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Donald Macleod explores the music and life of Gustav Mahler. Today, Mahler’s obsession with human mortality, which became all too real with the tragic death of his daughter Maria.

The death of his beloved younger brother Ernst, less than a month after the boy’s thirteenth birthday, hit Mahler hard. Perhaps it marked the beginning of the preoccupation with the fragility of human existence that was to become such a hallmark of his work. It may also have inclined him towards the work of the poet Friedrich Rückert, whose Kindertotenlieder – Songs on the Death of Children – charted, in a cathartic cycle of 428 poems, his alternately despairing and accepting reaction to the death of two of his six children, Luise and, coincidentally, Ernst, in an outbreak of scarlet fever in 1833. You can only imagine Mahler’s feelings of guilt when his own young daughter, Maria – ‘Putzi’, as he affectionately called her – died from a combination of scarlet fever and diphtheria, just two years after he had finished setting a selection of Rückert’s grief-laden verses.

Rückert-Lieder (Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen)
Kathleen Ferrier, contralto
Vienna Philharmonic
Bruno Walter, conductor

Symphony No 4 (2nd movement, In gemächlicher Bewegung, ohne Hast)
San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

Kindertotenlieder (Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n)
Janet Baker, mezzo soprano
Hallé Orchestra
John Barbirolli, conductor

Symphony No 6 (4th movement, Finale. Allegro moderato – Allegro energico)
Vienna Philharmonic
Pierre Boulez, conductor

Produced by Chris Barstow for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales