Bergson Phil' Performs Mahler & Fauré for All Saints' Day

Traditionally, All Saints’ Day is an occasion to pause and reflect on life and death. In this program, we do so through music. It opens with what is perhaps the most unsettling work in the history of music: Gustav Mahler’s *Kindertotenlieder* (Songs on the Death of Children). This cycle is based on poems by Friedrich Rückert. After two of his children died of scarlet fever, he desperately tried to come to terms with this loss and wrote no fewer than 428 such “Kindertotenlieder.” Mahler selected five of them. His wife Alma was perplexed; she found the undertaking eerie. She could not understand how her husband could compose songs based on such texts while his own children were happily running around in the garden and he could happily hold them in his arms and kiss them. The almost unbelievable conclusion to this story: Three years after composing the songs, Mahler’s daughter actually died. Gustav subsequently wrote a harrowing personal account. He emphasized that he had to imagine what it would be like if his own child were to die. After his daughter’s actual death, he would never have been able to write these songs.

Johannes X. Schachtner has written an arrangement for string orchestra that, together with the solo baritone, powerfully brings to life the emotional world of this music: loneliness, memories, speechlessness, and hope.

Hope also characterizes the musical atmosphere of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. It is probably the most peaceful and conciliatory Mass for the Dead of all. For unlike the famous settings by Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, and others—which focus on the violence and horror of the Last Judgment—Fauré viewed death as a blissful deliverance. The “Dies irae,” the “Day of Wrath,” barely appears in his composition. And he fittingly concludes with the “In Paradisum,” which sings of the angels who may escort the deceased to heaven.

To put it somewhat pointedly, one could summarize it this way: Mahler asks how one lives with loss. Fauré answers what one may hope for.

Doors open at 3:30 pm
Start: 4:00 pm
End: approx. 5:15 pm

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