Composed: 1901-1904
Premiered: 1905, Vienna
Duration: 26 minutes

Alma Mahler thought her husband was tempting fate in 1901 when he began setting poems from Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). The Mahlers had two healthy young children, so Gustav’s choice of text seemed particularly morbid. Almost 70 years earlier, Rückert, for his part, had lost two children in three weeks to scarlet fever, and in an ecstasy of grief, had written a cycle of over 400 poems covering every aspect of his feelings: loss, guilt, denial, the hope of redemption. The five songs Mahler selected range from the paralyzed bitterness of the opening song, where the sun rises brightly for the world at large, heedless of the singer’s grief, to the final pair of songs which suggest a more hopeful and ultimately consoling point of view.

Mahler’s orchestra in Kindertotenlieder is small by his own standards. This deliberate choice gives the cycle an intimate quality, at times bordering on the claustrophobic. The music reflects every nuance and mood of the text, and is especially notable for its harmonic ambiguity, often hovering unstably between major and minor, and sometimes so full of tortured chromaticism that there seems to be no fixed key at all.

Kindertotenlieder is not a song cycle like those of Schubert and Schumann, which follow a clear narrative. Rather, it explores a theme in a way that looks forward to works by Britten and Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 14 is also essentially a song cycle on the theme of death, for two solo voices and small orchestra.

A very sad coda to the story of Kindertotenlieder is that Mahler’s daughter, Maria Anna, did in fact die as a child, having caught scarlet fever at the age of 8 in 1907. Mahler confessed later that he could never have set Rückert’s texts after having experienced the loss of a child himself.

Program note by Simon Docking.