Editing Gustav Mahler (section)

====Modern revival====
According to American composer [[David Schiff]], his compatriot [[Leonard Bernstein]] used to imply that he had single-handedly rescued Mahler from oblivion in 1960, after 50&nbsp;years of neglect. Schiff points out that such neglect was only relative—far less than the (incomplete) disregard of [[Johann Sebastian Bach|Bach]] in the years after his death. Although Bernstein gave the Mahler revival further impetus, it was well under way before 1960, sustained by conductors such as Stokowski, [[Dimitri Mitropoulos]] and [[John Barbirolli]], and by the long-time Mahler advocate Aaron Copland.<ref>Schiff</ref> Mahler himself predicted his place in history, once commenting: "Would that I could perform my symphonies for the first time 50 years after my death!"<ref>{{cite book|last1=Fischer|first1=Jens Malte|title=Gustav Mahler|date=April 2013|publisher=Yale UP|page=692|edition=1st English|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rnBj5mrK7moC&pg=PA680|isbn=978-0-300-13444-5|access-date=18 November 2017|archive-date=15 April 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230415173532/https://books.google.com/books?id=rnBj5mrK7moC&pg=PA680|url-status=live}}</ref>

Deryck Cooke argues that Mahler's popularity escalated when a new, postwar generation of music lovers arose, untainted by "the dated polemics of anti-romanticism" which had affected Mahler's reputation in the inter-war years. In this more-liberated age, enthusiasm for Mahler expanded even into places—Spain, France, Italy—which had long been resistant to him.<ref>Cooke, pp. 3–4</ref> Jonathan Carr's simpler explanation for the 1950s Mahler revival is that "it was the [[LP record|long-playing record]] [in the early 1950s] rather than the {{lang|de|Zeitgeist}} which made a comprehensive breakthrough possible. Mahler's work became accessible and repeatable in the home."<ref name=Carr221 /> In the years following his centenary in 1960, Mahler rapidly became one of the most performed and most recorded of all composers, and has largely remained thus. In Britain and elsewhere, Carr notes, the extent of Mahler performances and recordings has replaced a relative famine with a glut, bringing problems of over-familiarity.<ref name=Carr221 /> Harold Schonberg comments that "it is hard to think of a composer who arouses equal loyalty", adding that "a response of anything short of rapture to the Mahler symphonies will bring [to the critic] long letters of furious denunciation."<ref>Schonberg, p. 137</ref>

In a letter to Alma dated 16 February 1902, Mahler wrote, with reference to Richard Strauss: "My day will come when his is ended. If only I might live to see it, with you at my side!"<ref>A. Mahler, pp. 220–221</ref> Carr observes that Mahler could conceivably have lived to see "his day"; his near-contemporary Richard Strauss survived until 1949, while Sibelius, just five years younger than Mahler, lived until 1957.<ref>Steen. p. 742</ref>