Circling Through the Universe Songs by Gustav Mahler
Richard Stokes
Gustav Mahler once declared that he was loath to set great poetry, since it was already self-sufficient. It was, he said, like a sculptor chiseling a statue from marble and a painter coming along to color it. He is the only important lied composer never to have set in his piano-accompanied songs a single poem by one of the great poets of German literature, and this has in some quarters encouraged an erroneous view of him as being insensitive to lyric poetry. The fact, moreover, that many of Mahler’s songs were either used in symphonies or have a symphonic feel to them has led some commentators to assert that he was a symphonist at heart, with scant regard for the subtleties of word-setting. Little could be further from the truth, although there is an orchestral quality inherent in virtually all his songs, even the piano-accompanied originals. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (commonly known in English as “Songs of a Wayfarer”) were composed in the midst of a traumatic relationship with Johanna Richter, a soprano at the Kassel Opera, where Mahler was chorus master. The poems, by Mahler himself, are heavily autobiographical, and the mood and theme of the four songs bear a striking resemblance to Schubert’s Winterreise. Both protagonists are jilted, both set out on a journey, both lie down to rest beneath a linden tree and both end in despair. Mahler’s opening song shares with Schubert’s last the same pedal-point and
