Hanya Holm's setting of Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children)
Hanya Holm created Homage to Mahler in 1976 during her thirty-fifth consecutive summer of Dance Instruction and Production in Colorado. Premiere performances were August 4 and 5 in Armstrong Theatre at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Jeanne Piland, soloist with New York City Opera Company, sang Gustav Mahler's monumental song cycle with piano accompaniment by Leonard Taffs. A recording of Kathleen Ferrier and the Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter conducting, was used for rehearsing.
Photo: Norman Ader
Two sections of Holm's dance, a solo she created for Claudia Gitelman and a duet for Gitelman and Terry Kaelber, have been performed in intervening years by the two original dancers and by others in America, Europe and Asia. In the fall of 1997, dancers under Gitelman's direction at Rutgers University undertook to reconstruct two group sections which had never been performed again after 1976. The goal of this site is to record the process of reconstruction and the dancers' research into the work's historic context.
