Vienna Honors Gustav Mahler, Once Hounded: Norman Lebrecht

Vienna, which never accepted him as one of its own, is paying homage to Gustav Mahler.

As head of the opera from 1897 to 1907, Mahler had outraged the city by denouncing its traditions as mere laziness. When he was conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he updated Beethoven’s scores. As a composer, he unsettled audiences with subversive symphonies of painful ambiguity.