Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber

Circling Through the Universe

Songs by Gustav Mahler

Richard Stokes

Gustav Mahler once declared that he was loath to set great poetry, since it was already self-sufficient. It was, he said, like a sculptor chiseling a statue from marble and a painter coming along to color it. He is the only important lied composer never to have set in his piano-accompanied songs a single poem by one of the great poets of German literature, and this has in some quarters encouraged an erroneous view of him as being insensitive to lyric poetry. The fact, moreover, that many of Mahler’s songs were either used in symphonies or have a symphonic feel to them has led some commentators to assert that he was a symphonist at heart, with scant regard for the subtleties of word-setting. Little could be further from the truth, although there is an orchestral quality inherent in virtually all his songs, even the piano-accompanied originals. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (commonly known in English as “Songs of a Wayfarer”) were composed in the midst of a traumatic relationship with Johanna Richter, a soprano at the Kassel Opera, where Mahler was chorus master. The poems, by Mahler himself, are heavily autobiographical, and the mood and theme of the four songs bear a striking resemblance to Schubert’s Winterreise. Both protagonists are jilted, both set out on a journey, both lie down to rest beneath a linden tree and both end in despair. Mahler’s opening song shares with Schubert’s last the same pedal-point and empty fifths, and throughout the two works the wanderer’s grief is highlighted by sporadic references to unattainable joy—in Schubert the retrospective bliss of a past relationship, in Mahler the presence of nature’s ravishing beauty. The cumulative power of this nature description has its counterpart in the progressive tonality of the cycle, for each song ends in a higher key than the one in which it started —a sort of cranking up of the emotions. The distraught mood of Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht is underlined by the constant shift from Allegro to Andante, and from 4/8 to 3/8 time. Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld is the only song that starts happily and never modulates to the minor. The opening phrase with its fourths became the main theme of Mahler’s First Symphony. Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer starts in D minor, and in the middle section, at “Wenn ich in den Himmel seh’, seh’ ich zwei blaue Augen steh’n,” magically enters C major, accompanied continually, though, by sharp dissonances. When the main theme returns it is a semitone higher. Die zwei blauen Augen begins as a funeral march, the first of many that appear in Mahler’s works.

Almost half of Mahler’s 44 four solo songs are settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of folk verses edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, the first volume of which was published in 1805 and dedicated to Goethe. The title (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”) refers to the figure of a boy on horseback brandishing a horn, an illustration of Das Wunderhorn, the anthology’s opening poem. The source for many of the poems was oral, but the editors made frequent amendments in accordance with their own tastes and occasionally, unwittingly, included poems by living authors, such as Justinus Kerner’s Der schwere Traum, which they re-christened Icarus. The poems have a childlike naivety but often enshrine profound wisdom in their unpolished, unarty verses. Many of Mahler’s settings deal with military life, and in the piano accompaniment we often hear the beat of horses’ hooves, fanfares, drums, and marches. Mahler spent much of his childhood in the Moravian garrison town of Jihlava, and it is reliably reported that as a young boy he knew hundreds of military tunes by heart. Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? is in ländler style, and with its florid vocal line is a test for any singer. The song introduces a typical Mahlerian feature, the moto perpetuo that he also uses to sinister effect in Das irdische Leben. Ablösung im Sommer displays Mahler’s genius at word-painting: the cuckoo sings an onomatopoetic and staccato minor third (minor, because it has just died), and the nightingale dazzles us with brilliant scale figurations in the major to illustrate its youth and beauty. Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald, with its triadic melody reminiscent of Brahms, is more romantic. Marked “träumerisch, durchaus zart” (dreamily and very tenderly), the music transports us into the depths of the dark woods where the birds can be heard singing in the pianist’s right hand. The lover knocks at his beloved’s door but she does not wake. “Wo ist dein Herzliebster geblieben?” (“Where is your sweetheart now?”) runs the final line of the poem—but there is nothing untoward in the question. This beautiful song ends in triple pianissimo: there will be another assignation soon.

It is said that Mahler composed the nine Wunderhorn songs of 1887–90, which form volumes two and three of the Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit, for the children of Carl and Marion von Weber, descendants of the composer, in whose library he worked at the time of his First Symphony. The children would certainly have relished Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen, especially as it deals with presents: a gentleman on horseback comes to a lady’s castle and enquires whether her children are well-behaved, for his pockets are bulging with gifts. But the lady replies that her children do not obey her—and away the gentleman rides. Rheinlegendchen is one of the most delightful of Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings. It is very much in ländler mood, and the horn pedals at the beginning and end of the song recall Schubert. The poem in Des Knaben Wunderhorn is called Rheinischer Bundesring, and Mahler’s original title was “Tanzlegendchen.” Der Schildwache Nachtlied is a spooky dialogue between a lonely sentry, characterized by martial music, and a girl who appears to him in a vision and tries to lure him from the path of duty with her sustained lyrical melody. Lied des Verfolgten im Turm describes a passionate dialogue between the imprisoned soldier and his sweetheart; through changes of meter, melodic style, and—in the orchestral version—instrumentation, Mahler cleverly contrasts his characters: brass and timpani for the soldier, pastoral woodwind for the girl. Das irdische Leben tells of a child dying of starvation, while the mill grinds the corn too late. Mahler gives both mother and child their own themes, the child’s consisting of dramatic octave leaps; while the mill can be heard in the oscillating moto perpetuo accompaniment. In the orchestral version, the scurrying accompaniment of the strings creates a mood of extreme anguish. In Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz’, the pianist is required to imitate the muffled rolling of drums, as a deserter faces death. Unlike the young soldier in Der Tamboursg’sell, this deserter heard an alpine horn from over the border, and was so smitten with nostalgia that he had to swim back to his homeland. Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, a dialogue between a dead soldier and his grieving sweetheart, dates from July 1898. The accompaniment begins with a succession of empty fifths that dreamily conjure up the distant trumpet calls that wake the girl, who, “somewhat reserved,” asks who it is that knocks at her door. The soldier replies in a beguiling D-major passage that he wishes to be admitted, whereupon she bids him welcome in a melting G-flat major melody to a soft accompaniment of parallel sixths. Major and minor alternate throughout the song, which ends in the soldier’s confession that his home is in the grave—after which the relentless martial rhythm, indicative of man’s subjection to Fate, slowly fades away.

Mahler wrote the first two songs of Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”) in the summer of 1901 while at work on his Fifth Symphony, choosing the poems from a volume of verse by Friedrich Rückert that contained 428 poems on the theme of the death of infants. Rückert had written them in 1834 after losing his two youngest children in a scarlet fever epidemic. (Joseph von Eichendorff was at the very same time pouring his grief into a similar but smaller cycle of ten poems, Auf meines Kindes Tod, that Othmar Schoeck would later set to music as his Opus 20.) Mahler was still a bachelor in 1901, but in the following year he married Alma Schindler and soon became a father. His second daughter was born in 1904 and it was during the summer of that year, while at work on the Sixth Symphony, that he composed the last three songs of the cycle. They were published and premiered in 1905. Although it has often been asked how Mahler could have been so morbid as to compose such songs when his own children were happy and healthy, it should be remembered that he was simply completing a work that had been begun in 1901. Tragically, however, as if he had been tempting providence, he lost his eldest daughter two years later.

Mahler cleverly chose five poems that, instead of forming a narrative, portrayed the father’s emotions, which are alternately grief-stricken, affectionate, consolatory, or simply benumbed. Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n was written by Rückert on the morning after the death of one of his children, and the glockenspiel that is heard no fewer than three times in Mahler’s orchestral version of the song alludes discreetly to an innocence that is now no more. Nun seh’ ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen contains memories of the children’s star-like eyes, and throughout the song a five-note theme is heard in the accompaniment that resembles the “gaze” motif from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (“Er sah mir in die Augen”). The third song, Wenn dein Mütterlein, is a conflation of two Rückert poems that describe how the poet looks for his dead child each time his wife now enters the room. Mahler’s setting, marked “grave, malinconico,” sounds fittingly like a mixture of a children’s round and a danse macabre. Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen tells of the father’s fond hope that his children will return, that they have merely gone for a walk, that they have wandered into a better world where their parents will one day join them. In diesem Wetter, which repeats motifs from the first song and thus gives the cycle a unity, describes the storm that raged on the day of the funeral, the grief of the heart-broken father, and finally the peace that the children have found in a safe haven.