program
GUSTAV MAHLER: Kindertotenlieder (1901-04) – 23′
Songs on the Death of Children, on poems by Friedrich Rückert
PERFORMERS
Barcelona Symphony Orchestra
Dame Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano
Ludovic Morlot, conductor
The Kindertotenlieder reveal essential aspects of Gustav Mahler's musical thought. His starting point is the creative universe of Friedrich Rückert, who will write 428 poems, in his attempt to survive the death of two of his children, aged 3 and 5, in the term of two weeks. Mahler created a dramatic universe around universal infant death, on five of the poems.
Contemporary with the Fifth , Sixth and Seventh symphonies, the creative dialogue with the German poet opens a new path in his production. The cycle proposes something unattainable: mixing joy and anguish, peace and restlessness, childhood and death. And he succeeds. Again and again, the major mode dissolves unsettlingly into the minor mode, so that heartbreak becomes music. Art is not a palliative of death, but the sublimated experience of it, which we always know secondhand, through others.
Mahler manages to derive his musical ideas from the poem, using specific aspects of music to pick up the tensions and ambiguities that escape the word. In this sense, there is a dialectical relationship with the text, in which sometimes the music discovers the pain after the smile of the language. Already in the first of the songs, the terrifying indifference of nature to human tragedy is highlighted, which will close with the moving "In diesem Wetter..." in D, with a promise of transcendent redemption, despite the fact that the children are in an ontological storm, because "the hand of God protects them".
