LIVE: Renée Fleming "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"

Fleming will sing Mahler in New York
this January (Photo: Jonathan Tichler)

In 2001 Paramount Classics released Bruce Beresford's Bride of the Wind, a film celebrating Alma Schindler Mahler: "Vienna, 1902: Alma Schindler meets Gustav Mahler. She beautiful, young, plays, and composes: music is her life. She becomes Mahler's lover, then he marries her, asking that she give up composing. She has two children, works as his assistant, does his books, saves him from debt, and feels stifled. In 1910, after the death of a child, she retreats to a spa where she falls in love with Walter Gropius. Will she go with him or stay with Mahler? She conducts an affair with the tempestuous Oskar Kokoschka and is stifled in another way. Then, she marries Gropius, who proves imperious. She leaves him for Franz Werfel: he finds her compositions and insists the public hear them." The soundtrack featured three songs by Alma Mahler ("Bei dir ist es traut," "In meines Vaters Garten," and "Laue Sommernacht") written in 1910. The works are performed by Renée Fleming and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet joins on

Fleming as Alda in 2001

two of the pieces. They even got into costume and performed one of the numbers at the end of the film with Fleming portraying soprano Frances Alda singing for an audience that includes the character of Alma Mahler. Another piece on the soundtrack was "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" from Gustav Mahler's Rückert Lieder. It featured Fleming singing the famous song (which in the film was arranged by the film's composer Stephen Endelman) and is heard only in excerpt*.

Now is your chance to hear Fleming sing the song in its entirety from a live concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw on October 25, 2010:


Renée Fleming will perform Mahler's Rückert Lieder at Carnegie Hall in New York on January 15, 2012 with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. James Levine is scheduled to conduct. Watch a trailer from the film Bride of the Wind after the jump. [Source, Source, Source]
*This is how it was recorded for the soundtrack and film.