His life is closely connected to Vienna. After his childhood in Bohemia he moves here at the age of 15 to study piano and composition. He starts his international career in Vienna, associates with artists and meets his wife Alma–truly a femme fatale.

On the top of his reputation he is director of the Viennese opera for ten years and launches an important opera reform. Mahler makes his way overseas and enters the New World as director of the Metropolitan Opera House. But only three years later he dies of a bacterial heart disease in Vienna, where he also is buried.

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Gustav Mahler