Gustav Mahler: Origins and Legacy

A 2011 PBS Arts Documentary hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas, as part of Keeping Score series.

From the sounds outside his bedroom window - a kind of sonic goulash of military marches, ethnic dance bands, church bells, ritual prayer, and nature itself - Gustav Mahler created an entire universe of emotion in music. In an astonishingly productive twenty-five years, he fashioned ten symphonies and 45 songs of cosmic scale, great beauty, and jarring emotional twists and turns. And he did it all in the brief moments he could spare from his day job as one of Europe's preeminent conductors.

In Gustav Mahler: Origins and Legacy, Michael Tilson Thomas returns to the provincial Austro-Hungarian city of Mahler's childhood, and bears witness to his grand achievements, great sorrows, and daring musical explorations into the depths of the human soul.

Join MTT and the San Francisco Symphony as they trace Mahler's rise as a young conductor, his career - crowning appointments in Vienna and New York, his turbulent marriage and the sudden, tragic death of his daughter - and show how his stormy inner life inspired new and ever-more heartbreaking heights of creativity.