Three Songs to words by Friedrich Rückert

Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft

Um Mitternacht

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

The complete but unfinished piece of music - the work in progress, perhaps, or the indeterminate score which takes shape only in performance - has become a familiar concept in the last forty years or so, particularly to those composers who, like Luciano Berio, have worked with John Cage or taken a positive interest in his ideas. To those of previous generations it would have been an incomprehensible paradox. In this particular area, whatever else they have in common, the composers of the “Resurrection” Symphony and the Sinfonia part company.

Someone who knew Mahler very well said of Rückert’s poem Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! - a delicately expressed assertion of the artist’s right to have no one looking over his shoulder as he works and to have no one trying his piece out until it is completely finished - that “it is so typical of Mahler he could have written it himself.”

In fact, Mahler found a profoundly kindred spirit in Friedrich Rückert (1788 -1866) - the loss of whose children, commemorated in his Kindertotenlieder, so uncannily and so sadly foreshadowed a similar tragedy in Mahler’s own household only a few years after he had set those 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 Kindertotenlieder.

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 arpeggio on celesta and harp not only has a peculiar acoustic fragrance: it is also the source of the vocal line and of the legato quavers which run gently through the song on the strings. Cellos and basses are excluded from a texture in which woodwind melody floats evocatively on the air.

All the strings are excluded from Um Mitternacht from which, until the last stanza, light and warmth are also excluded. The first part of the song is dominated by the desolate three-note Mitternacht motif with which it begins and the descending scale figure first heard low down on fourth horn. The oboe is replaced by the still more plaintive oboe d’amore. The point of the scoring here is to offset with maximum effect the change to the major, the horn fanfares and the harp and piano flourishes, for the chorale-like setting of the last stanza.

“It is I myself,” said Mahler of Rückert’s poem, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen adding that it derives from a “feeling that fills one and rises to the tip of one’s tongue but goes no further.” It is a feeling which Mahler explored further in the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, with much the same melodic material and similarly nostalgic harp colouring. It is the most freely constructed, perhaps the most spontaneous, and certainly the most inspired of all the Rückert settings.