The Classical Music Book

201

five-note “pentatonic” scale

(distinct from the Western seven-

note scale), providing an element

of local color that his European

audiences would easily recognize.

Large ambitions

In Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler

managed to combine his two

principal musical concerns—song

and the symphony—in a single

large-scale work for the first time.

In his Second, Third, and Fourth

Symphonies, there had been a

substantial overlapping of the two

genres; in Das Lied von der Erde

their fusion is so complete that

neither can be separated out. A

tenor and mezzosoprano alternate

in the six song settings, and Mahler

deploys a large orchestra with

exceptional sensibility to mood and

color, often with the finesse of a

chamber group of solo instruments.

The opening “Das Trinklied vom

Jammer der Erde” (“Drinking-Song

of the Earth’s Sorrow”), music of

wild and despairing fatalism, is

followed by the desolate depiction

of a mist-covered lake in “Der

Einsame im Herbst” (“The Lonely

One in Autumn”). Then comes a

group of three shorter settings,

prominently colored by the

pentatonic scale, recalling the

innocent happiness of youth and

the joys of springtime. The final

setting, “Der Abschied” (“The

Farewell”), is longer than the other

five songs combined. Two different

poems are here separated by an

orchestral interlude and lead

eventually to a conclusion with

words added by Mahler himself:

“Everywhere the dear earth

blossoms forth in spring and grows

green again! Everywhere and

forever, distant horizons gleam

blue: forever ... forever ...”

The music seems not so much

to end as to dissolve into this vision,

in which awareness of human

mortality is transcended by the

perception that life and the natural

world will timelessly be renewed.

The work as a whole relates more

ROMANTIC 1810 –1920

to Mahler’s deepest creative and

personal concerns than to a fashion

for “exoticism for exoticism’s sake,”

but, without that fashion and the

inspiration Mahler found in Eastern

culture, Das Lied von der Erde

could not have existed. ■

Mahler’s diverse influences are

satirized in this caricature of him

conducting his Symphony No. 1 in D

major, from a November 1900 edition

of Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt.

Is it at all bearable? Will it

drive people to do away

with themselves?

Gustav Mahler

Mahler’s struggles are

those of a psychic weakling,

a complaining adolescent

who enjoyed his misery,

wanting the whole world to

see how he was suffering.

Harold Schonberg

American critic

US_198-201_Mahler.indd 201 26/03/18 1:01 PM