Chen Reiss and Lahav Shani - Strauss and Mahler VI

The friends Mahler and Strauss

Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were contemporaries and the most famous conductors of their generation. It will surprise many, but they were also good friends. Mahler made an effort to stage Strauss's operas; Strauss in turn, conducted his colleague's early symphonies. Both spent the concert season conducting and the summer months composing. Mahler retired to his 'Komponierhäuschen' in the Austrian Alps, and Strauss stayed at home in the villa that he had built in the Bavarian Alps with the proceeds from his opera Salome.

The singer-composer and the symphonist

Mahler and Strauss were both music directors of the Vienna Court Opera for a number of seasons. The first left there after an argument; the other left with a beautiful villa in Vienna. Mahler married the composer Alma, twenty years his junior, at the age of 42. Strauss married the famous soprano Pauline de Ahna, daughter of a general. They were tough marriages. But where Strauss achieved enormous success with his operas and songs, Mahler wrote nine symphonies – works of which he knew: 'meine Zeit wird kommen'.