Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860 (happy belated birthday, G!), which made me think I might as well post some notes I wrote a few years back for the Dallas Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, in chamber reduction. (I have written about the full orchestral version, too, I’m pretty sure, but I think both versions of the work are fascinating and urge you to listen to both, if you haven’t already.) I’m pretty sure I have never posted them before, but if I’m repeating myself, please take it up with the subscriptions department, which will reimburse you in full.

If you’d like to listen to a lovely performance that’s readily available on YouTube, I recommend this performance by Cantata Profana, from 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKY2xQLdteU

Mahler’s Song of the Earth

by René Spencer Saller 

In 1907, about a year before he started writing Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) endured three brutal losses. First, through no fault of his own, he was forced out of his longtime position as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera. Next, his cherished four-year-old daughter died from scarlet fever. Then his physician told him that he had a fatal heart condition. Frightened and grieving, Mahler confronted his mortality crisis by working harder than ever. Despite being warned by his doctor to get more rest, he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—slow down. 

In July of 1908, he wrote to Bruno Walter, who would conduct the posthumous premiere in Munich, not quite six months after the composer’s death:  

“If I am to find my way back to myself, I have got to accept the horrors of loneliness, since you do not know what has gone on and is going on within me. It is, assuredly, no hypochondriac fear of death, as you suppose. I have long known that I have got to die…. Without trying to explain or describe something for which there probably are no words, I simply say that with a single fell stroke I have lost any calm and peace of mind I ever achieved. I stand vis-à-vis de rien [face-to-face with nothingness], and now, at the end of my life, have to begin to learn to walk and stand.”

Two months later, he wrote another, less morbid letter to the conductor. “I have been hard at work,” he reported. “I do not know what the whole thing should be called. I have been granted a time that was good, and I think it is the most personal thing that I have done so far.” 

Unsure how to classify Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler finally settled on “a symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) and orchestra.” Nominally a song cycle, with alternating movements for two singers—usually, but not always, male and female—the composition was originally scored for a large orchestra, although Mahler’s many small instrumental groupings often suggest the intimacy and expressive clarity of chamber music. He indicated that a tenor should sing movements 1, 3, and 5, and assigned the remaining three, including the sprawling sixth, to either a contralto or a baritone. (In most cases, a contralto is chosen.)

Schoenberg/Riehn Arrangement

Thanks to Mahler’s gossamer textures, the score for Das Lied von der Erde lends itself to a chamber-music reduction. In 1921 the largely self-taught Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) began an arrangement for a small (14-instrument) ensemble. Schoenberg never meant for the arrangement to be published or performed publicly. He created it mostly for educational purposes, under the auspices of The Society for Private Musical Performance, which he and his musical disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern had co-founded in Vienna in 1919.

The goal of the Society—which denied entry to music critics and forbade applause during or after performances—was to promote new and underperformed music by contemporary composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bartók. Over its roughly three-year existence, the Society staged more than 100 performances. Each piece on the program was performed twice in a single evening to help subscribers absorb and appreciate what were likely to be totally unfamiliar works. Owing to financial constraints and other practical considerations, many scores (such as Mahler’s) were stripped down to more economical arrangements for piano or chamber ensemble. 

Schoenberg arranged Das Lied von der Erde for string quintet (standard quartet, plus double bass), wind quintet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium, and percussion (glockenspiel, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, small and large drum). By the time the Society folded in 1922, he had abandoned the project, after orchestrating only the first song. For the remaining songs, he left extensive notes, which, in 1983, decades after his death in 1951, the German composer, conductor, and musicologist Rainer Riehn (1941–2015) used to finish the score. Making a slight adjustment to Schoenberg’s instrumentation, Riehn added a part for celesta in “Der Abschied.”

Instead of the lustrous orchestration of Mahler’s original, the Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement calls for solo instrumentalists to accompany the singer, with a single violin or cello standing in for Mahler’s massed strings. Comparing Mahler’s original orchestral score to a painting, Riehn called the chamber arrangement a woodcut rendition. 

Song by Song

The lyrics are based on texts from Die chinescische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), a collection of ancient Chinese poems translated into German by Hans Bethge. Mahler chose poems by Li Tai-Po, Mong Kao-Yen, Wang Wei, and Tchan Tsi, but adapted the lines as needed, sometimes augmenting them with his own words. All six songs touch on the brevity of life and the certainty of death. 

The first song, “Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde” (The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow), seems at first like a jovial tribute to the analgesic properties of alcohol, but each of the three stanzas ends with the same ominous refrain: “Dark is life, and so is death.” Mahler raises the pitch of this line with every repetition, ramping up the emotional tension.  

Next,  in the delicately scored “Der Einsame in Herbst” (The Solitary One in Autumn), a seamstress laments her loneliness over a long, sleepless night: “Sun of love, will you never shine again/To dry my bitter tears?” A spectral oboe and spare, shuddering strings intensify the autumnal flavor.

The third and briefest song, “Von der Jugend” (Of Youth), describes a gaggle of pretty young things under a porcelain pavilion. Pentatonic patterns and Asian-inspired percussion set the scene while darting woodwinds mimic the partygoers’ passing remarks.

In “Von der Schönheit” (Beauty), the singer depicts a group of maidens gathering lotus blossoms by a riverbank. The loveliest one gazes longingly at a young man, who doesn’t notice her. Despite the sad lyrics, the music is sprightly, buoyed by frisky winds, pizzicato strings, and dotted rhythms.

In the fifth song, “Der Trunkene im Frühling” (The Drunkard in Spring), the booze-fueled male protagonist tries in vain to obliterate his thoughts while birds twitter mindlessly in the background: “What does spring matter to me?” he concludes. “Let me be drunk!”  

A sinuous, sorrowful solo oboe glides over swaying strings and pulsing rhythms in the half-hour-long finale, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell). “I shall no longer seek the far horizon,” the singer declares. “My heart is still….” Mahler combined two poems by different authors, punctuated by a magnificent orchestral death march. He marked the end Gäzlich esterbend (completely dying away), and added his own words as conclusion: “Everywhere and forever the luminous blue of the horizon… Forever… forever…” That last word, ewig, summoned from the depths of the contralto’s register, is repeated nine times as the music melts into radiant silence. 

Copyright 2020 René Spencer Saller