LDV100

BEATRICE BERRUT 21 He looks up: the sky is clearing outside. This symphony will begin with a funeral march and it seems to him that today is a suitable day for that, despite this precarious bright spell. Exhausted by his unremitting work since early this morning, he stretches his stiff limbs, then gets up and takes a few steps around the room. What calm, he thinks, and what a contrast to the many conflicts that have marked his year with his musicians at the Hofoper! ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, says Rückert in one of his poems: I am lost to the world. He leafs through the book carelessly placed on the windowsill and smiles bitterly. ‘That’s me all right’, he sighs. The seeds of the future appear to have been sown on this evening as the water trickles from the canopy of the forest, and he can sense it. Rückert wrote his Kindertotenlieder after the death of his two youngest children; now he is composing his funeral march and setting some of the poet’s texts to music when he has a spare moment. His daughter will die of scarlet fever: he does not know that yet, but his music does. Little Maria Anna is not yet born and will be no more than a brief spark of life; the furtive light that pierces the sky is her prefiguration.