Farewell - Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), A Symphony for Tenor and Contralto (or Baritone) and Orchestra, after Hans Bethge’s The Chinese Flute

Gustav Mahler made the first sketches for this music in 1907 but did most of the work in the summer of 1908, completing the last song in short score—that is, with the instrumentation indicated but not fully written out—on September 1 that year. The full score was finished in 1909. Mahler did not live to hear this work, whose first performance was given by his friend, disciple, and former assistant, Bruno Walter, in Munich on November 20, 1911. Walter chose two American singers from the roster of the Vienna Court Opera, William Miller and Mme. Charles Cahier (Sara Jane Layton Walker from Nashville, Tennessee, who always used her married name).

The score calls for three flutes and piccolo, three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets with high clarinet in E‑flat and bass clarinet, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, two harps, mandolin, celesta, timpani, glockenspiel, tam-tam, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tambourine, snare drum, and strings.

These notes are used by kind permission of the estate of Michael Steinberg and are taken from the complete notes in his Oxford volume “The Symphony”.

Early in 1907, Gustav Mahler was given a newly published verse collection of German translations from the Chinese, Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, The Chinese Flute. Mahler, distracted and overworked, put the book aside. Late that summer, when he came across the gift again, he was worse than overworked. In July, his daughter Maria, four‑and‑a‑half, had died of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and he had learned that he himself suffered from a severe heart condition. Work pulled him out of despondency. Those melancholy verses spoke to Mahler with singular urgency. He began sketches, and the songs were his chief project for the following summer.

It was clear to him from the beginning that he was writing no ordinary song cycle but something larger and more cohesive, something, in fact, symphonic. Bruno Walter recalled Mahler’s describing the work as “a symphony in songs,” and Mahler did in the end head the score “a symphony for tenor and contralto (or baritone) and orchestra.” Ever since Bruno Walter chose a contralto when he conducted the first performance in 1911, most performances have followed Walter’s lead. But Mahler expressed no clear preference, and in fact when the poems’ speakers are referred to, the references are masculine.

Das Lied von der Erde is not, however, among Mahler’s numbered symphonies. It would be his ninth, but, with Beethoven and Bruckner in mind, he was superstitious about ninth symphonies and convinced that he would not be granted the time to go beyond that freighted number. He thought to put one over on the gods by not assigning a number to the symphony after the Eighth, and when he finished the symphony he called No. 9 he triumphantly told Alma that it was of course “really the Tenth” and that the danger was past. But the gods were not taken in by Mahler’s bookkeeping, and death claimed him as he was at work on the symphony he called No. 10.

“Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (“The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow”)—The poet is Li T’ai‑po, born in Szechwan in 701. Legend has him drown when he fell out of a boat by moonlight, drunk, whereupon a dolphin bore him to sea and immortality; in duller fact, he died in bed in the year 762. Wine was, however, one of his favored topics. Here he invites us first to contemplate the brevity of human life and then to drain our goblets. From Li’s melancholy poem Mahler makes a savage song. It explodes with the fierce call of all four horns in unison and with the cackle of sardonic laughter in woodwinds, trumpets, and violas. It is a song full of bittersweet sounds and of ugly ones. As musical composition it is as extraordinary as it is a penetrating setting of a poem. Mahler spreads a feast of variation: Nothing appears twice the same way, and even the refrain of “Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod” is sung each time at a higher pitch than before. Along with this developing variation (to borrow Schoenberg’s phrase about Brahms), we find Mahler extending the resources of counterpoint by means of what we might call simultaneous variation. At (for example) the passage about the span of human life—“Nicht hundert Jahre darfst du dich ergötzen”—tenor and violins have almost the same melody, but the fascination is in the almost-but‑not‑quite, in the way what seems to be a single line keeps splitting in two. This sort of multiple vision recurs throughout this song (and others in Das Lied von der Erde, particularly the last). As Mahler grew older, his poignant and vivid art was tied more and more to his bold polyphonic fantasy. In this song we meet his craft in its most prodigiously developed state, and in the service of communicative powers that border on the annihilating. “What do you think,” he asked Bruno Walter, “Is it at all bearable? After hearing this, won’t people want to do away with themselves?”

After this ferocious tavern homily comes the contrast of the second song’s fatigued quiet. The poet of “Der Einsame im Herbst” (“The Lonely Man in Autumn”) is Chang Tsi. Muted violins paint the background against which the oboe projects its plaintive song, a song more elaborate than is for many minutes granted the baritone. His declamation is a series of restrained scale passages. Only with the thought of the beloved place of rest does passion begin to inform the singing. The anguished plea to the sun of love—“will you never shine again?”—is a sudden flight of ardent song, but before the sentence is finished Mahler reverts to the bleak opening music.

There follows, after these intensely serious songs, a triple intermezzo, all on poems by Li T’ai‑po. First “Von der Jugend” (“Of Youth”)—the orchestra even pretends for a moment to be Chinese in this dexterously charming projection of a genre scene so familiar as to be a cliché. Under the bits of pentatonic melody and the ding of the triangle it is all quite Viennese. And in a moment it is over.

“Von der Schönheit” (“Of Beauty”) is more spacious, and while “Of Youth” is the delighted observation of a single mood, we now have a song as varied as the pounding heartbeats of the seductive girls with their great yearning eyes. The song rises to a fiery gallop, only to return to languor. The music continues the delicious erotic reverie long after words have failed.

“Der Trunkene im Frühling” (“The Drunkard in Spring”) is perhaps our friend from the first song, but in reckless good humor. The realization that spring is come softens him—the violin solo is the quintessential Mahler pastoral tune—but he retreats, from his own tenderness to the safety of his wine flask while the music returns to the bright, bass‑starved sound of its opening page.

“Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”) constitutes almost half the work. Here Mahler made a conflation of two poems. The first is by Mong Kao‑Jen; the second, beginning with “Er stieg vom Pferd,” is the work of Wang Wei. These eighth-century poets were themselves friends who addressed these respective verses to one another.

The song begins with a deep tolling over which the oboe keens. Veiled violins bring consolation, but the music disintegrates. In less than a minute-and-a-half, Mahler has given us the basic material for the movement. The silence that follows the disintegration prepares the entrance of the voice. At this moment, the music in effect begins over—or, if you prefer, what we hear now is a variation on the first eighteen measures, a variation in which the tolling is reduced to a sustained low C on the cellos, the oboe’s part is taken by the flute, and the voice assumes the contours of the horns’ and clarinets’ sighs. After the flute dies away, the music makes a third start of tolling and lament; before the double song is done, there will have been nine such new beginnings. They are widely various in tone and mood, in key, in scale, in their propensity to introduce new material or avoid it. Developing variation is here the governing principle. The idea of simultaneous variation is also very much with us. Perhaps the richest instance of it occurs in one of the most lovely phrases in Das Lied von der Erde, the one about the rising moon: “O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt/Der Mond am blauen Himmelssee herauf,” where baritone, clarinets, and cellos have almost the same melody, almost at the same time.

The first two stanzas and the beginning of the third are scene‑setting. With “Ich sehne mich, O Freund” comes a sudden surge of feeling. Here, with the fresh sound of mandolin, Mahler gives us a new melody of miraculous breadth. A broad orchestral interlude marks the break between the two poems and is also the most magnificent of Mahler’s funeral marches. The music for the second poem is a condensed re‑experiencing of that for the first. The great hymn to spring—“Die liebe Erde”—brings the earlier “new melody” back in still more beautiful form. Voice and instruments reiterate “ewig” (“forever”) until sound and silence become one. Mahler sings a farewell, but his song of and to the earth is, at its close, a song of love and of life.

— Michael Steinberg