mahler: Das lied von der erde (The song of the earth)
1 Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery) 2 Der Einsame im Herbst (Autumn Loneliness) 3 Von der Jugend (Youth) 4 Von der Schönheit (Beauty) 5 Der Trunkene im Frühling (The Drunkard in Spring) 6 Der Abschied (Farewell)
The story that Mahler avoided calling Das Lied von der Erde his Ninth Symphony because he wished to cheat death, which had claimed Beethoven and Bruckner after they had reached the same stage of their careers, is a much-repeated one, and though its origins may be questionable it has the merit of plausibility. In the summer of 1907, a year after completing his gigantic, life-affirming Eighth Symphony, Mahler was staying with his family at their summer lakeside retreat at Maiernigg when he suffered the double blow of the death from scarlet fever of his elder daughter and the discovery of his own life-threatening heart condition. It was the beginning of a black period for him; ever aware of death, he was now forced even more into making an accommodation with it. Small wonder if portents of mortality gained extra strength.
The summers were when Mahler did most of his composing – winters were devoted to a punishing conducting schedule – but the traumas of 1907 rendered the year creatively fruitless. That is, unless we accept his widow Alma’s assertion that it was at the end of that summer that a friend gave him a copy of Die chinesische Flöte (‘The Chinese Flute’), a small book of assorted Chinese poems, many of them ancient, gathered together in German translations by Hans Bethge. The collection may have had its faults as an academic exercise – Bethge’s ‘translations’ were in fact secondhand adaptations of other men’s work, and many of his attributions are incorrect – but it certainly touched something in Mahler. Chinoiserie was much in vogue in European art at this time, but Mahler must have been drawn, too, to the poems’ highly concentrated reflections on natural beauty, the transience of human existence and the inevitable acceptance of death. When in 1908 he took up residence in a new summer home at Tolbach in the Dolomite mountains (after a winter season that had seen his final performances as musical director at the Vienna State Opera and his first conducting engagements at the Metropolitan Opera in New York), he had already made a selection and was ready to turn them into an orchestral song-cycle. According