"Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis" ("The hunter's funeral")

About this Work

The 1892 and 1894 performance program notes contained the following text related to this movement :

Gestrandet. Ein Totenmarsch in Callot's Manier.
Zur Erklärung diene, wenn notwendig, folgendes: Die äußere Anregung zu diesem Musikstück erhielt der Autor durch das in Süddeutschland allen Kindern wohlbekannte parodistische Bild "Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis" aus einem alten Kindermäerchenbuch: die Tiere des Waldes geleiten den Sarg des verstorbenen Försters zu Grabe; Hasen tragen das Fähnlein, voran eine Kapelle von böhmischen Musikanten, begleited von musizierenden Katzen. Unken, Krähen usw., und Hirsche, Rehe, Füchse und andere vierbeinige und gefiederte Tiere des Waldes geleiten in possierlichen Stellungen den Zug. An dieser Stelle ist dieses Stück als Ausdruck einer bald ironischen, bald unheimlichen brütenden Stimmung gedacht.

Stranded. A funeral march in the manner of Callot.
If necessary, the following explanation may help: The author received the stimulus to this composition through the parodistic picture "The Hunter's Funeral", well known to all children in Southern Germany from an old children's book of fairy tales: the animals of the forest accompany the coffin of the dead hunter to his grave; hares carry the flag; a band of Bohemian village musicians is walking ahead, accompanied by music-making cats, toads, crows, etc., and stags, deer, foxes and other quadrupeds and feathered animals of the forest accompany the procession in funny poses. Here this piece is intended to be a sometimes ironically funny, sometimes spooky brooding mood.

This program was not shown in later performances.

Recording History

I began creating a MIDI sequence of this music in January 1995, using a Yamaha PSR SQ16 with its built-in sequencer. The standard MIDI limitations of only having 16 tracks posed significant challenges, as the music score had more than 16 "tracks" - I managed to share some tracks and used patch changes to get all the instruments in. Got the file ready just in time for the Frankfurt Musikmesse 1995, where I took it with me on a demo disk and tried it out on several synthesizers that were shown there. What a disappointment, when I realised that the SQ16 mapping of velocity, expression and volume did not match to any other synth - the balance was completely off! So the first thing after coming back from the Musikmesse was to buy a standard General Midi soundcard for my PC and to convert the file into a more standard-compatible version. This was a pity, because the SQ-16 actually sounded not bad, in fact much better than my MIDI sound card! Especially the tamtam on the SQ-16 was very nice - it was missing in the GM standard, so I had to replace it with several cymbal sounds. I abandoned this music for a while, before I released a final MIDI version in the GM standard in 1998.

In the meantime the MP3 revolution had taken place, and I devoted more time to creating MP3 recordings. The complex and delicate sound of this Mahler piece was very difficult to achieve with synthesizers which I had available at the time, so I never made an MP3 recording from that MIDI file which would sounds satisfactory. This changed when I got hold of the Garritan Gigastrings in 2001, and later in 2004 the Garritan Personal Orchestra. So in 2005 I began a conversion of this music into using those samples, but I soon was again overwhelmed by the tedious task of re-assigning the mapped tracks, unwarping all those instruments which had shared tracks, and getting all those marvelous sound effects to shine.

It took a few more years, until I had a new computer setup (MAESTRO-2) which finally provided the necessary power to play simultaneously many audio and synth tracks. So I decided to complete the rendition of this Mahler movement, as the first piece played by this new computer. I began the work in February 2010, and got the first more or less satisfying recording after 5 weeks.

Discussions

All Recordings

This list contains all avaliable recordings of this music that I created. These are often experimental and are made available just for reference. The newest recordings are at the top.

Right-click and save the files instead of trying to play them by a direct link - some of them are very large!

 
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