contrapuntal craft. A contrasting trio brings a march and even some amiability. Deeply touching is the trumpet’s shining transformation of one of the Burleske’s most jagged themes into a melody of tenderly consoling warmth. But it is the fierce music that brings this movement to its crashing final cadence.
Mahler ends his symphony with an Adagio, beginning with a great cry of violins. All the strings sound a richly textured hymn. Their song is interrupted by a quiet, virtually unaccompanied phrase of a single bassoon, but impassioned declamation resumes immediately. That other world, however, insists on its rights, and Mahler gives us passages of a ghostly and hollow music. Between the two extremes lies a great chasm. The two musics alternate, the hymnic song being more intense and urgent at each return. At the end, grief gives way to peace, music and silence become one.
Gustav Mahler composed his Symphony No. 1 in high hopes of being understood. But he enjoyed public success with the work only in Prague in 1898 and in Amsterdam five years later. The Viennese audience in 1900, musically reactionary and anti‑Semitic to boot, was vile in its behavior.
The work even puzzled its own composer. He was unsure whether he was offering a symphonic poem, a program symphony, or just a symphony. He did most of the work on this score in February and March 1888 and revised it extensively on several occasions.
When Mahler conducted the first performance with the Budapest Philharmonic in 1889, he billed it as a “symphonic poem” whose two parts consisted of the first three and the last two movements. (At that time, the first movement was followed by a piece called Blumine, which Mahler later dropped.) A newspaper article the day before the premiere outlined a program whose source can only have been Mahler himself and which identifies the first three movements with spring, happy daydreams, and a wedding procession, the fourth as a funeral march representing the burial of the poet’s illusions, and the fifth as a hard‑won progress to spiritual victory.
When Mahler revised the score in January 1893, he called it a symphony in five movements and two parts, also giving it the name Titan—not for the violent figures of Greek mythology, but for the eponymous novel by Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763‑1825), a key figure in German literary Romanticism and one of Mahler’s favorite writers. But by October he announced the work as TITAN, a Tone Poem in the Form of a Symphony.
Before the Vienna performance in 1900, Mahler again leaked a program to a friendly critic, and it is a curious one. First comes rejection of Titan, as well as “all other titles and inscriptions, which, like all ‘programs,’ are always misinterpreted. [The composer] dislikes and discards them as ‘antiartistic’ and ‘antimusical.’” There follows a scenario that reads much like an elaborated version of the original one for Budapest. During the nineties, when Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben had come out, program music had become a hot issue. Mahler saw himself as living in a very different world from Strauss, and he wanted to establish a distance between himself and his colleague. At the same time, the extra‑musical ideas would not disappear, and he seemed now to be wanting to have it both ways. There was no pleasing the critics on this issue. In Berlin he was faulted for omitting the program and in Frankfurt for keeping it.
Mahler writes “Wie ein Naturlaut” (like a sound of nature) on the first page. Fragments detach themselves from the mist, then coalesce. Among these fragments are a pair of notes descending by a fourth, distant fanfares, a little cry of oboes, a cuckoo call (by the only cuckoo in the world who toots a fourth rather than a third), a gentle horn melody. Gradually the tempo quickens to arrive at the melody of the second of Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs. Mahler’s wayfarer crosses the fields in the morning, rejoicing in the beauty of the world and hoping that this marks the beginning of his own happy times, only to see that spring can never bloom for him. But for Mahler the song is an evocation and a musical source, and he draws astounding riches from it by a process, as Erwin Stein put it, of constantly shuffling and reshuffling its figures like a deck of cards. The movement rises to one tremendous climax, and the last page is wild.
The scherzo, whose indebtedness to Bruckner Mahler acknowledged, is the symphony’s briefest and simplest movement, and the only one that the first audiences could be counted on to like. The trio, set in an F major that sounds very mellow in the A major context of the scherzo itself, contrasts the simplicity of the rustic Austrian material with the artfulness of its arrangement.
The funeral music that follows was what most upset audiences. The use of vernacular material presented in slightly perverted form (the round we have all sung to the words “Frère Jacques,” but set by Mahler in a lugubrious minor); the parodic, vulgar music with its lachrymose oboes and trumpets, the boom‑chick of bass drum with cymbal attached, the hiccupping violins; the appearance in the middle of all this of part of the last Wayfarer song—people did not know what to make of this mixture, whether to laugh or cry or both. They sensed something irreverent, new, and ominous—that these collisions of the spooky, the gross, and the vulnerable were uncomfortably like life itself.
Mahler likened the opening of the finale to a bolt of lightning that rips from a black cloud. Transforming material from the first movement, he takes us, in the terms of his various programs, on the path from annihilation to victory, while in musical terms he engages us in a struggle to regain D major, the main key of the symphony, unheard since the first movement ended. When at last he reenters that key, he does so by way of a stunning and violent coup de théâtre, only to withdraw from the sounds of victory and to show us the hollowness of that triumph. He then goes back to the music with which the symphony began and gathers strength for a second assault that does indeed open the doors to a heroic ending and to its celebration in a hymn in which the horns, now on their feet, are instructed to drown out the rest of the orchestra, “even the trumpets.”
—Michael Steinberg, with Howard Hersh on the Wunderhorn Songs
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony's program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation's pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.
More About the Music
Further Listening and Reading
Mahler: Origins and Legacies
Recordings: With Michael Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra for future release on the SFS Media label, Thomas Hampson is recording Wunderhorn Songs and the Songs of a Wayfarer. Until this recording is available, here are some alternatives:
For the Wunderhorn songs—Thomas Hampson with pianist Wolfram Rieger (a DVD, on the Tdk label) | Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Fieskau, with George Szell and the London Symphony Orchestra (EMI Great Recordings of the Century)
For the Songs of a Wayfarer—Thomas Hampson, with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon, see above) | Janet Baker, with John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra (EMI Great Recordings of the Century, see above) | Thomas Quasthoff, with Pierre Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon)
For the symphonies—The San Francisco Symphony has recorded all the Mahler symphonies with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting (SFS Media).
Reading: Gustav Mahler: The Years of Challenge 1897-1904, by Henry-Louis de La Grange (Oxford University Press) | Mahler: A Biography, by Jonathan Carr (Overlook) | Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism, by Carl E. Schorske, which includes a fascinating chapter on Mahler (Princeton) | Mahler, by Egon Gartenberg (Schirmer) | “Mahler and Sibelius: What More Could There Be?” by Larry Rothe, in For the Love of Music (Oxford University Press) | The Mahler Album, compiled by Gilbert Kaplan, an intriguing collection that documents the composer’s life in photographs, sketches, drawings, and newspaper cartoons (Abrams) | Also see the Web site of the International Gustav Mahler Society, gustav-mahler.org/english.