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 Rüchert, 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.