Gustav Mahler’s reputation for passion and drama is unparalleled, and although he was more successful as a conductor than as a composer during his lifetime, today his music is considered among the most ambitious and striking in the repertoire. His works cover an immense emotional spectrum; tragic and triumphant, brilliant and macabre. Straddling the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Mahler’s work capstoned a rich tradition of Austro-German romanticism that had dominated nearly two centuries of European music.