Um mitternacht - No. 5 from 5 Rückert-Lieder

3 Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen; Rückert-LiederNo. 5 Liebst du um Schönheit; Rückert-LiederNo. 4 Um Mitternacht. Ludwig van.
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All receive the full F-D treatment. Stephan Genz is even more touching. Overall, Gerhaher is as touching and dramatically involved as Genz, but even wider-ranging in tone colour and expression.

Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder: which recording is best?

Among a handful of versions with mezzo and piano, Marie-Nicole Lemieux — so often memorable in Handel and Vivaldi — sings here with a monochrome severity. The more communicative Ann Murray is lucidly partnered by Malcolm Martineau. She brought an almost unbearable emotional vulnerability to everything she sang.

Like Verdi, Mahler was famed for choosing singers — sometimes controversially — for their expressive power rather than vocal beauty. Recorded at a concert with the San Francisco SO, Susan Graham combines a rounded beauty of tone with a vivid sense of character: But her ultra-slow speed — necessitating a break in the opening phrase — suggests a soul weighted with sorrow rather than a blissful withdrawal from the world.


  1. Red.
  2. Mahler: Symphony No 1, Ruckert Lieder / Ozawa, Fischer-Dieskau, Bohm.
  3. At midnight.

Her voice is not always ideally steady, and high notes can glare. A relief, then, to turn to two Mahler singers of an older generation.

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Yet in the lighter songs she is too much the grande dame to charm and touch: Brigitte Fassbaender , eloquently partnered by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Riccardo Chailly, is less impeccable vocally her deep-bronze tone can discolour on high notes but far more involving. In the summer of that year, in happy anticipation of the birth of their first child, Mahler composed another Rueckert setting as a token of love for his wife "Liebst du um Schoenheit," with piano accompaniment, eventually orchestrated by one M.

Puttmann , and in , at about the time he completed the sketch for his Sixth Symphony, he wrote the two final songs of the Kindertotenlieder. This cycle, the four other Rueckert songs orchestrated by Mahler himself, and the last two Wunderhorn songs - "Revelge" and "Der Tambousg'sell" - were all introduced in a concert of Mahler's works which the composer conducted in Vienna at the end of January , some twelve weeks after the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Cologne.

These were to be Mahler's last efforts in the realm of song as such, and his last compositions for voice until the vast Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde , the latter a song-cycle on Chinese texts, but of such proportions that Mahler could designate it "a symphony for tenor, alto and orchestra. It was from Rueckert's lamentations over the death of the two youngest of his six children, expressed in more than four hundred poems, that Mahler selected his texts.

Mahler - Rückert-Lieder : Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

When Mahler began composing the Kindertotenlieder , in , he had not yet met the woman who would be his wife; by the time he completed the cycle, in , he was the father of two young daughters, and his wife found it "incomprehensible" that he would produce such a work at that time. In her reminiscences, Alma Mahler wrote, I can understand setting such frightful words to music if one had no children, or had lost those one had.

Moreover, Friedrich Rueckert did not write these harrowing elegies out of his imagination: What I cannot understand is bewailing the deaths of children, who were in the best of health and spirits, hardly an hour after having kissed and hugged them.

I exclaimed at the time, "For heaven's sake, don't tempt Providence! Nearly thirty years later, when Alma was the wife of the architect Walter Gropius, the death of their daughter Manon at the age of eighteen would inspire Alban Berg to compose his Violin Concerto in her memory. Gustav Mahler's fascination with Rueckert's poems, though, went back much earlier, and may have had something to do with the coincidence of his having been profoundly moved by the death in of his beloved younger brother who had the same name as one of Rueckert's children, Ernst.

Proms 2010 Prom 48

This and other considerations are discussed in some detail by Theodor Reik in his book The Haunting Meloldy. In a broader sense, the Kindertotenlieder might be said to represent a certain fascination, or absorption, with death that runs through all of Mahler's music, from the First Symphony and the songs from which it grew, and even earlier in the cantata Das klagende Lied , to the great valedictory triptych comprising Das Lied von der Erde , the Ninth Symphony and the unfinished Tenth. In any event, at the time it was composed, at midpoint in his cycle of symphonies, this song-cycle signalled a new phase in Mahler's creative development, the poignancy and intimacy of these settings looking ahead in many respects to Das Lied von der Erde.

One conspicuous indication of the new departure represented by these songs is the scoring of their accompaniment.


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  • Gustav Mahler () - Introduction Ruckert-Lieder.

    • Here Mahler calls for much smaller orchestra than he used in his symphonies, frequently evoking a chamber-music texture that goes beyond the level of intimacy suggested in the symphonies. There is no better example than the very opening of the first song, with its stark solo oboe and horn, followed by the bassoon and horn once the singer enters, with only the cellos, in a high register, filling in at first. The English horn has a poignant solo in the third song, in which the violins are omitted to darken the string sound. Solo instruments, the horn in particular, are used with great effect throughout the cycle, "symphonic" effects occurring relatively infrequently in the concluding section of the fourth song, for example, and the opening of the final one.

    Notes and Editorial Reviews

    Various thematic interrelationships among Mahler's works highlight an extraordinary sense of continuity, and lead to interpretations in terms of autobiography and even "prophecy" in his music. This website began in as a personal project, and I have been working on it full-time without a salary since At midnight I projected my thoughts out past the dark barriers. No thought of light brought me comfort at midnight. At midnight I paid close attention to the beating of my heart; One single pulse of agony flared up at midnight.

    Rückert Lieder, song collection… | Details | AllMusic

    At midnight I fought the battle, o Mankind, of your suffering; I could not decide it with my strength at midnight. At midnight I surrendered my strength into your hands! Text added to the website between May and September