Three Rückert Lieder (1901-2)

Liebst du um Schönheit

Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder

Rückert’s poem Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder “is so typical of Mahler,” said someone who knew him well, “that he might have written it himself.” In Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) Gustav Mahler had found a profoundly, even uncannily kindred spirit - one whose loss of his children, commemorated in his Kindertotenlieder, so sadly foreshadowed a similar tragedy in the Mahler household a few years after the composer had set the same Kindertotenlieder to music. Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder!, dated 14th June 1901, was the first of Mahler’s Rückert settings. By the end of that summer he had also written Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft, Um Mitternacht, and Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen as well as three of the Kindertoten-lieder.

Liebst du um Schönheit stands slightly apart from its companions in that it was written a year later, in August 1902, and in a different situation. A comparatively simple love song, it was intended as a surprise for his wife, Alma Schindler, whom he had married five months earlier. Aware of her passion for Wagner at the time, he slipped it between the pages of her copy of Die Walküre, as she later recalled it. “Then he waited day after day for me to find it; but I never happened to open the volume, and his patience gave out. ‘I think I’ll take look at Die Walküre today,’ he said abruptly. He opened it and the song fell out. I was overwhelmed with joy and we played it that day twenty times at least.” Actually, as Alma’s diary indicates, it was her Siegfried score rather than her Walküre score that Mahler chose for his little subterfuge. But that is scarcely significant. More to the point - and she would not have been slow to notice it, distant though it is - is the allusion to Tristan as the song approaches its climax at “Liebst du um Liebe…” It was presumably because of its essentially intimate nature that Liebst du um Schönheit is the one Rückert setting Mahler considered unsuitable for orchestral treatment. (The version heard in performances of the Rückertlieder with orchestra was scored by one M. Puttmann).

Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft describes, according to Mahler, “the way one feels in the presence of a beloved being of whom one is completely sure without a single word needing to be spoken.” The pianissimo arpeggios in the opening bars not only have a peculiar acoustic fragrance: they are also the source of the vocal line and of the legato quavers that run gently through the accompaniment. The lower registers of the piano are largely excluded from a texture in which melody floats evocatively on the air.

In Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! the most prominent feature of the piano accompaniment is inspired by the sound of the bees which, in the poem, are introduced in the second stanza but which, in the song, buzz industriously throughout. According to the composer’s confidante, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, the poem “is so typical of Mahler that he might have written it himself.”

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht

Ging heut Morgen über’s Feld

Ich hab’ ein glühen Messer

Die zwei blauen Augen

The Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are the result of Mahler’s unhappy love affair with Johanna Richter, a soprano in the opera company at Cassel where he was a staff conductor between 1883 and 1885. The words (or most of them) he wrote himself in a series of poems addressed to Johanna between August and December 1884. It was only towards the end of the affair that he set them to music and it was only in 1897, when he had completed the orchestral version, that the work was published. The title, taken from a popular collection of poems by Rudolf Baumbach, he no doubt felt appropriate not only because of the romantic association of the “fahrender Geselle” with the wanderer poet but also because of his own status in Cassel as a “journeyman” musician.

The literary style adopted by Mahler for these songs is close to that of his favourite collection of folksongs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn - remarkably close considering that he is said not to have discovered the anthology until 1888. The first of them is actually compiled from two of the poems in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. It is based on a theme common to much writing of its kind, which is the contrast between the happiness of the outside world and the misery of the rejected lover.

In the first part of Wenn mein Schatz the contrast is particularly poignant, since the outside world is at her wedding while he weeps in his room alone. Mahler intensifies the contrast by mixing two different tempi. On the one hand, there is the wedding tempo which introduces and periodically interrupts the song; on the other hand, there is the very much slower reflective tempo adopted by the lonely voice. At the beginning of the second part, where he looks to nature for comfort and where the wedding dance mingles with the bird song, the key changes from D minor to E flat major, which is clearly unrealistic in the context. Inevitably, the key returns to D minor and the lover to his isolation.

Ging heut Morgen sets him in a similar situation. The key is now a radiant D major, the melody (used again later in the First Symphony) cheerful, and the accompanying colours bright with birdsong and bluebells. The whole effect is heightened when, with the sun sparkling on the scene, the key changes to B major. It is only in the last three lines of the song that the lover turns his attention from the outside world to his own inner self. The tempo slows down; the key changes to an uncertain F sharp major; and he answers his own modest question in the negative.

He touches on the depth of despair in Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer, which plunges the tonality immediately back into D minor. The pain so vividly expressed in the piano harmonies is scarcely relieved by memories of her blue eyes, her golden hair, and her silvery laughter. On the contrary, they inspire the death wish that so chillingly ends the song in E flat minor. The E minor funeral march at the beginning of Die zwei blauen Augen is a natural consequence. However, it carries the unhappy lover not to his grave but, with a lovely modulation from C minor to F major, to consolation in the bosom of nature (this section too he used in the First Symphony). The conflict between the outside world and the inner self is resolved in a shower of petals from the maternal lime tree. The funereal F minor cadences are no more than a distant echo.