3 Song Cycles by Gustav Mahler

3 Song Cycles by Gustav Mahler

This convenient volume contains Mahler's three great song cycles in piano-vocal score, reprinted from authoritative German and Austrian editions. All three complete scores offer singers and musicians the opportunity to study and savor the compelling musical qualities of these famous works at the piano.
Songs of a Wayfarer (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen), the composer's first song cycle, is considered by many the masterpiece of his early period. A setting of his strongly autobiographical text, this is a revealing self-portrait of a young man. The haunting musical imagery of Songs of the Deaths of Children (Kindertotenlieder), Mahler's setting of five poems by Friedrich Ruchert, embodies the chromatic harmonies typical of his late work.
In The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), Mahler combines the forms that most obsessed him song and symphony into a masterpiece that epitomized his musical genius and the very spirit of late Romanticism. Based on six poems translated from Chinese, the songs merge from passionate evocations of the pleasures of youth to dark and foreboding expressions of loneliness, sorrow, and farewell.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), an Austrian composer and conductor, is best known for his symphonies and Lieder. His turbulent paintings, which are late Romantic in style, reflect the uneasy spirit of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The composer's music was repressed by the Nazis due to his Jewish ancestry, but it has undergone a steady comeback over the last five decades.