The autograph piano score of the first of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, “Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n,” has been discovered and identified, reports Deutsche Welle. Identified by musicologist Berthold Over, the rediscovered score — in the possession of an anonymos private owner — is the missing part of the puzzle in the chronology of Kindertotenlieder‘s creation.
Mahler wrote three of the five songs comprising Kindertotenlieder in the summer of 1901 and then resumed the cycle in 1904, when he wrote the other two directly into the orchestral score, skipping the process of writing out a preliminary piano score. The orchestral scores from 1904 and two of the handwritten piano scores from the 1901 songs were preserved, but up to now there had been no trace of the one missing score.
According to DW: “The discovery of that fifth song — No. 1 in the official sequence — means ‘that it’s now possible to say which three were composed in 1901 and which two in 1904,’ Over explained to DW. ‘Establishing the chronological order of Mahler’s works is sometimes difficult because he didn’t date his manuscripts.'”
Filed under: Mahler, music news
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 