“Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 (1901-1902)
Run Time: Approx. 11 minutes

Kindertotenlieder (1901-1904)
Run Time: Approx. 28 minutes

“The sole reward that I ask for my works: to be heard and understood” – Gustav Mahler in a letter to Richard Strauss

For this note, I’m going to do something unusual and lump these two works together. Yes, they are distinct pieces, but Kindertotenlieder sandwiches the Fifth Symphony in timeframe, and both works stem from an important set of overlapping events in the composer’s life.

In the years between 1901 and 1904, Mahler faced a veritable tsunami of major life events. It began with a serious illness that nearly killed him, prompting him to add his own to the growing list of mortalities he fretted over. Soon after, he met Alma Schindler, the force of nature he would marry after just four months. In 1902, Alma gave birth to their first child, Maria Anna. Two years later, they welcomed their second daughter, Anna Justine.

Mahler began working on Kindertotenlieder in 1901, before he and Alma had even met. The deaths of his eight siblings had clung to him, but he found kinship in a set of texts by his favorite poet, Friederich Rückert, whose Kindertotenlieder (1834) were written in reaction to the deaths of his own two children. Rückert had never intended to publish the poems, 428 in all, treating them more like diary entries chronicling his grief. Without that literary varnish, they are strikingly raw and honest, at times approaching manic outbursts. It’s easy to see why Mahler was so drawn to them; emotional ferocity was his calling card as well.

In all, Mahler selected just five of the poems to set, but, preoccupied with conducting engagements, his whirlwind courtship with Alma, and the composition of his Fifth Symphony, he put the work aside after completing three songs.

Symphony No. 5, “Adagietto”

If Kindertotenlieder had come as a response to the death of his siblings, the Fifth Symphony fixates inwardly on his own mortality. A reaction to his recent brush with death, the piece unfolds in five movements, journeying from an ominous funeral march (tellingly derived from the famous fate theme from Beethoven’s Fifth), through a violent purgatory, allusions to his youth and Jewish heritage, and finally arriving at a great triumph of the human spirit. Along the way, he pauses for a wistful “Adagietto,” the movement we included on this program.

Though it’s often performed as a standalone work, the “Adagietto” reaches its full effect when it follows the intensity of the Symphony’s first three tumultuous movements, like the sun finally peeking through at the end of a storm. Mahler once remarked that a symphony should be a whole world. The world that precedes the “Adagietto” is one of sadness, terror, nostalgia for simpler days, and anger that those days are gone. And then a glimmer of hope. Here, Mahler allows the winds, brass, and percussion—who, to this point, have been deep in the trenches—to lay down their arms and take rest as the strings and harp perform a wistful declaration for his new wife. Mahler was in love, and the music displays an innocence not often heard in his music.

Return to Kindertotenlieder

Two years later, just a few weeks after the birth of Anna Justine, Mahler, constantly agonizing over the health of his children, returned to work on Kindertotenlieder. Alma was furious. She could not understand why, upon the birth of a child, he could engage himself with such material. She thought it a bad omen.

But Mahler felt he had to write the songs, even though he knew how difficult they would be to hear. A lifelong friend later recalled that “he felt sorry he had to write them and he pitied the world that would one day have to hear them, so terribly sad was their content.”

Sad as they may be, conductor Leonard Bernstein and baritone Thomas Hampson felt strongly that the songs should not be morose. Hampson recalled discussing this at length while making their landmark 1989 recording of the cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic. “Every poem he wrote,” Hampson says, “all 428 of them, was a cathartic process to get off and out of this catatonic grief of loss, and find some reason in it.”

Reason was all Mahler ever wanted. “Why have you lived?” he wrote. “Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke? We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living—indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!”

Rückert and Mahler’s catharsis touches on many familiar aspects of grief. The first movement expresses the loneliness and anger that comes from living in a world that dares to go on as if nothing happened.

Now the sun prepares to rise as brightly,
As though no misfortune had befallen in the night!

Hampson particularly noted the use of the word “allgemein” to describe the sun shining. “Allgemein,” he said, “means without reservation or impedance. In other words, there’s an audacity that the sun would come up on another day that has seen a night of such grief. And there’s anger in that line.”

In the second song, Rückert expresses the shock of being blindsided by misfortune. Mahler illustrates this with rising figures that culminate on dissonant chords—little twists of the knife. In the third song, Rückert expresses the constant grief of expecting to see his children in their usual places, in the most mundane moments. This music is perhaps the darkest of the set, expressing a constant, unrelenting sadness. It plods along, the plucked strings hinting at a funeral procession, the woodwinds softly heaving, as if at any point it may no longer be able to go on.

When your dear mother
Comes in through the door
With the flickering Candle
I always think
You are coming too
Stealing in behind her
As you used

The fourth song is full of hope, not for the future, but rather for the possibility that this was all just a bad dream. Here, Rückert muses that the children have just gone out for a walk, and will return at any moment. In his setting, Mahler places his upward lilting melody against alternating major and minor modes, the moments of levity so fragile in their brevity.

The fifth movement begins as a storm; finally, we have arrived at anger. How could this have happened? If he had been able, he would have protected them! “In this weather, this raging storm,” Rückert cries, “I’d never have let the children out. But they were carried from the house, I had no say in the matter.” The orchestra quakes and howls as the singer spits and wails.

But no storm can go on forever, and when his rage is finally spent, Rückert finds solace.. Mahler lays the orchestra down to sleep, soothed by gentle strums of the harp and tender lullabies in the winds, perhaps finally putting his own siblings to rest along with it.

In this weather, this howling gale, this raging storm
They rest, as if in their mother’s house.
Frightened by no storm
Protected by God’s hand,
They rest, as if in their mother’s house.

Three years after the premiere of Kindertotenlieder, Mahler lost his eldest child, Maria Anna, to scarlet fever, the same illness that killed Rückert’s children. It would be the first in another string of cataclysmic events for the composer, reigniting the questions that never strayed far from his mind. “Why do we live? Why do we suffer?” Though these quandaries constantly wrestle for purchase in his music, they never win out in the end. It often seems to me that the more he suffered, the more insistently triumphant his music became.

“When I hear music,” he wrote to conductor Bruno Walter in 1909, “I hear quite definite answers to all my questions, and am completely clear and sure. Or rather, I feel quite clearly that they are not questions at all.”