Austrian concert programme — Schubert & Mahler

7 songs to words by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866)

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

Lachen und weinen D777 (1822–3)

Du bist die Ruh D776 (1823)

Robert Schumann (1810–56)

O, Ihr Herren Op.37 No.3 (1841)

Volksliedchen Op.51 No.2 (1840)

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (1901)

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! (1901)

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (1901)

“It is I myself,” said Mahler on reading Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen. Rückert might not be in the very top rank of German poets but some exceptionally fortunate composers, Schumann and Mahler foremost among them, found that they could identify more closely with his verse than that of most others. Brahms and Wolf were less susceptible, though not totally immune, and Strauss was more successful in setting Rückert for chorus than for solo voice. Schubert, however, the first major composer to adopt him, produced at least three masterpieces – Dass sie hier gewesen, Du bist die Ruh, and Lachen und Weinen – out of six Rückert settings, all of them written between 1822 and 1823 and all of them based on poems taken from the recently published Östliche Rosen (a clear tribute to Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan).

The text of Lachen und weinen could almost have been written by a poet with an intimate knowledge of Schubert’s music and an ambition to bring out the most personal aspect of his genius. Rückert almost certainly knew nothing of Schubert and yet, while engaging the composer’s most spontaneous melodic and rhythmic instincts, his words inspire harmonies poignantly poised on the major-minor ambiguity so distinctive of Schubert. After more time for reflection in Du bist die Ruh – one can imagine the same lover some years later – love now amounts to religious devotion. It is expressed in holy tranquillty in the first four stanzas and transcended in the last as the vocal line twice rises to its highest point and has nowhere else to go but awed silence.

Another case of Rückert apparently foreseeing a distinguished musical future for his poetry is the series of poems, collected under the title Liebesfrühling, which he wrote to celebrate his engagement in 1821. It supplied the opening and closing songs of Myrthen, Schumann’s wedding present to Clara, and it turned out to be ideal material for a joint celebration of their marriage in Zwölf Gedichte aus “Liebesfrühling” on which they collaborated between January and June 1841. Clara’s modesty about her creative ability restricted her contribution to just three of the 12 songs but it is to her that we owe what was probably the earliest setting of Liebst du um Schönheit. She might well have had a part in the composition of O, Ihr Herren, an essentially feminine inspiration even though the delightful little postlude seems characteristic of Robert rather than Clara. Written possibly in 1840 for a Mozart album, the publication of which was intended to coincide with the unveiling of the Mozart Monument in Salzburg, the appropriately Mozartian Volksliedchen was included in the Lieder und Gesänge Op.51 published in 1850.