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Program Notes

Kindertotenlieder

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

Premiere: January 29, 1905, in Vienna, Austria

Approximate performance time is 26 minutes

Behind the music

In the winter of 1833, the German poet Friedrich Rückert suffered the deaths of two of his six children, both victims of scarlet fever. His three-year-old daughter, Luise, passed away on New Year’s Eve. Rückert’s son Ernst died on January 16, 1834, just twelve days after his fifth birthday. For the next several months, Rückert expressed his grief by composing hundreds of poems.

Rückert died in 1866. Six years later, many of the poems were published in a collection known as Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). In the summer of 1901, Mahler set three of the Rückert poems to music. Three summers later, Mahler composed two more songs, thus completing a cycle for solo voice and orchestra comprising five of the Rückert poems.

In the Composer's Words
Mahler told a friend: “I put myself in my thoughts into the situation of a man whose own child has died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs anymore.”

By the time Gustav Mahler completed Kindertotenlieder, he and his wife Alma were the parents of two beautiful daughters: Maria (b. November 3, 1902) and Anna (b. June 15, 1904). Alma Mahler was greatly troubled by Gustav’s composition: “I exclaimed at the time: ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tempt Providence!’” Alma Mahler’s worst fears were realized. In early July of 1907, three years after the completion of the Kindertotenlieder, Maria Mahler died of scarlet fever — the same disease that took the lives of Friedrich Rückert’s two children. Alma described her husband’s reaction: “Mahler, weeping and sobbing, went again and again to the door of my bedroom, where she was; then fled away to be out of earshot of any sound. It was more than he could bear.”

With his Songs on the Death of Children, Gustav Mahler created a work of breathtaking eloquence and poignancy. As the composer told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner: “it hurt me to write them, and I grieve for the world which will one day have to hear them, they are so sad.”

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