📍Kaliště 32, 396 01 Humpolec, Kraj Vysočina, Czech Republic
1860 – 1911“I was born Gustav Mahler on the 7th of July 1860 in Kaliště, a village in Bohemia, the second of fourteen children of a Jewish innkeeper. The village and the surrounding Bohemian landscape — the forests, the military band that played nearby, the combination of beauty and coarseness that a market town produces — entered the music in ways I could not always explain. I moved to Vienna as a young man and spent my life conducting in Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna and New York, but composing happened in summer retreats. The Ninth Symphony was composed partly at Toblach in the South Tyrol. I died in Vienna in 1911 at fifty, leaving the Tenth Symphony unfinished. The Kaliště childhood — Jewish, Bohemian, surrounded by sounds that seemed to contradict each other — was the first collision of irreconcilable elements that my music spent a lifetime exploring.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: de La Grange, H-L. Gustav Mahler (1973-2008), Oxford University Press; Franklin, P. The Life of Mahler (1997), Cambridge University Press