Explaining Mahler's music and appeal

Whether or not there's a free lunch in America, free Mahler is all over the place these days. Though the posthumous popularity of the early-20th-century symphonist Gustav Mahler seemed to be peaking 10 years ago, recognition of his music is, if anything, accelerating in this, the centenary of his death.

Those who have never investigated Medici TV (www.medici.tv) are more likely to do so now that the online video-streaming network is offering a Mahler symphony cycle free to the end of June, showing the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach in thrilling form. New Mahler recordings still emanate from every major conductor, even historically informed performance guru Roger Norrington.

With so much Mahler around, it's time to explain who he really was and why his symphonies have permeated our society - in other words, a job for Michael Tilson Thomas, the hyper-articulate music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

He turns his attention to the composer he has championed for decades in the next two installments of his PBS series Keeping Score (9 p.m. Thursday and June 30 on WHYY-TV12).

It's far more sophisticated than most composer documentaries, and it should be. Mahler's Symphony No. 9 has become such a fixture both in concerts and broadcasts that when Tilson Thomas says the intentionally jumbled third movement is Mahler's self-portrait - showing us an external caricature that his contemporaries saw, and later in the movement, the soul his close friends knew - your history with the music kicks in for a major "aha!" moment.

Though music documentaries are often created out of visual priorities - what's heard supports what's seen - Tilson Thomas uses that priority to show Mahler's world through the composer's own eyes: Camera crews visit the small Czech town where, as a boy, he lived over a tavern - and catch the still-living folk traditions that he later quoted, almost verbatim, in his symphonies. Archival footage of pre-World War I Vienna shows the city where he made his career at the Vienna State Opera, and Tilson Thomas also visits Mahler's many countryside composing huts. One even had a locked safe where he stored his work every night.