Kindertotenlieder

Of all composers, none so deeply and personally expresses the oppositions of life and death, of loving and losing, as Gustav Mahler. Though he did not die young like Mozart or Schubert, or end his days in an asylum like Schumann, Mahler lived under the constant shadow of man’s mortality. From the deaths of his parents and sister in a single year (1889), a brother’s suicide, and the loss of his eldest daughter, Mahler’s hypochondriacal strain fed a growing anxiety. 1907 was the pivotal year. Just months after burying his daughter, Mahler was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition. Yet he continued to conduct and compose, completing a Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in 1909. Ever superstitious, he refused to label Das Lied officially as Symphony #10, citing predecessors like Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner who died while working on their Tenth. The general mood and affect of Mahler’s Ninth and Das Lied were foreshadowed by two compositions, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) and five Rückert-Lieder, which were the first works he wrote following a nearly fatal hemorrhaging in February 1901.
In the haunting Kindertotenlieder, for instance, every moment of joy is touched by foreboding of sadness as voice and orchestra alternate between emotional extremes. While composing Kindertotenlieder, Mahler selected five additional texts by the same poet, Friedrich Rückert. Rückert’s name is familiar to fans of art song, perhaps best known from Franz Schubert’s ephemeral “Dass sie hier gewesen” (1822). More than 100 of his poems have been set by nearly every major name in German music from Schubert to Berg. Placed beside Goethe and Heine in the poetic pantheon, Rückert taught Oriental languages at the University of Berlin. Fascination with Eastern thought and locales tends to infiltrate most of his better poems, and these features were especially significant to Mahler, who also set Chinese lyrics in Das Lied. The five Rückert-Lieder are not a song cycle in the same sense of progressive action, as in the Schumann. Rather, the five songs are linked by shared poetic ideas and compositional history; Mahler wrote most of them in the summer of 1901. Moreover, several noted interpreters (including Christa Ludwig and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) have made their own successful re-orderings of the five songs.
The first song Mahler wrote, "Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder," glides deftly over its two stanzas, which use metaphors from music and nature to reinforce the notion that "good things come to those who wait." Continuous eighth-note motion suggests fervent activity, while the chromatic key changes and occasional dissonant emphases touch on the protagonist's wish to keep her labors secret. Similar in both length and musical details, “Ich atmet einen linden Duft!” refreshes the continuous rhythmic motion and striking key changes of song 1. The piece works conventionally as a love song: an oriental, sensory induced reminiscence. However, pungent dissonances during the second stanza remind us that the central image, the linden, also carried symbolic connotations of repose in death (witness Schubert's “Der Lindenbaum”).
“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” strikes a very different tone. Its length, tempo, and poignancy mark it as an expressive focal point in the set. It is Mahler at his most sublime, drawing extended chords from the vocabulary of Debussy and radiant text painting from Wagner. One need look no further than the vocal breakthrough at “ich sei gestorben” (that I was dead) to grasp the bliss felt in leave-taking, where love and song become an escape from everyday life. “Um Mitternacht” opens more austerely, almost like an incantation for the late hour, marked by the repeated main motive and frequent falling lines in the accompaniment. (It’s hardly coincidental that the phrase “At Midnight” appears exactly twelve times in the poem.) Without transition, Mahler introduces a grand, religioso peroration that manifests Rückert’s lightly veiled references to Christ's crucifixion. A year after these four were premiered, Mahler added “Liebst du um Schönheit,” which offers a lighter pendant to the weighty songs just heard. Just when one thinks Mahler can only write of death and transfiguration, he sets this conventional love poem in pure strophic simplicity. Like the contemporaneous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the song was written for his wife Alma, whom he had met in November 1901 and almost immediately married. As she recalled: “He had composed for me the only love song he ever wrote (“Liebst du um Schönheit”) and he slipped it in between the title page and the first page of the [score to Wagner’s] Valkyrie. Then he waited day after day for me to find it; but I never happened to open the volume, and his patience gave out. ‘I think I'll take a look at the Valkyrie today,’ he said abruptly. He opened it and the song fell out. I was overwhelmed with joy and we played it that day twenty times at least.”

(c) Jason Stell