LDV100

26 MAHLER ∙ SCHOENBERG / JUGENDSTIL ‘O my Mathilde, when I raise my eyes to you, I raise them to Beauty! It is you I imagine walking arm in arm with me through the bare, dark night; it is you who bear in your heart a burden of which you are ashamed. But I, who love you above all else, will bear it with you, to make it lighter. For we are heading towards a new dawn together.’ What he does not yet dare tell her, he writes. Day after day, moved by the haunting vision of her supple waist, her white hands, her shining hair that he dreams of seeing as it cascades down her back, he kneads, moulds the notes of his sextet, throws them onto the paper in handfuls like ripe wheat, his belly aching with the desire for warm bread. The poet Richard Dehmel expressed it so aptly in his Verklärte Nacht : love is greater than the ghosts of the past! True love forgives, accepts, shares sorrow. He is serene, for he knows that she will be his, and he revels in that delicious and unbearable expectation, which sublimates his music and his passion. In the twilight, it seems to him that her feminine curves mingle with the undulations of the melodies he has composed during the day, coming together in an incandescent disc. When the sun disappears over the horizon, they both return to the little cottage, their cheeks burning, drunk and almost ashamed of the giddying silence in which they have watched the flames of the Schwarza die away, and those of the stars come out.