Gustav Mahler said “my time will come” — and he was right, though he did not live to see it. During his lifetime, he was famous as the greatest orchestral conductor of his age but dismissed as a second-rate composer. His symphonies — massive, emotionally overwhelming, structurally radical — were considered overlong and overwrought. It took fifty years after his death for the world to recognize that he had built the bridge between nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century modernism.

This episode traces Mahler from his Bohemian childhood through the opera houses of Europe, the symphonies written during stolen summer vacations, and the personal tragedies that fed his music.

• Mahler’s childhood amid poverty and death and the conducting career that consumed his creative time
• The ten symphonies composed during summer breaks from conducting — and Das Lied von der Erde
• The anti-Semitism he faced, the conversion to Catholicism, and the Vienna Opera years
• The death of his daughter, the heart diagnosis, and the posthumous triumph he predicted