Lieder (orch. David & Colin Matthews)
     1. Die stille Stadt 
     2. Waldseligkeit 
     3. Licht in der Nacht 
     4. Bei dir ist es traut
     5. Laue Sommernacht 
     6. Erntelied 

Composed: 1910/1915; Duration: 20 minutes

First performance of these works by the BPO. 

A fascinating figure amongst the turn-of-the-century Viennese culture class, Alma Mahler (née Schindler) was a brilliant and beautiful socialite with high-profile romances and compelling and diverse artistic output. Daughter of painter Emil Schindler and singer Anna Bergen (who later remarried painter Carl Moll), she was a natural at navigating the ins and outs of the art scene.

She had a youthful but short-lived romance with artist Gustav Klimt. Things were a bit more serious with her composition teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky, but ultimately she married the esteemed director of Vienna’s Hofoper, Gustav Mahler, in 1902.

Gustav held the old-fashioned preference that Alma take an exclusively maternal role, raising their two daughters rather than continuing to pursue composition. The death of their first daughter caused marital strife, and Alma had an affair with architect Walter Gropius. Gustav began supporting and promoting her as a composer, but it was all too late, as Gustav died in 1911. Alma would eventually marry poet Franz Werfel (she changed her name to Alma Mahler-Werfel), and fled to the U.S. in the 1940s, where she was a cultural icon of old-world Europe.

Her portfolio as a composer is limited to 17 surviving songs, most composed in 1900/01 while working with Zemlinsky, with 14 published in three sets in the 1910s, and three posthumously in the 2000s. The texts show her sophisticated connection to contemporary, modernist poetry, and the settings are equally daring. The disjunct and leaping melodic lines convey the turmoil and tension of the texts, and the harmonies are Wagnerian and, in some cases, more adventurous than either Zemlinsky's or Gustav Mahler’s taste. In a brief and limited output, she sets herself up as a talented and expressive early modernist.

See below for Lieder text and English translations by Andrea Bickford.