childsviewpage

Loosely based upon the Gustave Mahler song cycle used in the last movement of
his Fourth Symphony,“Das Himmlich Leben (A Child’s View of Heaven)”. The songs
were inspired by a book of German folk poems “Das Knaben Wunderhorn (The
Youth’s Magic Horn)” - the central figure of this painting.
The painting tackles issues of assimilation, conversion and the often terrible
consequences for Jews. The painting is presented as a contemplation of death
from a child's perspective akin to Peter Pan's 'awfully big adventure.' The sadness
of death contrasts with the peaceful content of the child's paradise. Mahler, a
Jew who converted to Roman Catholicism in order to secure the job of director
of the Court Opera in Vienna, is portrayed as the nursery rhyme character ‘the
cat and the fiddle’, innocently playing for children of the Holocaust.