GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911) Rückert-Lieder To poems by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) ca. 20 mins. Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft! Liebst du um Schönheit Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen UmMitternacht In the summer of 1901, Mahler’s soul burst out in song, which surrounded and accompanied his work on the purely instrumental Fifth Symphony. In the complex relationship between his songs and symphonies, Mahler’s mature style was emerging together with the new century. The songs are small masterpieces in themselves, profoundly personal, lyrical expressions of the moment. They encapsulate an experience, assuming a first-person perspective that is intimate and often introspective. Each composed during one day and orchestrated the next, they also open the door to a chamber-like, more transparent and reduced orchestral language, an almost sparse, subtle texture that enhances the feeling that we’re allowed into a very personal, private space. Aspects of the previous song style (like Des Knaben Wunderhorn) have disappeared: no more of the narrative distance that came with a quasi-folk style, marches and dance melodies, irony and sarcasm, and the manner of a ballad. All the Rückert songs are personal, reflecting Mahler’s human experiences: feelings, hopes, spiritual ruminations, fleeting sensations. Of the eight songs he composed that summer, seven (including three kindertotenlieder) were on poems by German poet Friedrich Rückert, a prolific and quite popular poet, but not a beacon of his time. However, this worked well for Mahler who considered it “a profanity when composers venture to set perfect poems to music; it was as if a sculptor chiselled a statue and then a painter came along and coloured it.” The poems he chose have no textual continuity, they inspired Mahler individually, but are usually performed together, because of the time of their creation and because they represent his emerging change of style. This shift towards a more exposed and vulnerable stance is attributed by many of his biographers to Mahler’s near brush with death earlier in 1901, which made him all the more aware of his mortality and all the more attuned to his innermost being. Between the summer of 1901 (when he composed four of these songs) and March of the next year, Mahler met, fell in love, married and conceived a child with 22-year old Alma Schindler - one interpretation being that he unconsciously sought a kind of immortality through paternity. Liebst du um Schönheit is a personal love song to Alma, composed in 1902 during the first summer of their married life. Nowhere is the fleeting personal experience better captured than in Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (I Breathed a Gentle Scent), which opens the curtain on a magical world of whispers and nuances of colour stemming from a relatively minimal amount of sounds and instruments.
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