Christian Gerhaher / Gerold Huber

Gustav Mahler’s orchestral songs, which are heard in this concert in piano versions, mark a high point in the Late Romantic vocal repertoire. In »Das Lied von der Erde«, which is based on Chinese poems, Mahler explores different aspects of the subject of life and death. In its original form a hybrid between an orchestral song cycle and a symphony, the composition was written at a time when Mahler was suffering from several blows of fate in his private life. The composer described it as, »Probably the most personal work I have produced so far.«

The »Sieben Lieder aus letzter Zeit« after poems by Friedrich Rückert, on the other hand, are intimate character pieces; they are not a cycle as such, but a group of individual songs. »Des Knaben Wunderhorn« is a set of lieder that Mahler composed based on folk poems from the eponymous collection of verse edited by Clemens von Brentano and Achim von Arnim.