2/12/2011

If we're to believe the story, and it seems generally accepted, Mahler was seriously concerned that people might "go home and blow their brains out" upon hearing Das Lied Von der Erde. Songs of the Earth. Songs that describe the life and gaiety and joy and love of the world, encapsulate the power of a horse and the self absorption of a drunkard and finally bid farewell to its impermanence and fleeting joys.

I've been putting off weighing in on this piece of music for one reason or another, but the overall umbrella of the problem is twofold. First, it's a complicated piece which has been subject to considerable scrutiny from unusually erudite people whose business it is to turn the lens of their erudition on music. I am not one of those people and gave up the notion of being too smart about this from the first. The other problem was fear.

Das Lied von der Erde was huge, and deeply affecting. It consists of six songs, great Chinese poems from important masters of Chinese poetry including Li Bai and Wang Wei (I actually translated a Li Bai poem in college once). The poems were first translated into French, from French to the Hans Heilman German version and thence to the Hans Berthge version. Finally someone not named Hans got their...hands...sorry...anyway, got their hands on the text and that was none other than Gustav Mahler who considerably personalized the poems as you can see here. One of the most important shifts he made is in the last poem, the only song I am going to get to in this post. That's because the songs are all leading up to it. Not to say they aren't important but they are all leading up to Der Abscheid, the farewell. The two most significant things, I think, that Mahler did to this poem was to make it in the first person and turn the last line into a refrain.

I'm nothing like an expert, but Mahler set's this final, massive piece in the first person to...brace yourself for the accumulated genius of my degree in English literature...personalize the poem. Simple enough I suppose, but hearing it sung in the first person somehow drove things to a more personal level.

Now the refrain. Wang Wei has his last line like this:

Endless the white clouds.

Mahler's looks like this:

Ewig...Ewig (endless, endless)

Not to over consider the change, I think that's the difference between Chinese poetry and music.

I really don't know what to say about the mysterious oboe and the occasional, far off whisper of a mandolin that runs through Der Abscheid. Margaret already described how we all sat in stunned silence while this song rolled over us like crashing waves. There are these deep orchestral blasts that punctuate the piece, and they come together in the end with terrible finality. I couldn't think how to get at the effect that had. I consider myself, after all, to be a writer of one kind or another and resent the thought that I might be left dangling like Claudius, with painted words that make a cheap thing of something vast deep. (act 3...scene something or other. it's just before the "to be or not to be" bit) wasn't one I liked.

I'll just say that the first time we listened I heard the C minor plinks of the Mandolin, the movement of this song of farewell, the mysterious oboe, I felt it all as emptiness, remembered the lines from Tristan and Isolde (which Wagner took from somewhere else...Goethe I think) "Oed and Leer ist das Meer" (Waste and empty is the sea). It struck me as terrible, a terrible meditation on the vast emptiness of the world and the unanswered longings we must live with and die by. The poet in Der Abscheid dismounts his horse and offers wine to his departing friend.

Where and why are you going?

You say you are returning to the southern mountains.

Let me go and do not ask me why, says the other,

there are endless white clouds there.

There is Mahler's refrain; Endless, endless.

R reminded me, and played for all of us the musical theme at the end of Mahler's second, the Resurrection Symphony. Sure enough it's there, a very similar rise, a shift to C Major (the relative major to the A Minor key that Lied Von der Erde begins in) and, I think, Mahler's essential, if meloncholic, certainty in the redemption of time. I can't help but wonder if it is listeners like me that Mahler was worried about walking away from Das Lied von der Erde really bummed out, listeners astute enough to get the pentatonic meanders and orchestral blasts and bold venturing into the "endless, endless" world of horizons but too dumb to see his overall allegiance in the process.

Because I'm situated here in the 21st century, what came to mind was that last scene from the movie SE7EN, you know the one. "Ernest Hemmingway once said 'the world is a fine place and worth fighting for' well I believe in that last part."