Gustav Mahler’s bid for greatness: the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before the first world war. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought in 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

Even plays were being conceived on a scale beyond the capacity of any human audience (to culminate in Karl Kraus’s Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit), and novels many times the length of War and Peace, such as Proust’s. Not everything was realised — Otto Wagner’s colossal projects for Vienna ran into the sand of the imperial family’s implacable dislike of the architect — but an astonishing amount was achieved, and still stands as an example of what confidence can do. We might admire it; we might want to react against an overblown and bombastic tendency; but there’s no escaping it.

One of the areas where the appeal of size proved most seductive was music. Upscaling could take two forms; in length of invention and size of ensemble. Composers had often felt the appeal of masses of performers, and the challenge of sustaining a single musical structure beyond the scale of, say, Beethoven’s Eroica had been long appreciated.

After Wagner’s massive extension of both orchestra and timespan in the seven music dramas from Das Rheingold to Parsifal, a sort of arms race among composers began. In theory there was nothing to prevent a composer from exploring an expansion in only one aspect, and writing a short piece for a huge orchestra, or a very long one for a chamber ensemble.