Thomas Laske & Verena Louis: |Mahler Lieder

The ‘songs of a Wayfarer” are the earliest songs by Gustav Mahler that continue to be performed regularly, both in the setting for soloist and orchestra as well as in the original piano version. Mahler describes the unhappy love-relationship with singer Johanna Richter, which inspired him to compose these songs, as a time of “continual, unbearable trials”. Mahler wrote the texts himself – with reference to “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”, a Romantic collection of folksong texts. Through music, he combines his emotional life and literary knowledge in unmistakably “Mahlerian” manner. Dating to 1901, the songs based on texts by Friedrich Rückert open up an entirely new phase within Mahler’s song oeuvre. The Mahlerian themes of loneliness, loss, and death appear devoid of any Romantic ornament in “Um Mitternacht”, and the famous “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” musically portrays the lyric persona’s retreat from all things worldly. The ‘songs on the Death of Children”, selected by the composer from hundreds of poems published by Rückert under this title, are among Mahler’s darkest works. Through his unfaltering and ambiguously abstract music Mahler lifts the tragedy of a child’s death to a higher level, using it as a metaphor for the surreal timelessness of death itself.