Luogo e data di registrazione		Philharmonie, Berlin (Germania): - 7-10 dicembre 1973 & 14 ottobre 1974 (Das Lied von der Erde) - maggio 1974 (Rückert-Lieder)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Production		Hans Hirsch
	Recording Supervision		Cord Garben (Das Lied von der Erde), Hans Weber (Rückert-Lieder)
	Recording Engineer		Günter Hermanns
	Prima Edizione LP		Deutsche Grammophon | 2707 082 | (2 LP's) | durata 33' 51" - 51' 15" | (p) 1975 | Analogico
	Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon "Galleria" | 419 058-2 | (1 CD) | durata 66' 00" | (c) 1987 | ADD | (Das Lied von der Erde)
	Note		Cover by Holger Matthies, Hamburg

Mahler completed “Das Lied von der Erde" in Toblach, a village in the Southern Tyrol, in September 1908. He was 48, and for over a year he had attempted to fashion in music a response to the events of the summer of 1907. That summer Mahler had been forced to resign the directorship of the Vienna Opera. His young daughter, Putzi, had died of combined scarlet fever and diphtheria. And on a fateful afternoon a local country doctor had diagnosed, quite unpredictably (Mahler asked to be examined as a joke), the heart condition which was to change Mahler’s life and, in 1911, tragically end it. The spectre of death transformed Mahler’s world as it had done the worlds of Schubert and the English poet, John Keats, before him. His sense of earthly beauty was newly enhanced (the very fragrance of the Bohemian soil, he once remarked, was now more than ever an abiding joy) whilst inwardly he was totally disorientated. In a letter to Bruno Walter he described the loss of the inner harmony he had struggled so long to achieve. “I stand,” he wrote “vis-à-vis de rien.” No wonder that “Das Lied von der Erde”, created out of despair yet created at a time when Mahler‘s perceptive and creative faculties were newly tuned, proves to be one of the richest and most ambivalently beautiful of all the great death-haunted works of European art. In a sense, Mahler had lived with this death-in-life from his earliest years. There is a famous letter written by Mahler to his friend Josef Steiner in 1879 in which he glories in the beauty of the earth (in words which predict the lines he was to add to the end of the “Abschied” of “Das Lied von der Erde”. The lines are often quoted; but the letter also tells sadness. Thinking of his already dead brothers and sisters Mahler wrote: “Now the pale figures of my life pass before me like shadows of a long-lost happiness, and the song of longing sounds again in my ears.” Clearly at 19 Mahler was already partially prepared to write the great “song of longing” which was also to be his Song of the Earth, and his Requiem. Nonetheless, the revelation of the heart condition came as a hammer blow; this was no longer an image of death but the thing itself. For a time nothing served, neither the affirmative faith Mahler had won through to in the Eighth Symphony nor, even, the existential grimness he had confronted in the Sixth. Fortunately, though, the events of the summer of 1907 were not wholly grim. Later that year, now in Schluderbach, Mahler recalled a volume of newly translated poems from the T'ang Dynasty of China which an old friend, Theobald Pollak, had given him. The world of Chinese art with its crafted fineness, its delicate sense of the transcience of things, its pessimism tinged with gaiety and nostalgia (“a gaiety transfiguring all that dread” as W.B. Yeats put it in his great ‘Chinese’ poem “Lapis Lazuli”) chimed with Mahler’s mood. Here were the images he so clearly needed. And given the images, Mahler had the musical language with which to clothe them. For the music of “Das Lied von der Erde” emerges as a wonderful distillation of all that has gone before: rich and rare, vibrant, touched with irony yet deeply poignant. Not a note is wasted. With Mahler, as with Michelangelo and William Blake, men of comparable vision and skill, line is the crucial thing, the line from which everything evolves: motivic, germinal, finely coloured. There are few works of music which are as sinewy and evanescently beautiful as this; few symphonies which are organically as whole. The opening movement frames the work’s tragic dilemma: a rich, vibrant hedonism set against the waste of life and the pallor of death. Just as Keats in his Nightingale Ode calls for “a beaker full of the warm South” but goes on to reflect on an earth “Where youth grows pale, and spectrethin, and dies”, so Mahler and his poet celebrate the glinting goblet (the impulsive orchestral opening which harbours, in the first violin entry, the pentatonic scale which pervades the entire score) but, all too quickly, rein in their joy (“Doch trinkt noch nicht...” the vocal line chromatic and decoratively expressive). Images of desolation follow; and, briefly, an image of spring, full of yearning and prefaced by characteristically Mahlerian nature sounds. But there can be no escape, as there is with Keats, into these sounds of nature. Here there is only the ‘rotten trash’ of existence and the expressionist nightmare of an ape dancing on the gravestones. “Now you may drink!” the poet exclaims as the vision recedes, and the refrain with which Mahler punctuates the entire movement returns: “Dunkel ist das Leben, istder Tod”. First heard in G minor, and then in Aflat minor, it is now heard a step higher-more poignant and inconsolable than ever-in the tonic key of A minor. The second movement, alyric of loneliness and desolation worthy of Goethe’s Harper,evokes a landscape of autumn mists and hoar frosts. The music is coloured in neutral tones - silvers and greys - led by a haunting, plaintive oboe solo, and a voice part grieving and ‘instrumentally' pure. After two lines a richer theme intrudes on the horns, but the singer is inconsolable. Lonely minor seconds help spell out the mood of weariness in the phrase “Mein Herz ist müde”. Late rthere are two painfully hopeful interludes. At “Ich komm zu dir” a resting place is glimpsed and the voice sweeps down, caressively but abortively, in D major. Then, at the phrase "Sonne der Liebe", the music sweeps with blind longing into E flat major. But the hope is delusive for the poet’s question does not seek an answer but, rather, states a bitter reality. The words “mild aufzutrocknen” (set to the same phrase as “Mein Herz ist müde") and a grey, vanishing coda confirm the lonely mood. Three interludes follow, reminiscent of the central movements of the earlier symphonies. Musically and poetically the first of these is as precious as it is brief. After preliminaries in Bflat, Mahler launches us with a gay flick of trumpet tone into G major (bright and sweet, the tonic key of the Fourth Symphony) as friends, elegantly clad, talk, and drink tea and write their verses. But now the poet glimpses the scene, inverted, reflected in the waters of the lake, and the music darkens. It is a transforming moment, for though the gaiety returns it is modified by the knowledge, till now tacitly ignored, that it is art alone which enables so much beauty and enchanted unconcern to remain a living reality. "Of Beauty", the mood by turns delicate and aggressively heroic, needs little comment; though notice the beautiful string writing, reminiscent at times of Verdi’s late manner. Nor does the third interlude, “The Drunken Man in Spring”, a heady, dancing piece that returns to the theme of an escape through drink. Two things are memorable, though. First, the magical passage for voice, solo violin and flute (the flute echoing the ‘Paradise' theme from the Fourth Symphony) as the drunkard wakes to the sound of birdsong. Then the rich plunge of tone as spring is truly greeted and the profoundly beautiful line (added to the poem by Mahler) “Aus tiefstem Schauen lauscht ich auf”: the drunken man (the poem’s title was also changed by Mahler) capable of that most Mahlerian thing, human wonder. This superbly rubicund movement, A major to the first movement's A minor, is an admirable foil to the great “Abschied” which follows. For this long, valedictory movement Mahler joined together two poems (the second originally dedicated to the poet of the first). The poet awaits his friend at dusk. He reflects on the beauty of nature and anticipates the pleasure of his friend’s company at such a moment. But when his friend arrives it is to bid an everlasting farewell. Mahler orders all this, symphonically and poetically, with an unerring skill. Tam-tam and ominous woodwind utterances set the scene. Three verses, the first and third prefaced by recitative, follow (in C major/minor; A minor; and B flat major, the Key of “life-intoxicated” longing). The introductory material then returns, with a linking funeral elegy, and the second poem is set as an expressive, terse and, finally, expansively beautiful recapitulation of the music of the first poem. The staging posts of the first poem are clearly followed. In the second a recitative announces the arrival of the friend. At “Er sprach...” there begins the re-working of the lyric material of verse one of the “Abschied” (the section ending now with a deeply expressive vocal appogiatura on the phrase ‘lonely heart’). At “Ich wandle” the second section of the “Abschied” is recalled, tersely in a mere thirty bars, before the ecstatic switch into C major and the beautiful concluding section, set to Mahler’s own words (“Die liebe Erde...”). Here the mood of longing spreads higher and wider as the textures become more and more ethereal. Yet there is no sense of ascetic withdrawal from the world. The first intimation of immortality (the first of the seven softly-called cries of “ewig”) is heard against a sensuous shimmer of mandolins. Never was a homecoming more sweetly, more mysteriously or more tentatively wrought. The Key is C major, but the tethering note, the tonic C, is rarely present. At the end the violins trace a pianissimo E, the voice dips from E to D, flutes and oboes breath a sustained and unresolved A. Enigmatically the music dies out of life without denying life’s beauty; dies into eternity yet mysteriously hovers on. The closing lines of Keats' Nightingale Ode come to mind. “Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?” Mahler greatly admired the craft and sensibility of the poet Rückert, and his poems drew from Mahler some of his most beautiful writing for voice and orchestra. The songs, written at various times between 1901 and 1904, form no pattern, “Blicke mir nicht” and “Liebst du um Schönheit”, the latter written from Alma Mahler, are domestic pieces, Straussian in feel. “Um Mitternacht”, scored for wind, timpani and harp, is a noble affirmation of faith, and “Ich bin der Welt” a dying from the world into love and the harmony of song, set to one of those inimitable Mahlerian melodies (used again in the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony and, significantly, in the phrase “Die Sonne scheidet” at the beginning of the last movement of “Das Lied von der Erde”).But perhaps loveliest of all is the song of love and linden blossoms, “Ich atmet’”, a murmuringly sensuous song, ‘scored' for voice, oboe, horn, flute and strings. The Rückert Songs, as Bruno Walter once observed, are a perfect example of that “exquisite dynamic relation between voice and orchestra” which Mahler understood so well. As such they point forward to the later, and more sustained, miracle of “Das Lied von der Erde”. © 1975 Richard Osborne