Mahler: I Have Become Lost to the World (solo piano transcription) (1901)

Nate Koch, piano.

This song is permeated by a feeling of openness, peacefulness, and resolution. But, true to Mahler's style, there is always loneliness, anxiety, and neuroticism just below the surface (best example: the unstable and dissonate notes in the left hand just as the vocal line resolves for the final time: 6:10).

This is a transcription of a song based on the poem by Ruckert below.

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I have become lost to the world,
With which I used to waste so much time;
It has heard nothing from me for so long,
That it may well believe that I have died!

I do not care at all,
If it considers me dead.
I also cannot contradict it,
For really I have died,
Died to the world.

I have died to the world's turmoil,
And I rest in a silent domain.
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love, in my song!

Friedrich Rückert

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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!

Friedrich Rückert