Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer
Composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
In 2016, BBC Music magazine polled 151 conductors to determine, as the headline put it, “the 10 Greatest Symphonies of All Time!” Three of the top 10 were by Gustav Mahler, and Mahler’s nine entries in the symphonic canon are often seen as the apotheosis of the huge late-Romantic symphony. But in his lifetime Mahler was better-known as an opera conductor than a composer, and he got his compositional start writing songs rather than orchestral pieces.
Bits of those songs often found their way into Mahler’s later symphonies, and astute listeners will find in his “Songs of a Wayfarer” two melodies that featured prominently in his Symphony No. 1, which of course the Philharmonic played to close the 21-22 season. Mahler worked on the “Songs” on and off through the 1880’s while he climbed laboriously up the ranks of Central European opera houses, ascending from a tiny wooden theatre in a Moravian vacation town to the wealthy German manufacturing city of Leipzig (from which he’d eventually move on to Vienna and then New York). The Songs of a Wayfarer were completed in their original, voice-and-piano instrumentation in 1885, and Mahler spent the next several years tinkering with their orchestration in his spare time before offering the orchestral version in 1891.
The Songs set poetry Mahler wrote himself, and their themes are familiar to readers of German poetry (and fans of Franz Schubert, who set many similar texts). In them we meet a young male narrator suffering from romantic heartbreak and wandering the countryside more or less aimlessly; the beauty and innocence of the natural world contrast piercingly with the narrator’s aching loneliness, and that contrast whipsaws his emotions from elation to despair.
In the first song, Wenn mein Schatz…, our narrator contemplates his darling’s upcoming wedding day – in which, of course, he can play no part. In Ging heut morgen… the simple joy of a summer saunter through a mountain field is interrupted, at last, by the inevitable pang of solitary despair, and in Ich hab ein glühend Messer the narrator offers a nightmarish vision of a glowing knife plunged into his chest. In Die zwei blauen Augen we end at last with Nature offering some relief, as our narrator finds peace sleeping under the falling blossoms of a linden tree. But wait: is our narrator merely snoozing, or is he in fact sleeping the final sleep of death? The ambiguity that ends the Songs captures the central question – what is death, and what can it tell us about the meaning of life? – that will animate Mahler’s compositions for the rest of his career.
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Hear Songs of a Wayfarer
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.