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The young Gustav Mahler proved to be a champion of the old Giuseppe Verdi. In January 1894 he introduced Verdi's last opera Falstaff to Hamburg, less than a year after its La Scala premiere. A decade later, in May 1904, he conducted it in Vienna. The latter performance prompted the following notice in the London Musical Times: “For a work so full of delicate and at times ironic details, no abler conductor could be found than Mahler; it is indeed impossible to imagine anything nearer perfection than this Falstaff performance” .
Mahler's affinity for the late Verdi has been emphasized often, mostly perhaps by conductors, and not absolutely always by Italian ones. Leonard Bernstein, for example, chose Falstaff and Das Lied von der Erde for his celebrity Vienna debut of 1966, producing landmark recordings of both in addition to the run of performances. Most perceptively, Riccardo Chailly has called Mahler “a great Verdi conductor.” “Aida, Otello, and Falstaff” he added, “were among his favorite operas. When Mahler orchestrated the Fourth Symphony he was conducting Falstaff—there are many ideas for coloring that are common between the two things.”1
Chailly's remark helps reconcile not only the Italian and the German, the operatic and the symphonic, but also the conductor and the composer. In 1894 Mahler was more experienced and vastly more appreciated as a conductor than he was as a composer. It was for Mahler the composer that the moment of the Hamburg Falstaff proved most transitional. It came perhaps at the point of his most fundamental stylistic