Ex. 7-11: Rheinlegendchen

Mahler wrote this song in August 1893, when he was 33, during a summer holiday by a lake in Austria. He finished the version for voice and piano on 9 August and the version for orchestra the very next day.

The words come from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn), a famous collection of German folk poems, but Mahler told a friend that the music came first: he had a melody in his head and looked through the book until he found verses that fit its rhythm. In the poem, the singer imagines throwing a gold ring into the river: a fish swallows it, the fish is served at the king's table, and the singer's sweetheart sees the ring there and brings it back. Mahler called the song "childlike" and "tender," and said that its orchestration was "sweet and sunny, pure butterfly colours."

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, and became one of the leading conductors of his time. Because he was busy conducting most of the year, he composed mainly during his summer holidays, and after this summer he had a small hut built by the lake so that he could work undisturbed. He later led the Vienna Court Opera for ten years, wrote nine large symphonies, and died in Vienna in 1911, at 50.

From the album Mahler: Lieder by Christiane Karg and Malcolm Martineau (2020)
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