Light in Battle with Darkness: Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder

Abstract

The relationship between text and music is at the heart of the study of Lieder. This study focuses on that relationship as it is manifested in a single work, Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (1905), five settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866). Discussion of this cycle has hitherto concentrated on five main areas: the problem of Mahler's motivation for writing them (he had not himself suffered the loss of children); the question of the sequence of their composition (the evidence is conflicting); the question of the cycle's unity; relationships between the songs and other works by Mahler; and the important innovations represented in their musical language. Commentators on the songs have, however, paid little attention to their literary dimension: the poems Mahler set and the question why he chose precisely these five from the total of 425 which Rückert wrote upon the deaths of his children. Indeed the view is widespread in German Mahler scholarship (less so in the English scholarship) that Mahler was in general insensitive to lyric poetry, musical concerns having an almost absolute primacy in his song-writing. The present study seeks to refute the latter view, by elucidating the significant literary dimension of the Kindertotenlieder. Mahler's awareness of and sensitivity to poetry are shown in two ways. First, an investigation of Mahler's literary source, Rückert's Kindertotenlieder, shows that in making his choice from the 425 poems, Mahler was attracted to poems featuring a consistent pattern of symbolic imagery, one found in only a small proportion of the total number of poems. Second, the songs themselves are analysed to show that these symbolic patterns are reflected in detail in the compositional techniques and orchestration of the songs. Thus in addition to the musical coherence demonstrated by other commentators, the cycle is shown also to exhibit a coherence of imagery and symbolic thought-content, the over-all organization of the song-cycle deriving from the close interrelationship of both.