Mahler: Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Traveling Journeyman)
sung by Carol Brice
English Translation of Text
The Fahrenden Gesellen of the title is a “traveling journeyman,” a remnant of the guilds of the Middle Ages and a stock figure in German Romanticism. These were young people who learned their trade by traveling from place to place and studying with various masters. There were still a fair number of them in the 19th Century. Heinrich Heine describes meeting one in his Harz Journey:
After having walked some distance I caught up with a traveling journeyman who came from Braunschweig, a nice little young man, so thin that the stars could shine through him as through Ossian’s nebulous spirits, and in general a baroque mixture of whimsy and melancholy characteristic of the common folk. This was shown in the amusingly touching way in which he sang the wonderful folk song, “A beetle sat upon the fence; buzz, buzz!” This is the nice thing about us Germans; no one is so crazy but that he can find someone even crazier who understands him. Only a German can appreciate that song and nearly die with laughing and weeping when he hears it.
“Laughing and weeping” I listen to these songs, written when Mahler was still a young man, maybe before he renounced his Jewish heritage in order to secure himself a place in the German-speaking cultural establishment. They are ridiculous and heartbreaking, juvenile and deeply knowing. The text, by Mahler himself, seems less written than distractedly recalled from all the cliches of Romanticism. The music, “laughing and weeping,” brings together German folk songs and the Yiddish songs heard on both sides of the Atlantic around the turn of the 20th Century.
The “laughing and weeping” tone first heard in these early songs is piercing, immoderate, anti-classical and characterizes all Mahler's later music. It runs counter to the "classical" ideal of a sound that is smooth, whole, closed-off, removed from the tone-world of social reality. There has yet to be a proper performance of these songs. To capture their peculiar sorrow, the singer would have to take on that broken, self-mocking voice one hears on old recordings of Yiddish songs from the New York of the 1920s, a voice nasal and scarred with experience, bringing to mind an asymmetric, greasy, pitted face and a smile that is also a grimace.
Most classical singers, working within the industry, are not willing to take that chance. The sorrow of Mahler is that of the dispossessed, those not in full command of the means of expression. They work with whatever music they find at hand, and this usually happens to be folk music. But they cannot quite identify with it. It is inadequate to express their actual experience. This tension tears open the fabric of the music and defamiliarizes it, makes it painful and piercing to cultured ears.
In his essay The Romantic School, Heine offers another lengthy description of the traveling journeyman in his discussion of German folk songs:
Usually the writers of such songs were wanderers, vagabonds, soldiers, itinerant scholars, or travelling apprentices (fahrenden Gesellen), particularly these last. Very often on my walking tours I joined company with these people and noticed how, at times, inspired by some unusual event, they would improvise a snatch of a folksong or whistle it into the open air. The birds sitting on the tree branches heard this, and when another had later come strolling past with his knapsack and walking stick, they would whistle that little snatch of song in his ear, and he would add the missing lines, and the song was finished. The words come from out of the blue to the lips of such a lad, and he needs only to utter them, and they are then even more poetic than all the fine poetical phrases that we concoct from the depths of our hearts. The character of these traveling apprentices lives and moves in such folk songs. They are a strange sort. Without a penny in their pockets, they travel through all of Germany, harmless, happy and free. I usually found that three set out together on such a journey. Of these three one was always the faultfinder… and if they came to a poor quarter with miserable huts and beggars in rags, he was likely to remark ironically, “The good Lord created the world in six days, and just look, the result shows it.” The second companion interrupted only occasionally with angry comments… his continual refrain was how much he regretted not having given his landlady in Halberstadt a sound thrashing to remember him by. At the word “Halberstadt” the third lad sighed from the depths of his heart. He was the youngest, setting out into the world for the first time, still thought constantly of his sweetheart’s dark brown eyes, always hung his head, and never said a word.
Why were Heine and Mahler, both assimilated German Jews, so attracted to this figure of the traveling journeyman? Maybe the footloose, carefree lifestyle of the young apprentice offered a disguise for the rootlessness of people cut off from their own heritage. This gives us another filter through which to hear this music. Certainly, the images of Nature in these songs are Romantic cliches. But how does an outsider experience the forces of Nature worshiped by Romanticism?
In one strain of 19th Century German antisemitism, the Jew is distinguished from “true” Germans by being cut off from Nature, for Nature itself is Aryan, with its golden-haired fields and blue-eyed sky. Thus for a Jew, even the brilliance of Springtime, the flowers and birds that grow from the soil of his adopted homeland, are closed off. He does not know their proper names and has no business in the stewardship of the land. He cannot go to Nature as a source of healing, the way countless Romantic poets did. The sky and fields themselves reject him. The “two blue eyes” of the darling girl are the eyes of society, which drive him out into the wide world and into the night.
Mahler thus inhabits the same marginal space in German Romanticism as Heine, whose bitterly ironic poems to his (always blonde and blue-eyed) beloved share the same frustrated desire to belong, to find a home through love. In the most intimate of experiences, one feels most sharply the collective wounds of history. This wound is also the source of hope: "I forgot what life's really like." When the vagrant falls asleep under the linden tree, the tree that stands guard before so many ancient German villages, promising with its sweet balmy scent safety and shelter for all who dwell within, the dream that engulfs him is of death as Utopia – in that other world, where no one is cast out any longer, the outcast will finally be welcomed home.
