Kindertotenlieder
Kindertotenlieder is a song cycle of Gustav Mahler, which he composed 1901-1904, based on texts an eponymous collection of poems by Friedrich Rückert.
Data
Instrumentation: Medium Voice ( mezzo soprano / baritone) and orchestra
The premiere took place on 29 January 1905 in Vienna under the composer Friedrich Weidemann as a soloist instead. Four of the Rückert Lieder Mahler premiered in the same concert. The first edition appeared in the same year.
The performance lasts about 20 minutes.
Background
From 1900 Mahler 's song-writing of texts Friedrich Rückert was determined. This authored a collection of 428 poems children dead shortly after the death of two of his ten children. This Mahler selected five texts to set to music. Mahler had 11 siblings, six of whom died in infancy. In 1901 he composed the songs one, three and four, 1904, the second and fifth. The first song is composed in D Minor, the last in D Major. It leads to a solution, so to speak, and completes the cycle. The melodic turn of cellos in the sequel to " In this weather, in this windy storm " (bars 129-133 ) sounds on to the main theme of the finale of Mahler's Third Symphony (1895 /96), the "what tells the composer with me the love " overwrote. "This is musically the last word of the Kindertotenlieder. Namely that the death powerful, stronger than him, but is love"
His wife Alma could not understand that he is in 1904, while his two children were playing happily in the garden, his Kindertotenlieder composed to texts by Friedrich Rückert, which he had written after the death of his children.
His daughter Maria Anna died in 1907 of scarlet fever, diphtheria.