The sky is endlessly blue, and the earth
will long remain, and bloom in spring.
But you, Man, how long will you remain?
Not even a hundred years shall you enjoy
all the mouldering trinkets of this earth.
The legendary conductor Bruno Walter called Das Lied von der Erde “the most personal utterance among Mahler’s creations, and perhaps in all music.” The first part is a bold statement; the second approaches sheer folly. The mind races for counter-examples: more personal than Brahms’s German Requiem? Beethoven’s last quartet? Even within Mahler’s body of work the claim is questionable. Why, for instance, would a Bohemian Austrian Jew’s most personal work feature a third movement that sounds like it belongs in a Chinese opera house?
The distinct Oriental shading in much of Das Lied (Adorno suggested that the tenor strains in high passages to mimic the vocal timbre of Beijing opera) is due to the text, which is drawn from Chinese poetry. And it is the text, I think, that bridges the gap to the personal in ways that Mahler’s previous texts could not. There is a gentleness of metaphor in the poems that make up Das Lied, a clarity of colour and line that seems to require solo winds and voices (Schoenberg would later transcribe the piece for chamber ensemble). There is an insistence on sensation, as when the poet describes a field stiffened in frost as though “an artist had strewn jade dust over all the fine blossoms.”
Perhaps the most important thing these poems offered Mahler was a theme that reflected his own preoccupations: the feebleness and futility of life in the face of eternal, impassive nature. “A full glass of wine at the proper moment is worth more than all the riches of the world!” bellows the singer in the first movement, “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery.” Between his raucous exertions come moments of gloomy sobriety, in which he intones, always to the same minor-key melody, “Dark is life, is death.”
The second movement, “The Lonely One in Autumn,” entwines the fates of the individual and nature. There are two sources of light in this poem, a lamp and the sun, and before the poem is out both will have extinguished – the small lamp “out with a splutter,” and the sun, a symbol for love and human companionship, ceasing to shine.
After autumn we expect winter, but the next two movements land us in the full bloom of summer. Titled “Of Youth” and “Of Beauty,” these play more like a remembrance, sandwiched as they are between the hermetic opening pair and the 5th movement, a second drinking song that returns us to the casual recklessness of the beginning. What’s remarkable about these two sunny middle movements is that they are brimming with people – “Youth” describes a group of “beautifully dressed” friends sitting on a pavilion in the middle of a pool, while “Beauty” has young men on horses gallop past a group of girls picking blossoms by the shore.
The despair of being alone in nature is erased by the companionship of humanity, but even here nature is not fully gone; see, for instance, the way the pavilion and the silk-clad friends are reflected in the pool below:
On the small pool’s still
surface, all things are reflected
wonderfully in reverse.
The bridge stands like a halfmoon,
its arch inverted. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking and chatting.
This reversal takes on a transcendent dimension in the work’s final movement, “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”), nearly as long as the first five movements combined. The poet is alone again, but in a sublime gesture she looks up as the moon, like a silver boat, “sails up into the lake of the sky.” Water is reflected in sky, and more significantly, it is the man-made boat that is transformed into the natural moon, becoming a part of nature. The boundary between the individual and nature begins to disappear as the poet becomes more attuned to the wilderness that surrounds her, and the earth, bizarrely and sublimely, begins to breathe as if human:
The brook sings loudly through the darkness.
The flowers stand out palely in the twilight.
The earth breathes, full of peace and sleep.
And out of this transformation comes the most astonishing of confessions, as a new figure enters that very likely speaks for Mahler himself, poor displaced soul that he was:
He dismounted and handed him the drink
of parting. He asked him where
he would go, and also why it must be.
He spoke, his voice was choked: “My friend,
on this earth, fortune has not been kind to me!
Where do I go? I will go, wander in the mountains.
I seek peace for my lonely heart.
I wander to find my homeland, my home.
Quiet is my heart, waiting for its hour!”
The final bars linger on the word ewig, or “endless”; the body disappears, is subsumed by nature. The final transformation is complete, the paradox of mind and body, nature and consciousness solved at last by the final farewell. The body of the poet is transmuted into the body of the Earth, and the Earth is made to sing.
written by Dan Wang. Dan is the Festival and Academy Coordinator for Toronto Summer Music.
