“SONGS ABOUT DEAD CHILDREN” BY G. MAHLER IN THE CONTEXT OF SPIRITUAL-ETHICAL AND GENRE-STYLISTIC METAMORPHOSES OF THE VOCAL CYCLE IN EUROPEAN MUSIC OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

The study, using the example of the vocal cycle “Songs about Dead Children” by G. Mahler, summarizes the featuresof the transformation of this genre in the conditions of the European music-historical tradition of the modern era.The purpose of the work is to identify the poetic and intonational uniqueness of “Songs about Dead Children” by G. Mahler in the context of the genre and style evolution of the chamber vocal cycle in European music of the earlytwentieth century.The methodology of the work is based on the principles of intonation, genre and style, music-culturological and analytical-musicological research methods.The scientific novelty of the work is determined by its analytical perspective, which takes into account not only the genreand intonational specificity of “Songs about Dead Children” by G. Mahler, but also their spiritual and philosophicalcontext and the features of its timbre and texture reproduction, which indicate one of the directions of the evolution of the vocal cycle in the conditions of musical modernity.Conclusions. The chamber-vocal cycle is one of the leading areas of G. Mahler’s work, which testified to his genre-style priorities aimed at understanding and reproducing the poetic-intonational world of musical romanticism. Atthe same time, the vocal cycle, widely represented in the composer’s work, testifies to the metamorphoses of this genre, due to its contact with the symphony, due to which the poetics of the German-Austrian Lied gradually evolves towards an “orchestral song”. The cycle “Songs about Dead Children” is one of the most striking examples of the transformation of this genre. In the absence of narrative, this cycle by G. Mahler, created on the texts of F. Rückert, is marked by emotionaland semantic integrity and the presence of the leading idea of the work – the emotional experience of the death of one’sown child. The poetic and intonational specificity of “Songs about Dead Children” is formed, on the one hand, against the background of expressive musical and rhetorical techniques (anabasis, catabasis, lamentо, the figure of the “cross”, chromatic sequences, etc.) and their polyphonic textural embodiment. On the other hand, the concept of the cycle is voiced within the timbre richness of the phenomenon of “orchestral song” with the indicative unity of vocal and instrumental factors for it, which testifies to the metamorphoses of the vocal cycle in the conditions of musical modernity of the earlytwentieth century.