Luogo e data di registrazione		Alte Oper, Frankfurt (Germania) - 24/25 marzo 1988
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Direction		Yoshiharu Kawaguchi (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Richard Hauck (Hessischer Rndfunk)
	Recording Engineer		Peter Willemoës (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Detlev Kittler (Hessischer Rundfunk)
	Mixing Engineer		Gen'ichi Kitami (DENON / Nippon Columbia)
	Technology		Yukio Takahashi (DENON / Nippon Columbia)
	Editing		Toshiyasu Shiozawa (DENON / Nippon Columbia)
	Mastering		Hiroyuki Hosaka (DENON / Nippon Columbia)
	Edizione CD		Denon | CO-72605 | (1 CD) | durata 61' 20" | (p) 1988.9 | DDD
	Note		Special Thanks to: Brüel & Kjær. Co-production with Hessischer Rundfunk.

The year 1907, which began with the first performance in Vienna of the Sixth Symphony, marked a major turning point in Mahler’s life. The 47-year-old composer was struck by three calamities in the course of the year: the sudden death of his eldest daughter Maria Anna, the diagnosis of a heart disease, and his retirement from the post of director of the Vienna Court Opera. Although at the height of his powers, the proximity of death brought Mahler to the realization that he was embarking, albeit prematurely, upon the final stage of his life. Immediately after losing his beloved daughter on July 12, Mahler learnt that he was suffering from heart disease, and left Maiernigg five days later. For several years he had spent his summer vacations immersed in composition, but his vacation this year thus came to a tragic end. However, the remaining period of around one month spent at Tirol (Alt-Schluderbach) was to give rise to a major work. According to the recollections of his wife, Alma, Mahler was strongly impressed by a poetry collection which had been sent him, and immediately began making sketches for a song cycle based on it. This collection of poems, which had been published that year, was “Die Chinesische Flöte” (The Chinese Flute) by Hans Bethge (1876- 1946), and the song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde" based on poems from this collection was completed the following year. “Die Chinesische Flöte” was an anthology of classical Chinese poetry based on existing translations into French, English, and German, although Bethge’s lack of proficiency in the Chinese language meant that the translations were by no means faithful to the originals. This was a time when considerable interest was being shown in the Far East, and this small volume, with its East Asian-style binding, proved a great success. Having retired from his post in Vienna, Mahler completed his first season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Returning to Europe, he composed “Das Lied von der Erde” in a single burst of creative activity in the summer of 1908 (the short scores of the individual movements are marked with dates from July to September 1) in the hut (Häuschen) which he had had specially built for composing in the new location where he was to spend his summers at Toblach (now the Italian town of Dobbiaco). After visiting Prague for the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Mahler returned to Toblach, and had the orchestration of “Das Lied von der Erde” completed by the autumn. There are unfortunately few letters or materials referring to the circumstances of the work’s composition. Mahler continued to add details to the work, but was not himself to witness its first performance, which was given under his devoted pupil Bruno Walter on 20 November 1911 in Munich, six months after Mahler’s death. The full score was published the following year. Following on from the previous Eighth Symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde” is a symphony employing vocal resources throughout. With its six songs based on seven poems by different poets, the external aspect of the work is highly unconventional. The title might be interpreted as referring either to a song cycle labelled as a symphony or a symphony labelled as a song. It was surely not just for superstitious reasons that Mahler felt hesitant about naming this work his Ninth Symphony, but rather because of the difficulty of categorizing the work in terms of conventional classifications. The two genres in which Mahler worked, that of the symphony into which not only are songs and song melodies introduced into the music but the symphony itself is a kind of vast song, and that of songs which expand to attain the scale of small symphonies: these two genres are united here in the most personal manner in Mahler’s work. It is the scale and form of the two outer movements with their long interludes and especially the motivic unity which runs throughout the work which give “Das Lied von der Erde” the character of a symphony. The work as a whole, with its two large scale outer movements interspersed by four comparatively brief central movements (a feature shared with the Second, Third and Seventh symphonies), is given a sense of unity by the pentatonic figure based on the pitches A-G-E-C initially presented by the nrst violins in the fifth bar which reappears one hour later as the concluding harmony of the work. The first movement, "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde", a fusion of irregular strophic form with sonata form, is based in a minor, the key which Mahler employed to evoke an atmosphere of tragedy. As suggested by the use of instruments such as glockenspiel and triangle, the enormous orchestra amplifies an ironic vocal solo by a piercing, metallic tonal quality. The f minor section which conjures up images of the eternal nature of the cosmos and the earth, serves as both a middle section and a development section with a contrasting sense of tranquillity and wistfulness: it suggests a sense of hope absent from the despairful text, and completes the basic propositions of life and death. The central four movements each follow up in their own individual manner the problems presented by the first movement on the levels of text and form, in the manner of symbolic reflections on the basic propositions of life and death, and the developmental shaping of strophic song form. We also hear variational development of the basic A-G-E-C figure. The second movement, "Der Einsame im Herbst", is a slow movement in the subdominant key of d minor. It is structured in complex strophic form, and opinions are divided as to the number of strophes of which it consists. Two central themes, one a woodwind monologue and the other based on a descending scale followed by its inversion sung by the soloist, are repeatedly developed to form a contrast with the espressivo motifs played by horns and celli. The sense of intolerable solitude builds up from a longing for the eternal rest provided by death to aspiration towards the "sun of love". As if as a premonition of the first half of the last movement, the movement as a whole is dominated by the descending motion representing death. The following two movements, which function as scherzi, are both equipped with Nietzschean titles and are in ternary form. The third movement, "Von der Jugend", in B-flat major is the shortest piece within the work. The superficially naive text (the original Chinese poem is not known), like an exotic miniature, appears deeply ironical due to the precise and cheerful orchestration. The fourth movement, "Von der Schönheit", is the setting of a famous poem by Li-Po. It is in ternary form, but one could never predict the ferocity of the orchestral writing in the central section from the elegance of the opening. The postlude, with its cloying nostalgia, gives an insight into the basic spirit of this work, described by Adorno as being of an eternally vanished past, a past by no means happy but which has become so through being the object of nostalgia occasioned by the realization that it is never to return. The young girls’ glances extend to the other movements too. It is interesting to note that the girls in Li-Po’s original poem are farming girls engaged in picking lotus fruits. In the translation “fruits” has been mistranslated as “blossoms”, in consequence of which the social perspective of the poem - the futile longing of the privileged classes for the life of the libertine - is totally transformed into a pastoral landscape. The fifth movement, "Der Trunkene im Frühling", is similarly rooted on the pitch of A and is closely connected with the first movement in the sense that it depicts the futility of human existence while treating the subject of wine and song. On the other hand, it corresponds to the second movement in the sense that its title refers to a single symbolically conceived human being, thus suggesting the symmetrical layout of the movements of the work as a whole. The poem, typical of Li-Po and based on a story contained in the Zhuang Zǐ in which Zhuang Zǐ dreams he is a butterfly and upon awakening wonders if he is a butterfly imagining he is Zhuang Zǐ, is completely reinterpreted in a European manner, and within the commotion of spring one notices the appearance of a phrase quoted from the fourth movement of the Seventh Symphony. The sixth and final movement, "Der Abschied", is a setting of two poems by Mong-Kao-Jen and Wang Wei. It is the longest movement, lasting around half the total duration of the work. It begins on a low C accompanied by the ominous peals ofa tamtam. as if totally to negate the previous music which had commenced in a minor and ended in A major. The melody, harmony, and rhythm seem to be generated once again from out of nothingness, from a mood indicated by the heading "Schwer" (heavy). The tone is set by the rhythm of a funeral march, and the process whereby this regular, fateful, inescapable musical atmosphere transforms into a free, light, and vibrant tone, in other words the transformation from the c minor of death into the C major of rebirth and purification is the drama which runs throughout the music. This gigantic movement lasting around thirty minutes consists of two sections corresponding to the two poems. The first half of the movement, the setting of the poem by Meng-Kao-Jen, consists of a prelude, the first solo vocal section beginning with Recitative 1, the first accessary subject section in F major beginning with an oboe solo accompanied by clarinets and harp, Recitative 2, and the second accessary theme in B flat major beginning with the mysterious tones of the mandolin, and ends with an epilogue based on the first accessary subject after rising to a peak and then falling back. Bethge`s eighteen lines of poetry are increased by Mahler to twenty-five, and the tense emotional atmosphere accompanied by simple natural depiction increases in stature to possess a far more personal but at the same time universal significance in consequence of Mahler’s adaptation of the text and the manner of its musical treatment. The latter half of the movement begins with varied recapitulation and development of the opening section. New motifs are constantly introduced, to be abruptly cut off, after which the music proliferates in enigmatic fashion, including a passage suggesting a funeral procession trailing along to the strains of folk music. This section, with its function of providing an interlude between the two poems, concludes with an uncouth barrage of C offering a premonition of the catastrophe to be presented in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. The alto enters once again with Recitative 3. The flute obbligato disappears to be replaced by the tamtam, the tolling of the "funeral bell". The poem assumes the third person singular form and the past tense, as a result of which the singer increasingly seems to assume a role similar to that of the evangelist in the Passions. The poem returns to the first person singular with the words "Du, mein Freund" ("You, my friend"), but rather than feeling a sense of verbal confusion within the dramatis personae, we sense ourselves in a multi-levelled nondualistic realm in which barriers between subject and object and distinctions of time have melted away. After an abbreviated quotation of the first accessory theme, the second accessory theme finally comes to the key of C major, in which the hero of the poem, of the music, and Mahler trust himself with the regeneration of spring, to the eternal regeneration which succeeds death. The circle of “Das Lied von der Erde” is not really a closed one. Even after the last sound of the music has faded away into nothingness, the phrase "ewig, ewig" ("for ever, for ever") endlessly repeated by the singer continues to ring without let within our souls, like the sighs of the person who strives knowing his ventures are in vain, as if in an attempt to come to terms with death, as if out of dread of finality. For us living towards the end of the twentieth century, overtaken by the bustle of everyday life, deprived of our true spiritual homelands, and our world under the constant threat of the nuclear winter, this song of regeneration strikes a most immediate and responsive chord. Yasuhiko Mori Translation: Robin Thompson All but some parts of this recording, where the output of assistant microphones were mixed in a digital time delay alignment, was made using just two Brüel & Kjær 4006 microphones. With the assistant microphones, Brüel & Kjær 4011 directional microphones are used for the first time in the world.