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Unread 05-13-2022, 10:01 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Location: TX
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Here is a contender for the saddest music ever recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3J2e-L62bY

Friedrich Rueckert wrote the Kindertotenlieder in the 1820s, after losing I think two children to yellow fever. A couple of generations later, around 1904, Mahler decided to set them to music. His wife said, "What are you doing? I'm pregnant." Mahler continued, and they had a daughter. Who died aged four, of yellow fever.

This is Kathleen Ferrier singing, in perfect German, 1947, in a London still flattened by the Blitz.

And here's a poem about it:


Passage through to Daylight


The Kindertotenlieder have begun –
and my heart breaks, to hear the news they tell.
The days we have to live, when once our child
is taken from us. Kathleen Ferrier –

who died young – sings contralto as the wind
and strings speak out. There is no passage through
to daylight but the one she takes; it all
is full of grief. The sun goes up so bright,
she sings, as if no sorrow had occurred.

Now this is where the tears well up. They are
the oboes playing. Can we bear it? Mahler
set words to music and his pregnant wife
was troubled at his subject. And their child
lived to the age of four and then she died.

When your mommy, Rückert wrote, comes in,
and I look up, she looks for you, my little
daughter. This is perfect German, crisp
and consonantal. Stopped-out light of joy,
sings Ferrier: erloschner Freudenschein.

There is a sort of ending, one where hope
is heard again. And it is very fine –
but this child won’t be coming back, to greet
the mother’s eye, the father’s heart. As Lear
says: Never never never never.