1 CD - 469 526-2 - (p) 2001

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)



Das Lied von der Erde 60' 31"
- Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde 8' 30"
- Der Einsame im Herbst 8' 35"
- Von der Jugend 3' 02"
- Von der Schönheit 6' 52"
- Der Trunkene im Frühling 4' 36"
- Der Abschied 28' 56"


 
Violeta Urmana, Mezzo-Soprano
 Wiener Philharmoniker
Michael Schade, Tenor Pierre Boulez, Conductor
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
Goldener Saal, Musikverein, Vienna (Austria) - ottobre 1999

Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Executive Producer
Dr. Marion Thiem

Recording Producer
Helmut Burk

Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)
Ulrich Vette

Recording Engineer
Jürgen Bulgrin

Editing
Dagmar Birwe

Prima Edizione LP
nessuna

Prima Edizione CD
Deutsche Grammophon - 469 526-2 - (1 CD) - durata 60' 31" - (p) 2001 - DDD

Note
Cover painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela © Sigrid Jusélius Foundation










1907 was a disastrous year for Mahler: first came his resolution to resign from the Vienna Opera following a vicious campaign waged against him; then his elder daughter Putzi succumbed to a ravaging attack of diphtheria; finally he himself was diagnosed with a heart ailment which, though relatively minor, he interpreted as a death sentence. These calamities served to drive a wedge between the ill-matched couple of Mahler and his wife Alma as they went about their lives isolated from one another by grief. During that summer he immersed himselfin a newly published volume of Chinese poems, in German verse adaptations by Hans Bethge, entitled Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute). In the autumn he left Europe for America, where he had accepted an engagement to conduct a four-month season at the Metropolitan Opera. When he returned to Europe in June 1908, and set up in Toblach (now Dobbiaco) in the Dolomites, where he would spend his remaining summers, he had to deny himself his favourite sports; swimming, rowing, cycling and climbing. "This time I must change not only my home", he wrote to Bruno Walter, “but also my whole way of life. You can’t imagine how difficult this is for me... Now I have to avoid all exertion, keep a constant check on myself, and walk very little.”
Alma, chief witness to this summer of crisis, confirms that the couple had never before spent so sombre a holiday. They were plagued everywhere by "anxiety and grief ". Mahler, however, was never one to let himself be felled by the blows of fate. Once again he would find salvation in his creative work; through the composition of a work in a completely new genre, Das Lied von der Erde, a symphony of six lieder for two solo voices and orchestra on texts from Bethge's Chinese anthology. No composer before Mahler had ever devoted himself exclusively to two forms so apparently incompatible as the lied and the symphony. Thus it is fascinating to see him accomplishing, at this late stage of his career, a synthesis of two seemingly opposing genres, two fundamentally different kinds of music: on the one hand, intimate, chamber music, and on the other, music destined for great numbers of listeners.
The crisis did not last long, four weeks at the most. Having arrived at Toblach on 11 June, Mahler completed the first two songs in July, and then, one after the other, composed the third, fifth, fourth and sixth by l September. As he wrote at the beginning of September before leaving Toblach - again to Bruno Walter: "I’ve been working with enormous intensity... and I believe this will be the most personal thing I’ve ever done.”
During the winter Mahler resumed his activities at the Metropolitan and, as usual, took advantage of tree moments to copy out his new score and finalize the orchestration. But the piece was still without a title. For a long time - at least a year - it was called, provisionally, Die Flöte aus Jade (The Jade Flute), The following winter, on returning to New York after having completed the Ninth Symphony, Mahler scribbled on a sheet of music paper: "The Song of the Earth, taken from the Chinese", followed by the titles he had given to the various movements and, finally, at the bottom ofthe page: “Ninth Symphony in four movements". With this innocent ruse he believed he had outwitted destiny, which had not allowed Beethoven, Schubert or Bruckner to compose more symphonies than the fateful number nine.
Hans Bethge’s little collection comprises some 80 poems, mostly dating from the eighth century, Chinese poetry’s golden age. The charm of the originals is rendered faithfully enough, even if Bethge occasionally added some romantic touches - which, however, quite pleased Mahler. In this volume, pride of place goes to Li-Tai-Po (or Li Bo), who was universally admired in his time for the ability to express with such force yet such delicacy, and with such formal perfection, the widest range of impressions and feelings - with, however, a marked predilection for the pleasures of wine and the joys of friendship. The first, third, fourth and fifth songs of Das Lied von der Erde are based on his texts. Less well known are Tchang-Tsi (or Qian Qi), the author of the second movement, “Der Einsame im Herbst” (The Lonely Man in Autumn), and Mong-Kao-Yen (or Meng Hao-ran) and Wang-Wei, two friends whose poems were set to music in the final "Der Abschied" (The Farewell). Mahler made these two poems, which express the basic "message" of the work, into something entirely his own, not hesitating to add to them a number of lines of his own invention.
It is hardly surprising that the melancholy in the Chinese poems should have evoked such a strong response from Mahler at a time when he was still suffering from the death of his daughter. In this period, when it sometimes seemed to him that life was slipping from his grasp, he was more conscious than ever of nature’s beauty, of man's misery and of the brevity of our stay on this earth. These are the three principal themes of Die chinesische Flöte, and the profound correspondence between them and Mahler's own thought can already be discerned in the letters and poems of his youth, which contain entire phrases echoing the Chinese poets.

1. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrows)
The first, second and last of the four strophes all end in a refrain ("Dark is life, dark is death”), which remains identical but is heard in a different key each time. The third strophe is without refrain but contains the only surge of real lyricism in this song, at the moment in which one of the essential “themes” of the work is announced in the poem: the “sky eternally blue” and the earth blossoming forth each spring, which stand in direct contrast to the brief duration of human lite and to the “rotting baubles” (morschen Tande) of man’s world.
2. Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely Man in Autumn)
An unvarying, unbroken garland of string quavers (eighth notes). above which the winds exchange short motifs derived from the notes A-G-E - the main leitmotif of the entire work - evokes the melancholy of an autumnal landscape: a lake shrouded in mist, grass covered in frost, the flowers withered and an icy wind bending down their stems. Each strophe contains a second, warmer element, which interrupts the garland of quavers; but, as usual, all sorts of asymmetries and irregularities are concealed behind the apparent simplicity of this scheme. Towards the end of the song the soloist refers to the "sun of love": a great melodic outburst seems once and for all to have banished the cold immobility of the rising and falling scales, but this returns with the initial desolation in one last bar. The “sun of love” was only a mirage.
3. Von der Jugend (Of Youth)
In erecting the "Chinese" decor of the three narrative songs that follow, Mahler avails himself of pentatonic motifs and an orchestra dominated by the triangle, bass drum, cymbals, woodwind, and piccolo trills. The image of beautiful young people chatting and writing down verses while drinking tea in the "pavilion of porcelain" is reflected in a pool. Towards the end of the song there is a turn to the minor and the music gives off a hagrance that is not Oriental but distinctly Viennese, with its characteristically sinuous melodic line and rhythm and its graceful hesitations.
4. Von der Schönheit (Of Beauty)
The poem describes an idyllic scene of young women gathering lotus flowers by the river’s edge. A group of handsome young men rides by, bringing a completely new hue to the scene and an acceleration of the tempo. But the riders vanish as quickly as they appeared, and once again the feminine grace of the first strophe invades the scene, with the “loveliest of the maidens” casting a longing glance alter one of the horsemen. The transparent and ineffably poetic coda, with its economy of means, is a model of its kind, a moving and somewhat distanced reflection - lightly nostalgic as well - of that fragile reality, that “illusion” we call beauty.
5. Der Trunkene im Frühling (The Drunkard in Spring)
It was probably not the theme of intoxication that inspired the ascetic Mahler’s choice of this poem by Bethge but rather that of the return of spring, symbolized by the twittering of the oboe, clarinet and piccolo, tenderly evoking the bird, harbinger of spring, who "sings and laughs". The dream is brief, however, and the drinker, now sober again, would have the cup of oblivion refilled. As Theodor Adorno remarked, "despair mingles with the exultation in absolute freedom, in a region bordering on death".
6. Der Abschied (The Farewell)
In length this finale is nearly equal to that of the five other pieces combined, and it is, in all respects, the expressive summit of the work. Each of the three large sections is preceded by an orchestral prelude and a vocal recitative. Before the third recitative, which leads to the final section, the prelude is expanded and takes the form of a long, poignant, quintessentially Mahlerian funeral march. Then the profoundly affecting conclusion, so full of gentleness, of restraint, of quiet faith, offers a positive response to the funereal lamentation. The magnificent lines that conclude the work are by Mahler himself:
Everywliere the dear earth blossoms forth
in spring and grows green again!
Everywhere and forever distant horizons gleam blue:
forever... forever...
Here, at the end of his short life, at a point where his prodigious mastery could now make light of every formal problem and every constraint, Mahler's music attains a new level of economy and contemplative lyricism. The material becomes rarefied as the voices are spaced out and float in the ether, liberated from the laws of gravity and the normal constraints of counterpoint. In this and Mahler’s other late slow movements, it is as though serene acceptance has been illuminated by a light coming from afar. He is at last free from the earthly contingencies that so painfully affected him. His music, more than ever before, opens up to eternity, to the infinite.
Henry-Louis de La Grange