Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1884-5) is Mahler’s first masterpiece, a demonstration of both his wonderful gift for folk-like tunefulness and his exquisite sensitivity to the musical properties of the German language. It’s also a valuable clue to possible autobiographical meanings in his First Symphony (1884-88), which references the cycle at two key points in its own journey. There are clear models here: Schubert’s poignant, doom-laden song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), which relates a rejected lover’s downward spiral into madness, and Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) which, like Mahler’s first song, depicts a man standing outside the wedding of his beloved, horribly alienated from the sounds of happy revelry. And yet it is purely, unmistakably Mahler. As so often with Mahler, it’s all very personal. Just before writing Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, he had experienced a romantic rejection of his own. Just how devastating that was is hard to gauge, but it released a torrent of wonderful music, covering a huge range of feeling and impression in just four songs. We follow the spurned young journeyman as he sets off to lose himself in nature—unsuccessfully, it turns out. Memories of the lost beloved return to torment him before, at last, he settles beneath a linden tree (another shade of Schubert) and looks forward to peace in the arms of oblivion. Far from being self-indulgent, this final song evokes the young man’s mental dissolution with extraordinary delicacy.