DAS LIED VON DER ERDE [THE SONG OF THE EARTH]
Gustav Mahler
(b. Kalischt, nr. Iglau, Bohemia [now Kalište, Jihlava, Czech Republic], July 7, 1860; d. Vienna, May 18, 1911), arr. Arnold Schoenberg and Rainer Riehn
Composed 1908-9, arranged 1921/1983; 60 minutes
Similar to how actors refuse to utter the word “Macbeth” inside a theater, Gustav Mahler felt queasy when it came time to write his Ninth Symphony. Even though he had completed the gigantic choral Eighth – the ’Symphony of a Thousand’ – the previous year, superstitious fear held him back from calling Das Lied von der Erde his Ninth. (Beethoven completed nine symphonies; Bruckner died before completing his Ninth). Instead, Mahler gave this symphonically conceived song-cycle a descriptive title, The Song of the Earth, but still referred to it as a symphony. It requires a substantial orchestra. Still, in 1921, this did not deter Arnold Schoenberg from bringing it to his Verein and personally starting work on an arrangement for chamber resources. He then shared it with other pupils, in the spirit of making Verein arrangements collaborative, didactic projects. The scoring is for wind quintet (with doubling on piccolo, cor anglais, E-flat and bass clarinets), also string quintet, harmonium, celesta, piano and a large percussion kit. At this time, however, Schoenberg’s brave attempt to make new music reach a new audience – often sight unseen or by bringing an ’innocent ear’ to their listening – folded. Hyper-inflation in Austria made such efforts unsustainable. The score was left unfinished until 1983, when German composer and conductor Rainer Riehn (1941-2015) completed the orchestration and prepared the arrangement for publication.
Back to Mahler now. In 1907, Mahler experienced major disruptions to the life he had known for the past ten years. He resigned his administratively arduous post as director of the Vienna Court Opera, soon afterwards signing on with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. But, more significantly, in 1907, he had been diagnosed with a lesion of the heart, forcing major changes in a lifestyle. The summer months, when he found the time to compose, saw him climbing mountains and walking through forests – “wresting my ideas from nature,” he told conductor Bruno Walter. “I have never been able to compose only at my desk – I need outside exercise for my inner exercises,” he added. A few months later, he was further devastated by the death of his daughter Maria from diphtheria. She was four, he was 46 and, just four years later at the age of 50, he, too, would be dead.
Feelings of mortality are present from the outset of The Song of the Earth, which he wrote mainly in the summer of 1908, after his first season at the Met. Tenor and mezzo-soprano (or baritone) alternate through the six poems that he selected from a small collection of 80 poems titled Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute). These had been recently published, in 1907, by Hans Bethge (1876-1946) in German, which he had freely translated and adapted from two 19th century French translations of 8th century Chinese sources. For all this distancing, the poems that Mahler selected and then reshaped into a symphonic structure spoke deeply to him and resulted in one of his finest compositions. Four of the poems have been traced back to the most celebrated Chinese poet of the period, Li Bai. The second movement is based on a poem by Chang Tsi, and poems by Mong Kao Jen and Wang Wei are combined in the finale, all in Bethge’s translations.
The tenor has the first song, The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow, which opens with a horn call, closely followed by a motif which binds the symphony together and which has suggestions of the pentatonic scale – perhaps drawn from early Chinese cylinder recordings Mahler is believed to have listened to before setting his Chinese poems. The unnatural, strained exuberance of the opening song’s hymn to wine cools three times to the words “Dark is life, dark is death!” Structurally, the song has elements of a sonata allegro, with contrasting themes and a repeated exposition. A sequence of slow movements and scherzos will then lead inexorably towards an extended finale, in which song cycle and symphony are interwoven in a farewell that is as long as the other movements combined.
In the second song, The Solitary One in Autumn, the mezzo seeks peace and rest among nature’s decay. The performing direction on the score, ’somewhat dragging and exhausted,’ appropriately encapsulates the singer-poet’s solitary experience. On the surface, Of Youth appears to transcend the surrounding melancholy, but the green and white porcelain pavilion described in the poem, like the chinoiserie in Mahler’s music, seems transitory and fragile. Of Beauty is an idyll, where the mezzo wistfully recalls unruly horsemen and the ache of romance, only to summon feelings of poignancy at the fleeting nature of it all. The fifth song brings a return of the drunkard (not a form of escapism that Mahler personally sought). It is a light-hearted song, perhaps with underlying bitterness and cynicism, that pauses only to acknowledge the beauty of springtime birdsong.
The final movement contains music of transcendent beauty and restraint. This is Mahler’s monumental summing-up of musical themes and motifs that make up this beautiful work. The two poems, including the additions made by Bethge and Mahler, bid farewell in the simplest of images: a setting sun, a closing flower, a weary homebound worker, a roosting bird, a poet longing for closure. Three main thematic sections appear twice with a deeply moving funeral march between. By the end, Mahler finds beauty in life with the Earth awakening again to Spring and his final ’ewig’ (forever), is nine times repeated. Mahler’s music “has the beauty of loneliness and pain,” composer Benjamin Britten eloquently states, “a serenity literally supernatural.”
