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With a damped, muted sound: the tone held back (Mahler’s Italian for mit verhaltener Stimme, ‘with restrained voice’).
Printed above the vocal line at the phrase it colours — in Mahler’s bilingual edition beside mit verhaltener Stimme — and lasts for that phrase.
The phrase is a translation, and loose Italian (smorzato would be standard), so read it through its German partner: a restrained, held-back tone rather than a sound fading away. In your own scores, mezza voce or sotto voce says this more clearly.
Mahler, Kindertotenlieder, “Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n!”, voice, m. 11: “con suono smorzare” beside “mit verhaltener Stimme”, in a song headed “Lento e malincolico, ma non strascinando”.
Con suono smorzare is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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