Hans Wollschläger became acquainted with the symphonies of Gustav Mahler in the immediate post-war decade—not through recordings or concerts, but through precise imagination while reading the scores. This "greatest reading experience of my life" led him to spend over ten years attempting to create a performance-ready version of the unfinished tenth symphony: the music of Gustav Mahler would never let go of Wollschläger for the rest of his life. Time and again, he expressed a passionate fascination for this composer, whether in essays and radio contributions, lectures, or reviews. It was also Wollschläger who, in a sensational lecture in 1989, called for a detailed textual exegesis of Mahler's scores for the first time, critiquing the interpretations of the commercial concert business of the past decades, which he referred to as the "sloppiness of tradition.".