Focusing on Mahler's birth, conflicted childhood and early influences in the backwoods of Bohemia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through his student days in Vienna and early song-writing to his emerging triumph as a conductor in concert halls all over Europe. The premiere of his own First Symphony in Budapest in 1888 shocked the contemporary audience, but this ground-breaking work, Tilson Thomas explains, contains many of the seeds of everything else that Mahler composed.