No orchestral season today is complete without a Mahler symphony. Three of them featured at last year’s BBC Proms,this yearthere’ll be four. Over a recent weekend in London, you could hear the first with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at theBarbican on a Fridayand the following evening enjoy theepic glories of the eighthwith the London Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall. Conductors from Boulez to Bernstein and Chailly to Rattle all have Mahler symphony cycles in their recorded catalogues.
And this month theConcertgebouw in Amsterdamhosts a grand Mahler festival. Across 10 days all his symphonies will be performed by world-famous orchestras and conductors, his unfinished 10th among them and also his “vocal symphony”, Das Lied von der Erde. “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything,” the composer famously said.
But what of Mahler the miniaturist, the master of that most intimate and personal musical form, the song for voice and piano?
While the gigantic symphonies rage in the great hall, Mahler’s complete songs will be heard in the Concertgebouw’s exquisite sister hall, the Kleine Saal. I will be playing them all at the piano, with 10 outstanding young singers across five concerts, including one programme devoted to the songs of his extraordinary wife, Alma Mahler.
They may be less all-encompassing than the famous symphonies, but Mahler’s songs are miniature masterpieces, ranking alongside the greatest by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf. They are marvels: songs as expressive and finely crafted as the famous symphonies are visceral and overwhelming.
Song composers tend to be pianists. Sometimes they are brilliant virtuosos such as Brahms, or failed virtuosos such as Schumann, or simply not virtuosos at all, such as Schubert, but all essentially write their songs from the perspective of their beloved piano. As a student at the Vienna Conservatoire, Mahler won prizes for his piano playing and it is clear that the instrument was an essential means for his own musical expression. All of his 50 or so songs have beautifully written piano parts.
Many of them, Mahler later rewrote for voice and full orchestra, and these have become so famous in their gloriously colourful and sumptuous orchestrations that sometimes the original version with piano is left in the shade, the overlooked sister.
Unlike Schumann, Schubert or Brahms, Mahler wasn’t forever searching for musical inspiration in volumes of poetry. Indeed, his very earliest songs were often settings of his own texts, including the miraculous short song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). But his greatest resource for song inspiration was the collection of folk poetry compiled in the early 19th century by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn).
When Mahler when was 32 and already celebrated as a conductor, he published his first song settings – 10 poems from Des Knaben Wunderhornfor voice and piano. Surprisingly, these included just one song of love and longing - the inspiration, then as now, for the most songs – while the rest were a mixture of high-spirited “character” ballads and songs that celebrated the beauty and joy of nature.
Another kind of text made its first appearance in this collection also, one that was to inspire Mahler throughout his life: the poem set in, or around, the military barracks. Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz (At Strasbourg on the ramparts) is haunting, and the precursor for the dramatic marches that found their way later into his third and sixth symphonies.
At the turn of the century, Mahler turned again to Das Knaben Wunderhorn for inspiration for 15 more songs for voice and piano, but this time he also made versions of them all for voice and orchestra (which continued to be his practice from this point on).
The songs he was writing for voice and piano were inextricably linked to the symphonies that were also germinating in his mind. One of the early songs from Songs of a Wayfarer, for instance, was incorporated into his firstsymphony. In his second, third and fourth symphonies, singers join the orchestra and songs that he had already set from Des Knaben Wunderhorn for voice and piano were incorporated into the bigger orchestral works. Urlicht (Primal Light) and Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (St Anthony preaches to the fish) both feature in the second symphony, and Es sungen drei Engel (Three Angels sang) and Ablösung im Sommer (The changing of the summer guard) in the third. The divine Das himmlische Leben (The heavenly life) is orchestrated as the last movement of the fourth symphony. These first four symphonies have since become known as the “Wunderhorn Symphonies”.
In February of 1901 Mahler suffered a haemorrhage that required emergency treatment and a period of recuperation. He spent those weeks at a villa near Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee, and it seems likely that it was here that he first read the poetry of Friedrich Rückert. The German poet’s verses were to inspire some of Mahler’s greatest music, including the celebratedRuckert-Lieder.
The exquisite delicacy of the vocal and piano writing in Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (I breathed a gentle fragrance) and Liebst du um Schönheit (If you love for beauty) and the searing intensity of Um Mitternacht (At Midnight) are overwhelming. In Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world) Mahler takes us to a place of utter peace where life’s pain can no longer touch us, a vision of another world that has rarely been matched.
By now, Mahler was the father of two daughters, and the poems that Rückert wrote after the death of his own children from scarlet fever profoundly moved him. Of the hundreds of poems written by Rückert to exorcise his grief, Mahler chose five for his song cycle for voice and piano, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the death of children). The depth of the pain and loss that they express is devastating. Later orchestrated, for me they are his greatest achievement in song.
Mahler’s final songs were incorporated in Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth), which he called his “vocal symphony”. Mahler always intended this work, written between 1908 and 1909 at a time of intense personal crisis, to be for two voices and full orchestra. He wouldn’t call the work his ninth Symphony out of superstition – Beethoven, Schubert, and more recently Bruckner and Dvořák had not lived long enough to write their respective 10th symphonies and Mahler, who had just completed his eighth, was painfully aware that his health was failing. Later, after he had completed Das Lied von der Erde, he started work on his ninth symphony and reassured Alma that it was in truth his 10th, and that the danger was past.
Not so, sadly. When he died in 1911 of heart failure, he left his incomplete 10th symphony.
The poems that inspired Mahler to write Das Lied von der Erde were from Die chinesische Flöte, versions by Hans Bethge of ancient Chinese poetry. They captivated him with their simple, timeless quality. Only recently it was discovered that Mahler also wrote a version for two voices and piano but in this one case we don’t know whether the piano version came before or after the orchestrated version. My own feeling, having played and studied the work at the piano, is that he wrote the orchestral version first – the piano version doesn’t have the same finesse or pianistic accomplishment of his other songs. Nevertheless, it is an enormous privilege to have Mahler’s own version for piano and voices of this seminal masterpiece, considered by many his greatest work.
I have spent 40 years studying and playing these songs and, unlike me alas, they never age. They range wide, from comic songs to serious metaphysical meditations, from touching and heartfelt love songs to sublime reflections on life’s meaning, and from simple folksong-like miniatures to entire song cycles. Along the way, I have felt Mahler the pianist by my side, encouraging me to find the endless colours and subtlety in his piano writing, and to give these wonderful songs life.
The Mahler festival 2025takes place in and around the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, from 8 to 18 May. Many events will be broadcast worldwide on the radio.Details here.