Oskar Fried was a German symphonic conductor and composer. Born in Berlin on 10 August 1871 into the Jewish family of Jérôme Fried, a small shopkeeper, he grew up in a home where music held an honored place. His elder brother, a violinist who had studied with Joseph Joachim, was his first musical mentor. Joachim himself advised the six-year-old Fried to pursue music seriously.
Economic hardship forced Fried to leave school after the fourth grade. He was placed in a private workshop where children were trained on orchestral instruments and exploited as performers and domestic laborers; after a violent incident involving the workshop's pupils, he was sent to a juvenile correctional colony. On leaving it, he found work with a travelling circus as a dog trainer, clown-acrobat, and horn player in its orchestra. Nikolai Anosov later recalled Fried as a distrustful and solitary man who could nevertheless be exceptionally attentive and kind to people he respected.
After breaking with his family, Fried moved to Frankfurt in 1889 and played in the orchestra of a small touring opera company. During a performance of Weber's Der Freischütz, he made a successful conducting debut when the company's conductor fell ill. Engelbert Humperdinck, who attended the performance, was impressed by Fried's natural ability and taught him music theory and composition. Fried also studied counterpoint with Philipp Scharwenka. He moved to Düsseldorf in 1894, studied art history, and received support from music director Julius Buths, before spending three years in Munich, where Hermann Levi commissioned an opera, The Infatuated Princess, on a libretto by Otto Julius Bierbaum. Completed in 1895, the opera was never performed.
Fried returned to Berlin in 1898 and worked with the Stern Choral Society. His 1903 cantata The Drunken Song, a romantic fantasy for chorus and orchestra on a text from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was performed by Karl Muck in 1904 and brought him wide recognition as a composer. Critics found Bach's influence in its polyphonic writing and Wagner's in its orchestration. In the autumn of 1904, Fried succeeded Friedrich Gernsheim as conductor of the Stern Choral Society, beginning his tenure with a highly successful performance of Liszt's oratorio The Legend of Saint Elizabeth.
In Vienna in 1905, where Franz Schalk invited him to conduct The Drunken Song, Fried met Gustav Mahler. The meeting developed into a friendship that decisively shaped his career. Fried regarded himself as Mahler's conducting pupil, and Mahler entrusted him with a Berlin performance of his Second Symphony, which achieved exceptional success. Fried became one of the earliest and most dedicated advocates of Mahler's music. Between 1905 and 1910 he toured Russia annually, conducting Mahler's Second Symphony at the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Conservatory on 28 October 1906, the first performance of Mahler's music heard by the Russian public.
Although conducting became his principal occupation, Fried continued to compose, writing the music drama The Emigrants in 1912 to verses by Émile Verhaeren translated by Stefan Zweig. He appeared with leading orchestras throughout Europe and the United States and cultivated an exceptionally broad repertoire. Alongside the classical and Romantic masters, he championed Busoni, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Sibelius, and Delius, and conducted premieres of works by Richard Strauss, Scriabin, Debussy, and Ravel in various countries. His interpretations of Liszt and Berlioz were noted for their commanding will and intense temperament, qualities associated with Mahler's influence.
Mahler remained central to Fried's repertoire. In Vienna in the autumn of 1920, he conducted a Mahler cycle including eight symphonies, The Song of the Earth, three song cycles, and the early cantata The Song of Lamentation. In 1923 he became the first conductor to record Mahler's music, making a recording of the Second Symphony for Polydor. Fried later worked first in Tbilisi and then in Moscow, where he led the Grand Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio Committee for a time and continued to collaborate with it and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. He died in Moscow on 5 July 1941 after a long serious illness. Interest in his recorded legacy revived later, and Music & Arts issued three compact discs of his recordings in 2005–2007 under the title Oskar Fried: The Forgotten Conductor.