Lieder fur Tenor
Performances by Gustav Mahler
- Not known if he performed the songs (for Josephine Poisl (1860- after 1880)).
Premiere
- 30-09-1934 Brno, World premiere. Radio Brno with Zdenek Knittl (tenor) and Alfred Eduard Rose (1902-1975) (piano).
Versions
- Three songs.
- Gustav Mahler originally planned 5 …
Composed Year 1880, these three songs are the first complete compositions of Mahler’s to have survived. Mahler planned them as part of a cycle of five, the last two of which he never composed, most likely because he became preoccupied with his cantata Das klagende Lied. Mahler himself wrote all three …
Im Lenz (Spring) alternates a lively musical idea for the first and third stanzas with a more mysterious passage for the second and fourth that is actually quoted from Mahler’s Das klagende Lied. Overall, the song vacillates from key to key and idea to idea too quickly to be musically …
Winterlied is better organized, being based on a single unifying motive stated in the piano at the very beginning of the song. In the central part of the song, the sixteenth-note accompaniment of the piano illustrates the spinning wheel mentioned in the text. Once again, Mahler draws upon Das klagende …
The final surviving song of the set, Maitanz im Grünen (May Dance on the Green) is an early version of Mahler’s first published song Hans und Grethe. This is in more of a Gesang style than a Lied style, that is, more of a folk song than an art song …