Norfolk Symphony Orchestra

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! (Do not look at my songs!) Icht atmet’ einen linden Duft (I breathed a gentle fragrance) Um Mitternacht (At midnight) Liebst du um Schönheit (If You Love for Beauty) Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I have become lost to the world)

Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) was a group of folksongs and folksong-like poems collected in the early nineteenth century by poets von Arnim and Brentano. From 1887, Mahler based much of the text for his songs on these poems. In 1901, Mahler finally put aside his long fascination with the Wunderhorn poems, pursuing in its wake an interest in the poetry of Friedrich Rückert. In addition to the five songs we shall hear today, his cycle Kindertotenlieder was a setting of verses by this poet, and both works were premiered in January 1905 with the composer conducting. It appears that Mahler did not particularly intend the Rückert-Lieder, which were composed over a four year period, to form a song-cycle and, although four of the pieces were orchestrated by Mahler himself, the orchestration of Liebst du um Schönheit was realised by Max Puttmann. Turning to the poetry of Rückert represented a change in Mahler’s music which was also reflected in his middle-period symphonic works, and the Rückert-Lieder marked an end to the simple collective faith and hope that pervaded the first three symphonies. In the Wunderhorn songs, characters had been representative of types, producing from Mahler a generic type of music – six are marches and four are Ländler. The music of the Rückert-Lieder, however, is much more personal. The poems are lyrical and take on a first person perspective that, with the exception of the first song we shall hear this afternoon, is intimately introspective.

After facing his own mortality during an episode of illness, Mahler’s priorities changed overnight, leading this previously work-obsessed bachelor to become engaged to the beautiful Alma Schindler in December of 1901. Um Mitternacht, composed the summer before he had met Alma, with its nocturnal imagery and the pain of a solitary heart, seems to confront the composer’s crisis of faith.

Two of the Rückert songs are lighter in character: Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder is, in Mahler’s view, the least significant of the set. This one is the closest to the world of the Wunderhorn. Here Mahler highlights Rückert’s buzzing bee metaphor, this kind of simple illustration perhaps hearkening back to the lieder of Schubert. Mahler describes Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft as “filled with the kind of happiness you feel in the presence of someone dear, of whom you are entirely sure, without a word needing to be spoken between the two souls.” The poem exhibits an interest in a kind of floating word-play and alliteration that Rückert had absorbed from Persian and Turkish lyrics. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen creates an extraordinary atmosphere of suspended time and meditative withdrawal from the mundane commotion. Mahler makes use of the pentatonic scale, associated with Eastern music, which lends the music an impersonal quality, avoiding any sense of goal orientation. This reflects Mahler’s interest in the ego-suppressing philosophies of the East which he reached via an exploration of the ideas of Schopenhauer. Mahler himself said of this song, “It is my very self.” Listeners will notice extraordinary similarities with the Adagietto from the composer’s fifth symphony (a kind of love letter to Alma) in the closing bars.