Gustav Mahler

Mahler was one of the leading late-Romantic composers and conductors, whose nine completed symphonies and song cycles became cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire and bridged the 19th century to modernism. Born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Bohemia, he directed the Vienna Court Opera and the New York Philharmonic; he converted to Catholicism in 1897, largely to obtain the Vienna post despite antisemitic obstruction, but he was born and raised Jewish.