Lyrics kindertotenlieder gustav mahler biography

‘I am,’ wrote Gustav Mahler, ‘three times homeless: a native of Bohemia in Austria; an Austrian among Germans; a Jew throughout the world.’ Mahler’s sense of being an outsider, coupled with penetrating intelligence and an extraordinary talent for depicting his surroundings in music, made him a restless and acutely self-critical artist. ‘The symphony,’ he insisted to fellow composer Jean Sibelius, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ Mahler’s symphonies are often conceived on an immense scale, with immense philosophical subjects: love and hate, joy in life and terror of death, the beauty of nature, innocence and bitter experience. He was also a great composer of songs, and in these smaller forms he distilled the essence of intense human emotions, developing and enriching his exquisite melodic gift in the process. He was the second of 14 children of a Jewish distillery owner. His parents were apparently ill matched. Mahler remembered violent arguments between them, and was an introspective child. Death was a presence in the house from early on: six of Mahler’s siblings died in infancy. Few of his major works do not feature at least a hint of a funeral march. Indeed his first composition, written when he was 10, was a Funeral March with Polka, a combination that would typify his work as an adult composer. Mahler’s father may have treated his wife harshly, but he did recognise and encourage his son’s musical talents. Gustav gave his first piano recital at the age of 10, and five years later was taken to the Vienna Conservatory to play for pianist and teacher Julius Epstein. Epstein pronounced the year-old ‘a born musician’. Accepted into the conservatory, Mahler made friends with brilliant fellow students, including the hugely talented but ill-fated Hans Rott and the great song composer Hugo Wolf. He joined the circle of supporters of Anton Bruckner, whose Third Symphony made a powerful impression on the year-old student. Though successful

If you would like to use our texts and translations, please click here for more information.

&#;Der Tamboursg&#;sell,&#; a folk poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

song cycle by Gustav Mahler

Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) is a song cycle () for voice and orchestra by Gustav Mahler. The words of the songs are poems by Friedrich Rückert.

Poems and setting

The original Kindertodtenlieder were a group of poems written by Rückert in –34 in an outpouring of grief following the illness (scarlet fever) and death of two of his children. Karen Painter describes the poems thus: "Rückert's poems on the death of children became singular, almost manic documents of the psychological endeavor to cope with such loss. In ever new variations Rückert's poems attempt a poetic resuscitation of the children that is punctuated by anguished outbursts. But above all the poems show a quiet acquiescence to fate and to a peaceful world of solace." These poems were not intended for publication, and they appeared in print only in , five years after the poet's death.

Mahler selected five of Rückert's poems to set as Lieder, which he composed between and The songs are written in Mahler's late-romantic idiom, and like the texts reflect a mixture of feelings: anguish, fantasy resuscitation of the children, resignation. The final song ends in a major key and a mood of transcendence.

The cello melody in the postlude to "In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus" (mm. –) alludes to the first subject of the finale of Mahler's Symphony No. 3 (/96), a movement titled "What love tells me" ("Was mir die Liebe erzählt"). "Musically, then, this is the last word of the Kindertotenlieder: that death is powerful, yet love is even stronger."

The Kindertote