The Golden Mahler Medal has been awarded by the International Gustav Mahler Society (IGMS) since 1958. The Medal is awarded from 2024 by the decision of an award committee to people or institutions that have made outstanding contributions to the scientific and/or artistic exploration of Mahler’s life and work and their development and reappraisal. People or institutions are also honored that have played a decisive role in shaping and enriching the international Mahler discourse in science and art through long-term institutional initiatives. The Golden Mahler Medal is the IGMS’s most important honor and can be awarded as an award for a life’s work as well as for an outstanding individual publication (monograph or article) or artistic achievement. In April 2024, the criteria for the award were precisely defined by the society’s executive board.
The award committee proposed that Vera Micznik and Hermann Danuser be awarded the Golden Mahler Medal in 2024. The committee’s justification states:
“Professor Emerita of Musicology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Vera Micznik has made pioneering contributions to Mahler scholarship with her eight essays on musical narrativity published between 1987 and 2021. Micznik’s analysis of discursive techniques in Mahler opened new perspectives in the field, applying literary theory notions to musical analysis. Through her methodological borrowings from literary criticism, Micznik contributed to developing new ways of listening and interpreting Mahler’s music, building a solid corpus of articles that had a deep impact on the field.”
“Hermann Danuser is one of the most outstanding and influential musicologists of his generation. The award of the Golden Mahler Medal 2024 by the International Gustav Mahler Society is in recognition of the fact that the music of Gustav Mahler has been a central and essential reference point of his academic work for more than five decades without any recognizable interruption. In over 25 essays, articles, and six monographs, Danuser has given important and continually new impulses to Mahler research. Its impressive breadth and variety of approaches arises from the attempt to understand Mahler as a phenomenon complexly interwoven into the music history of the entire 20th century.”
The award ceremonies with lectures by the award winners will take place as part of the Vienna Mahler Lectures at the Gustav Mahler and Viennese Modernism Research Center of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw; Lothringerstr. 18, 1st floor, 1030 Vienna). Hermann Danuser will speak on April 3, 2025 on “Gustav Mahlers dialektische Kunst”, Vera Micznik on May 22, 2025 on “Text/Music and Discursive/Narrative Elucidations in Schumann’s and Mahler’s Settings of the End of Faust”. A written version of both lectures will appear in issue 78 of News about Mahler Research (2025).