The Resonance of Memory

A letter from Mahler to his friend Josef Steiner dated 17–19 July 1879 demonstrates that the nineteen-year-old composer was not only familiar with the world of German Romanticism, but that he had well-nigh transposed himself into it. Among the multitude of Romantic symbols in this letter, those which clearly relate to Wilhelm Muller’s Die Winterreise are particularly conspicuous: an icy heart in need of sunshine, the linden tree as a place of rest and even an organ grinder. A comparison between the linden tree passages in the letter, the final verse of the last of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – penned by Mahler himself – and Wilhelm Muller’s famous poem from the Winterreise demonstrates Mahler’s peculiar relationship between literature, life experience and his own work. The astonishing dimension of this phenomenon becomes fully apparent only when the wealth of linguistic and musical quotations and allusions contained in Mahler’s Gesellen songs are considered. Alexander L. Ringer has made a major contribution to this.

It is well known that the four songs which comprise the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, composed in Kassel in the years 1884–5, resulted from a personal experience, namely Mahler’s unrequited love for Johanna Richter, the first soprano at the opera house there at the time the song cycle was written. Rather than the biographical matter per se, hardly a novelty in the genesis of lyrical texts, the manner in which Mahler describes it is revealing. In a letter of 1 January 1885 to his friend Friedrich Lohr, Mahler recounts the preceding New Year’s Eve, spent in Johanna Richter’s apartment. His account of her outburst of tears at the sound of the midnight bells parallels literary texts – Ringer mentions Jean Paul’s story ‘Die wunderbare Gesellschaft in der Neujahresnacht’ as well as the motivic relationship to Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’, set by Schumann as No. 13 of Dichterliebe, and to Wilhelm Muller’s ‘Tranenregen’, the tenth song in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin; Jens Malte Fischer also adds the Rome chronicle from Wagner’s Tannhäuser.