Mahler enjoyed a professional success without parallel in the arts. Although he was of Jewish origin, in a period of pronounced anti-semitism in Vienna, at the age of 37 he was appointed director and conductor of the Court Opera. His contemporaries admired him mainly as a conductor. He is idolized today as a composer, whereas the critics and audiences of the time judged his compositions banal and vulgar in content, sloppy and incoherent in form. This tension between the two roles arises from the fact that Mahler subverted the classical system of tonality, following a route that may be called sociological. From the world of everyday life he borrowed musical material (peasant dances, waltzes, Yiddish and gypsy melodies, student songs, marches, etc.) which broke the purity and autonomy of the self-enclosed classical system, in as much as these elements of vernacular music, far from being subjected to the conventions, retained their own character. Mahler thus opened up classical music a class music, an art for the cultured elite to the existential demands of the music of the common man.
