Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Recently a friend asked me which music piece IS ME. This is it. This song by Gustav Mahler is one I've long felt an affinity for. If I said I loved it, that would smack of self-love, wouldn't it? It has been close to me since I first heard it, probably around 1983. That is also when I discovered the incredible voice and personality of Maureen Forrester, who gave a song recital at our college in October 1983. 

Maureen and I hit it off after her recital in 1983

After that fateful and wonderful meeting, I listened to all the recordings she had made which were readily available (and even ordered rare import copies of Canadian pressings). As so often happened with me, a person helped me discover a certain area of music. Having worked with Bruno Walter as a young woman, she became a renowned expert in the music of Gustav Mahler. But her repertoire spanned four centuries of music and dozens of languages.

The afternoon before her recital, I had hosted the "Classical Hour" on the college radio station, which was right upstairs from where this picture was taken. I found a few of her old recordings of Mahler, Schumann and Brahms songs and played the "Songs of a Wayfarer" for my listeners. I particularly liked the light mood in "Ging heut' morgen übers Feld".

While she was accepting congratulations from other concert-goers, I ran upstairs and got the old records from the '50s and '60s and brought them down to have her autograpgh them. I told her about discovering "Ging heut' morgen" that afternoon and she started singing it for me, thrilled to have met someone in provincial Williamsburg who apparently knew her repertoire so intimately. She signed the albums and told the Dean of Students how thrilled she was to see that the College of William and Mary had such wonderfully educated students.  

Her piano accompanist asked me if I would take a Polaroid picture of him and Maureen for their scrapbook. I did so, and as I watched the photo develop, said to him, "I'd kill for a picture of me and her. Would you be so kind?" He was and so I've been able to look back at this beautiful moment where our long friendship started. Over the following years we exchanged letters and I enjoyed live performances of many wonderful works from Berlioz and Brahms to, of course, Mahler.

It would be several years before I discovered her recording of "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen". By then I had heard the tremendous interpretations by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Janet Baker, Christa Ludwig, Kathleen Ferrier and others. In some of these interpretations there is piano accompaniment and other times an orchestra backs the singer, who admits to having left behind mundane things and chosen to join the spirit world of love and music.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,

Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,

Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,

Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,

Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,

Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,

Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,

Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!

Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,

In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

I am lost to the world

With which I used to waste so much time

It has heard nothing from me for so long

It may well believe that I am dead

I am not at all concerned

If it takes me for dead

I can hardly deny it

For I really am dead to the world

I am dead to the world’s turmoil

And I rest in a quiet realm

I live alone in my heaven

In my love, in my song

Two interpretations (besides those by Maureen, of course!) stick out from the rest: Leonard Bernstein accompanies Fischer-Dieskau on the piano in the most drawn-out rendition I've ever heard. Bernstein extracts all the longing and resignation and self-satisfaction out of the piece in those eight minutes. And the singer - considered by many to be the greatest Liedersänger ever - brings his entire personality and emotions into the recording.

The other quite different one is an arrangement by Clytus Gottwald for a capella choir. I was lucky enough to hear the premiere live in the Gaisburger Kirche in 2012. The recording is beautiful, but the live acoustics in our church gave the arrangement an ethereal quality that is hard to beat. The entire CD is beautiful!

I often play the accompaniment on the piano and when I arrive at the last bars, my heart is beating slowly and I am totally relaxed. 

Now that I've picked up the violin, I also play it on that instrument as well. I played it in Mahler's woods this past summer in Austria. It sounded heavenly there too!