The Gustav Mahler revival and Queer Liberation were born within years of each other; and were forever linked in 1971 with the film Death in Venice. But why does Mahler’s music resonate so strongly with queers?

By Robert Nesti

And one for Mahler, Elaine Stritch famously shouted while singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” in the Broadway hit Company in 1970. By that point in time, the Austrian-born composer was part of the cultural zeitgeist, though at the time Stritch famously admitted that she thought the phrase a piece of Mahler referred to a piece of pastry. But in cultural music circles, Mahler was having a renaissance. It started ten years earlier with the centenary of his birth and grew to the point that he was fast becoming part of the standard repertory. Mahler’s time had come, his greatest advocate Leonard Bernstein said, and it had.

Ten months earlier and some fifty blocks downtown from where Stritch was performing, a group of rowdy drag queens and queers rioted outside a queer bar, the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village that had been raided by the police. The bar burned and the following night the confrontation between the queers and police continued, making headline news in the major New York dailies. Not surprisingly, the coverage was filled with homophobic slurs, but queer activism had found its political voice. When poet Allen Ginsberg later visited the Stonewall Inn he said, You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago. As queer advocates said at the time: the word was out.

On the surface these two cultural phenomena—the rise of Mahler’s music in classical music and the birth of the queer rights movement—are unrelated. Mahler wasn’t queer and those rioting queers were likely like Stritch: unaware of his existence. But as Mahler’s music became more widely known, queers responded to it. Its emotional intensity, psychological complexity, and exploration of his outsider status as a Jewish artist in fin-de-siècle Vienna—resonated deeply. His music was unabashedly emotional with extreme highs and lows. He rejected the Classical ideal of balance in favor of something more raw and urgent, providing the soundtrack to the queer emotional experience. Queer artists appropriated his music, and Bernstein not only tirelessly promoted his music, but brought his music back to the Mahler-unfriendly Vienna Philharmonic, and was even buried with a pocket score of the Fifth Symphony on his chest.

Bernstein saw Mahler as his kindred spirit, identifying with him as both a composer and conductor, as well as a Jew who experienced antisemitic hate during his tenure. There was, though, a stronger connection to this oppression that was not addressed: Bernstein’s closeted identity during the deeply homophobic years in which he became the pre-eminent American conductor. Mahler famously identified himself as a cultural outcast. I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world, and no doubt that resonated with Bernstein, whose queerness, if exposed in the 1950s, would have seriously marginalized his career and celebrity. While Bernstein embraced leftist political causes during the 1960s and 1970s, gay rights was not one of them. He held no fundraisers for the Gay Liberation Front as he had for the Black Panthers. It was, though, through Bernstein’s tireless determination that Mahler was heard again in major concert halls.

A personal note: the first time I heard Mahler was the Fifth with the Boston Symphony. I was transfixed by how different it sounded—it was intense; the jagged edges were not smoothed, but accentuated; it had drive, tension, and drama, but also great beauty. That came with the Adagietto, the fourth movement scored only for strings and harp—tranquil, but with a deep yearning that spoke to me as a young queer man. Was it just a coincidence that I attended the concert with a Harvard graduate student I was dating who loved Mahler and it was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (whom I had a crush on), at that moment a boy wonder in the classical world who later came out as queer and was mentored by Bernstein? No, Mahler spoke to us as queer men.

Leonard Bernstein (Wikipedia Commons)

The next time I heard the Adagietto was in a Boston movie revival house. It came with the opening scenes of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice as its protagonist, a composer named Aschenbach, was entering Venice in 1912. The beauty of the images and the music were, as Pauline Kael would write, breathtaking. And the music would return throughout the film as the 60-year-old Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde, found himself deeply infatuated with a fourteen-year-old boy, the androgynous Tadzio (16-year-old Swedish actor Björn Andrésen). Thomas Mann, who wrote the novella in 1912, a year after Mahler’s death at the age of 50, admired him greatly and modeled the mannerisms and physical characteristics of Aschenbach on him; though he would later admit the infatuation with a fourteen-year-old boy was one he had on a trip to Venice just prior to writing the novella. Mann’s character was a novelist, but Visconti made him a composer, which further contributed to the notion that Mahler was queer upon the film’s release. (He was not.)

Visconti’s homosexuality was an open secret, though he never officially acknowledged it. But his film forever linked Mahler with queer identity and its developing political movement. The establishment balked at the use of Mahler’s music: members of Mahler’s family disowned the film, and conductors Otto Klemperer and Wolfgang Sawallisch signed an open letter of protest against the use of the music. Warner Brothers, who produced the film, initially wanted to shelve it due to what they perceived were censorship issues. Visconti’s film was loathed by many mainstream critics, who found it ponderous, excessive, vulgar, and decadent—coincidentally, words associated with homosexuality since Oscar Wilde. Time Magazine panned it by calling it “irredeemably, unforgivably gay.” But in the Sunday New York Times on July 18, 1971, writer Stuart Byron took those criticizing the film to task, calling it one of the first movies that discussed central issues raised by the then-fresh gay liberation movement, seeing the film as a metaphor for the way queer men relate to each other. He wrote that “Mann’s story was always about this particular thing: male homosexuality. . . . [I]t is not surprising that Mann should have anticipated so many of the truths about homosexuality that are only now becoming explicit. And in filming Death in Venice, Visconti has produced a work distinct and different from Mann’s and one which is unquestionably the finest movie on gay oppression and liberation to date.”

There is no doubt that the use of Mahler in Death in Venice helped boost the burgeoning revival. The Adagietto became famous independent of its source, just as Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto became the theme from Elvira Madigan and Strauss’s opening motif from Thus Spake Zarathustra will always be associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though Mahler dedicated the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony to his wife Alma, the gorgeous, serene music has long been associated with Dirk Bogarde pining after Björn Andrésen. Visconti also uses music from the fourth movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony in a more philosophical way. The quiet, mysterious alto solo is taken from a poem from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with words that express a longing that will only be fulfilled in the afterlife. In the film it is heard while Aschenbach watches Tadzio play with his friends on the beach, which was Visconti’s way of representing the sense of longing for what could never be attained.

But Mahler’s relationship with queer culture did not start with Death in Venice. For most of the century, his legacy paralleled it. Just as queers spent most of the century in the closet, up until the Mahler renaissance, so did Mahler. For decades, only a few of his pieces were played by major orchestras, and he was banned outright in Nazi Germany for being a Jewish composer. During his life, his work and his personal style were demonized in antisemitic Vienna because he was a Jew, but the words used were also ones to describe queers: neurotic, effeminate, oversensitive, even degenerate. Mahler’s music was deemed undisciplined, and his conducting style unrestrained—more negative terms prescribed to homosexuals.

Why Mahler’s music resonates so strongly with queers is a complex question. Can his status as a cultural outsider be heard in his music? Yes, in many ways. He was challenging the musical establishment, experimenting with form and sounds, and pushing boundaries by bringing emotionalism to the forefront. His use of irony and sarcasm brings to mind queer men and camp. Imagine the surprise that many had when first hearing the Symphony No. 1 and discovering Mahler dropped the children’s song Frère Jacques into the slow movement, though in a minor key to sound foreboding. This ironic usage is the definition of camp. Yet his music is also deeply introspective, exploring questions of life, suffering, love, joy, and death with transcendent beauty. It is impossible not to be transfixed by the tender longing in the first movement of the Symphony No. 9, or daunted by the pathos of the slow movement from the Symphony No. 6.

For gay men who have struggled in particularly acute ways—through persecution, through the AIDS crisis, through the denial of basic rights—this artistic vision of transcendence offers powerful consolation. In 1963, Bernstein famously conducted a performance of the Resurrection Symphony (No. 2) to honor his slain friend John F. Kennedy; a quarter century later, how many queer men turned to recordings of the symphony for solace as their friends were dying from AIDS. Another personal note: at a memorial service for a queer friend in New York City, the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony was played on the piano at the late man’s request.

In describing Mahler, the Gay Wisdom Archive writes: “It would be nice to claim Mahler as Gay if only because his music is so cosmic, so intensely beautiful, so obviously the work of a genius who somehow understood how to shake the emotions of his listeners until they were overcome with pain or sobs or feeling or something resembling whatever a catharsis is supposed to be.”

Today Mahler is one of the most frequently played composers by major orchestras. There are somewhere between 35-45 complete sets of his symphonies currently available. Between now and April, there are two performances of his longest and one of his largest at Boston’s Symphony Hall: the Symphony No. 3, which tracks at some 100 minutes with a first movement longer than most Mozart symphonies. Two years ago, Andris Nelsons conducted a vivid performance of the Symphony No. 8, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand with so many chorus members, soloists, and orchestra members, they spilled into the balconies. No moment captured the power and beauty of Mahler than the final moments as Nelsons led the orchestra (with horns in the balcony) in the thrilling coda to this mighty work. It was yet another moving memory in this queer’s long association with Mahler. To paraphrase what Elaine Stritch said, Here’s another great one for Mahler.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, collaboration between Vivo Performance Arts and the Boston Lyric Opera on February 10, 2026 at 7:30 pm at Boston’s Symphony Hall. For more information follow this link.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 will be performed by the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra on April 11, 2026 at 8:00 pm at Boston’s Symphony Hall. For more information follow this link.