5 Rückert-Lieder

Few today would claim that Friedrich Rückert was one of the greatest German poets, though his elegantly lyrical verses had considerable appeal in the 19th century. But for Mahler, that was part of the appeal: there was music in Rückert’s poems, but not so much that Mahler could not add to it in his own unique way. Later, he would do this with devastating power in his Rückert-based song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children, 1901-04), but before that, in 1901-02, he set five Rückert poems for voice and piano (later orchestrated) which have no particular theme in common. Mahler never saw them as a cycle, and did not specify an order in which they should be performed. But they contain some glorious music, especially the visionary “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I Am Lost to the World)—in essence a kind of artistic and personal credo (Mahler quotes it in the famous “Adagietto” from the contemporary Fifth Symphony). Then there is the startlingly original “Um Mitternacht” (At Midnight), which in Mahler’s orchestration dispenses completely with the string section. The other three songs are all about love and are much lighter, even playful in tone: “Liebst du um Schönheit” (Do You Love Beauty?) was in fact a present for Mahler’s new wife, Alma, which makes it all the stranger that this is the only one of the songs he never orchestrated himself.