Sunday Classics: Mahler's military songs -- (3) At last we come to "Revelge" and "Der Tamboursg'sell"

From the Fischer-Dieskau Mahler performances we've heard the last couple of days, you might reasonably conclude that the guy was a blustering hack. And for me that's not entirely untrue, at least some of the time. But then he gives a performance -- an actual performance -- like this one of "Der Tamboursg'sell," and you're reminded of what he could do. (Again, Hans Zender conducts the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, April 1979.)

by Ken

One last time, from Jack Diether's liner note for the original Columbia LP issue of the recording of Mahler's settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, and Leonard Bernstein:

Mahler's unique power as a composer lies in his ability to catch the essence of the sounds of man and nature, and to transmute it into purely musical terms. From his early childhood, he was fascinated by the sounds that environed him: bird songs, bugle calls, tattoos, marches and, especially, dances and airs. It is said that when Mahler was only four or five years old he could already play more than a hundred peasant songs and dances on an accordion.

Where other composers such as Bela Bartok became increasingly interested in their native music as they grew older, Mahler seems to have absorbed the music of his homeland into his very cells at an exceedingly early age and seems then to have taken no further conscious interest in it. Instead, he built instinctively on the most powerful and primitive sources of expression throughout some of the most complex and sophisticated structures yet conceived by the Western musical mind. Perhaps that is one reason the strong appeal of Mahler's music continues to grow in our increasingly complex and often baffling age.

Again, the original plan this week was to prepare for today's program, the Mahler "military" songs "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tamboursg'sell" ("The Drummer Boy") with quick previews of some of the others from this subset of six songs within the canonical dozen Mahler Wunderhorn songs. (That's not including some early Wunderhorn songs and the three settings that found their way into the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies.)

If you were here for Friday night's installment, which offered two of what I called the "he said, she said" songs, "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") and "Lied des Verfolgten im Turme" ("Song of the Prisoner in the Tower"), sung both as duets and as solo narratives, and for last night's presentation of the hauntingly beautiful "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" ("Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow"), I think you understand why they couldn't just be "previewed," but instead had to be approached via some of the basic considerations of this material which I had planned to reserve for today's "real" post.

On the plus side, that means the heavy lifting is done, and today we can just listen to Mahler's final Wunderhorn settings, which in fact weren't published with the other Wunderhorn songs but wound up as the first two of Seven Songs, with no musical connection to the other five, settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert (also author of the Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children, which Mahler turned into one of his best-known works).


SO LET'S GET RIGHT ON WITH IT. TO HEAR MORE OF
"DER TAMBOURSG'SELL" AND "REVELGE," CLICK HERE

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