The city whose functioning ethos was Schein über Sein — appearance above substance — outdid itself in the run-up to Mahler's death, late on May 18, 1911. Newspaper prose turned purple and every man in the street had a quotable response. A railway porter, scoffed the satirist Karl Kraus, "(who) has often seen Gustav Mahler when he was Director of the Opera [...] sadly wipes his eyes with his begrimed blue sleeve". Thomas Mann ended Death in Venice with the words: "And later that same day, the world was respectfully shocked to receive the news of his death."

More than just the passing of a great musician, Mahler's death signifies a turning-point in the evolution of the fame game, the moment when the public seizes the right to know everything about fallen heroes and the secondary right to voice an opinion. Mahler, who stubbornly proclaimed "my time will come", did not expect the price of fame to be higher than the wages of sin or the focus to be so acutely intense.

It would be hazardous for a historian a hundred years later to ascribe the abolition of traditional reticence around Mahler's death to any of his attributes or shortcomings. With the advent of telegraphy and the competitive appetites of big newspapers, press conduct was bound to change and it was only a matter of chance who would become the first victim of the new prurience. 

Nevertheless, there is something to be learned from the pusillanimous conduct of the varied Umgebung who attended Mahler's death and the howling of the wolf-pack beyond, if only as a template for human behaviour much later at the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and the Big Brother magnet, Jade Goody, all of which are obsessively and continually exploited in print, on film and online. 

Fame has changed, of course. Down the century it has been devalued from a reward for creative achievement to a triumph of silicon implants. Its recent deconstruction in Mark-Antony Turnage's Covent Garden opera Anna Nicole suggests that the art-life-art imitation has taken yet another fresh turn, that reality is no longer an objective consensus but a virtual, selective state of consciousness invented by mass media. 

In the ironic alternatives he planted through all his symphonies, Mahler anticipated the possibilities of unstable realities. As a conductor, his interpretation of the same symphony varied to great extremes of speed and colour from one night to the next. Music, he told players in his orchestra, must reflect changing circumstances and spontaneous mood.

Mahler was also sensitive to the vapidity of celebrity. Given the choice, he would have preferred to confine his fame to those who appreciated his music. Ordering a tombstone, he asked for just one word on it, his surname. "Those who come looking for me will know who I was," said Mahler, a casualty of the first celebrity chase, "and the rest don't need to know."