If the number of recordings and concert performances is any indication, the post-1960s Mahler boom was not just a passing fancy. Rather, the public has taken Mahler to their collective hearts, assigning him a stature virtually equal to that of the idolized masters of the symphony, Beethoven and Brahms, as their successor. During Mahler's lifetime few but he would have dreamed that his works would achieve such stature. It has been less than a full century since he died, and we are now witnessing what Mahler predicted: that his time has surely come.

Performances by Mahler and his followers

But it was not so when Mahler lived. Despite his celebrity as a conductor, when he tried to foster his own music the results were far from consistently successful. He did have the early encouragement and support of Richard Strauss, who was the first conductor other than Mahler to perform one of the symphonies, giving the First in Weimar in 1894 and the Second in Berlin in 1895.

Mahler premièred all of his orchestral works except the last three (Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and the unfinished Tenth) to mixed reactions. As an operatic conductor he had no equal, but as a conductor of symphonic music it would appear that critical and public acclaim was more dearly sought and not always found. In the period c. 1890–1910, continental European audiences and critics measured every new symphonic work against their heroes, Beethoven and Brahms.