Mahler was an Austrian late-Romantic composer and also one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music only received wide acceptance in the latter part of the 20th century. After the music was discovered and championed by a new generation in a more iconoclastic age, Mahler became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.

Born in relatively humble circumstances, Mahler showed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as Director of the Vienna Hofoper. During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler experienced opposition and hostility, much of it from the anti-Semitic press (Mahler had converted to Catholicism from Judaism). Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera-directors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly Director of the New York Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mahler died of a blood infection in Vienna on May 18, 1911, at the age of 50. His music was seldom performed in the years immediately after his death and further set back by the Nazi's crackdown on "degenerate" music in Germany and Austria during the Second World War. Even today, Mahler's stormy works seem coarse to many and are an acquired taste. But through growing interests in Mahler's legacy, his music has seen a steady revival over the past five decades.  - Wikipedia