Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in a small Bohemian town and made his living not as a composer but as a conductor, climbing through the opera houses of Europe to the top job: director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, where his obsessive standards made him admired and resented in equal measure. Composing was crammed into summer holidays, in little huts he built by Austrian lakes.

What he wrote there were symphonies of enormous scale and ambition, often with singers folded in, mixing funeral marches, folk tunes, birdsong, and moments of pure transcendence. He told Sibelius that a symphony must be like the world: it must embrace everything. His last years were spent conducting in New York before his death in Vienna in 1911, and his music, slow to catch on, now anchors the orchestral repertoire.

Start with the Symphony no. 1, then the Symphony no. 5, whose slow Adagietto movement is his most famous single stretch of music.