Kindertotenlieder

A song cycle about the deaths of children? It sounds grisly, or morbidly self-indulgent, but Mahler was working through something important here. Not only had he lost several siblings in childhood; in 1904, when he wrote Kindertotenlieder, infant mortality was still startlingly high, even in supposedly civilised Vienna. Confronting devastating grief, in music of such heartbreaking beauty, would have been important for many, and after the death of his own infant daughter in 1907, Mahler recalled these songs poignantly in his song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 9. Friedrich Rückert’s verses are set with all Mahler’s customary sensitivity to the music of the German language, but one doesn’t have to follow the text to sense the terrible desolation behind it all. The fifth and final song does offer resolution of a kind: at least the children are now safe from the storms of life. Perhaps, it seems to say, music can help us face even irreparable loss.