About this episode
The episode discusses the Mahler festival held in 1920 to celebrate Willem Mengelberg's 25th year as Music Director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Synopsis As far as anniversary gifts go, the one Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg received in 1920 was pretty spectacular. To celebrate his 25th year as Music Director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, they staged a special month-long festival in honor of one of Mengelberg’s favorite composers — Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer of monumental symphonies, who had, in fact, conducted the Concertgebouw several times before his untimely death at 50 in 1911. Mahler was the conductor Mengelberg admired most, and Mengelberg and his orchestra were ardent champions of Mahler’s symphonies, too: their 1920 festival performed all nine of them over the course of two weeks that May. Mahler’s widow Alma was in attendance, as were his younger Austrian contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, Danish composer Carl Nielsen and a young British conductor and Mahler fan named Adrian Boult, who reported on the festival for a British newspaper back home. In 1995, the Concertgebouw staged another Mahler Festival on the 75th anniversary of the 1920 one, this time inviting the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic to participate. A hundredth-anniversary festival was…
Topics covered
- Mahler festival
- Concertgebouw Orchestra
- Willem Mengelberg
- Gustav Mahler
- classical music
- music history
Keywords
- Mahler
- Mengelberg
- Concertgebouw
- symphonies
- classical music
- music history
- festival
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Concertgebouw Orchestra
Books & works: Symphony No. 1 (Titan)
More episodes of Composers Datebook
- Brahms and Liszt · June 12, 2026 · 2 min
- Carlisle Floyd · June 11, 2026 · 2 min
- Britten's 'Prodigal Son' · June 10, 2026 · 2 min
- The London Symphony on stage (and screen) · June 9, 2026 · 2 min
- Ravel's 'Daphnis and Chloe' · June 8, 2026 · 2 min
- Britten's 'Peter Grimes' · June 7, 2026 · 2 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Composers Datebook podcast page.