Das Trinklied von der Erde?

7[, O!iZJer Km1S5ell, 12.l'i.2002 (op. 50)

'Every parting gives a foretaste of death.'
Schopenhauer
Before moving on to what might be termed the 'Chinese connec-
tion', in an effort to define how, and in what ways, it is meaningful
to attribute to an authentic Chinese influence certain features of
Das Lied FOil der Erde - Mahler's symphony for tenor, alto and
orchestra, composed in 1908 - I should like to spend a fe\v min-
utes on his choice of poems from Hans Bethge's Chinesische Flote
( T11e Chinese Fl11te). I believe that serious consideration of what
prompted Mahler's choice can lead to a fuller understanding of the
overall form of Das Lied and above all, perhaps, to bring final clari-
fication to a narrative that we find Mahler to have pursued with
exemplary rigour, virtually from first note to last.
For heaven knows hmv many years, discussion of the work's
form was clouded by endless attempts to describe the work in
terms associated with the 'classical' symphony: i.e., first movement,
slow movement, scherzo, finale. This was clearly an absurdity from
the start, and especially vvhen trying to give a meaningful account
of'Der Abschied', of both its form and its formal function. None
the less even today one still comes across approaches to the vvork
that regard 'Der Einsame' as a kind of slmv movement and the suc-
ceeding movements ('Von der Jugend', 'Von der Schonheit', 'Der
Trunkene im Friihling') collectively representing a 'scherzo'. As for
Lecture given at a contCrenct" on Dus Lied 1'011 dcr Erdc at The Hague. May 2002. and
published originally in Robert Becque and Eveline Nikkds (eds.), Die liehc Erdc all-
Procccdill,'(.S 40as Lied von der EnJe Symposi11111, Dfll 2002.
I

!HS TRINKLIED VO!'\ DER ERDE?
HANS
CHINEfiJCHE
FLOTE
LEIPZIG-1M JNJELVERLAG
MDCCCCXIX
The title page of Hans 's Die chincsische Fltitc
457
SCRUT!t\"Y
'Der Abschied', well, that came last - which was about all that
could be said about it from a perspective rooted in fallacy.
It was when thinking about what to say about Das Lied in a pre-
concert talk I gave at the great Mahler Feest in Amsterdam in I995
that for me a glimmer of light began to dawn. One aspect of it was
the speculation that, had Mahler lived to perform the work himself
and see it through the press for publication, it was more than pos-
sible - a belief I still hold - that he \vould have followed his own
symphonic precedents in dividing the work into Part I and Part II,
the first comprising the first five movements, the second, 'Der
Abschied'. To spell this out to myself I put together this simple
diagram:
PART I PART II
I 2
3 4 5
6
I
I CODA
I
I
a A c c
I
a/C I
a a/C
If nothing else this crude little 'map' confirmed my guess that it
made sense to think that the first five movements comprised one
self-contained part which, having run its course, could the more
easily embark on another, no less self-contained unit. (To the speci-
fic 'otherness' of Part II I shall certainly return.)
But let me first finish off my comments on Part 1. My diagram
indicates that tor me the middle three movements of Part I are con-
tained within a 'frame', a frame that is then itself framed by the
overarching trame of the whole work, a trajectory that is initiated
by the first movement, the first 'Trinklied', 'Das Trinklied vom
Jammer der Erde', the title of which Mahler at one time consid-
ered using as a title for the entire work, and concludes only when
the final, long sustained chord of'Der Abschied' has been reached.
The vvork's similarly overarching tonal scheme precisely reflects
the dichotomy of its form. The five movements of Part I are built
T
,!f-,
I
al
DAS TRINKLIED VON DER ERDE' 459
around A: the first, in A minor, the key often associated with
Mahler's darkest and bleakest thoughts and feelings, while the fifi:h -
seemingly - affirms A major. But as I shall try to make clear. this is
a desperate A major that if anything is even more dismaying, more
undoing, than the tonic minor.
Hmvever, if A is unequivocally the tonic of Part I, it is C, \Vith
the minor very much in the lead until the fmal culmination of'Der
Abschied' in the major, that is the tonic around which Part n, in all
its complexity, is constructed. Thus it is that in terms of its tonal
organization Das Lied is bitonal, though not quite in the sense that
we customarily use that term. On the other hand, it is one of the
many miracles in which this symphony abounds that the famous
last chord with which 'Der Abschied' concludes combines both
tonal centres. What vve hear is what the young Benjamin Britten
unforgettably described in a letter written in June I937 He had
been listening to the Bruno Walter recording, and was over-
\Vhelmed by the \vork's coda ('Ewig ... ewig!' ('Eternally ...
eternally')). 'I cannot understand it,' he \Vrites, 'it passes over me like
a tidal wave - and that matters not a jot either, because it goes 011 for
el'er, eue11 !fit is 1/CFcr again- that_{i11al chord is pri11ted 011 the
atmosphere.' [My italics.]
What of course haunted Britten was that final chord of 'Der
Abschied' in which the \vork's double tonics are vertically conflated
to form an added sixth, a chord incidentally that \Vas ahvays to
remain tor Britten one of exceptional significance; and it is on that
chord that 'Der Abschied' blissfully and wellnigh inaudibly expires
('Ewig ... ewig!'), with the very inspiration, so to say, on its lips that
gave energetic birth to the \vork in its first bars (see Ex. I). For me
there is no more brilliant and arresting instance of Mahler's long-
term powers of organization of his materials than the horizontal
articulation of the work's basic motive which opens the first move-
ment and the vertical conflation of those very same pitches which
was to provide him at its end \Vith the perfect sonorous equivalent
of eternity. I hope my two music examples claril) what I've been
saymg:
SCRUTINY
Ex. 1 'Der Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde'
Allegro pesante


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0) ff


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[I
Ex. 2 'Der Abschied'
G- I' h I b d anz 1c es er en
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On this occasion, I am particularly aiLxious to draw your atten-
tion to a fact, perhaps still little appreciated, of the extraordinarily
close scrutiny to which Mahler subjected his texts. The rigour and
intensity of imagination he brought to bear are immediately
apparent the moment \ve begin to understand hmv fundamental to
the work is the complex organization of its poetic and symbolic
imagery. It is my belief that it is precisely in this sphere that we
come to comprehend the most subtle and most profound thinking
that informs and shapes Das Lied and, above all, guides its narrative.
Recognition of Mahler's introduction of images of spring in
both the first and fifth movements as clear and calculated anticipa-
DAS TRINKLIED DER ERDE'
tions of the renewal of the earth that 'Der Abschied' finally cele-
brates, has now become part of even the most modest of commen-
taries on the work. All I would wish to add here, and I address not
so much passive audiences or students as pelj(mners - those who
bear the responsibility of re-creating in the concert hall what we
must assume Mahler wanted to be heard - is the crucial impor-
tance of ensuring that those images are given the emphasis and
articulation, from the singers, from the orchestra, that guarantee
their resonating on in our memory, so that when they confront us
again in their final guise, 'Die Iiebe Erde alli.iberall bli.iht auf im
Lenz .. .' ('The dear Earth everywhere blossoms in spring'), we
come to realize that the symphony has at last reached its goal, the
goal that \Vas targeted \vay back in the two drinking songs that
frame Part 1 (see my diagram above). Hmv fervently I long from
time to time for singers in Das Lied to take as much trouble with
their words as Mahler did in choosing- and sometimes \CVTiting! -
them .
It must be of quite special significance that the image of spring
is crucially released in both of the drinking songs, the first and fifth
in the cycle of movements. Spring, in fact, has no place in the inter-
vening songs: we have autumn in 'Der Einsame .. .' (No. 2) and
what must surely be regarded as high summer in 'Von der
Schonheit' (No.4). However, what is no less important to recog-
nize is the differences that characterize Mahler's use of his symbolic
springtime imagery. While in the first drinking song spring is
installed - and remains - as a symbol of possible hope amid the
song's pessimism, in the fifth, which concludes Part I, a comparable
imagery is released only to be violently rejected, wholesale. The
protagonist finds his only means of warding off reality- intimations
of mortality? - is to resort to the bottle. 'Was geht mich denn der
Fri.ihling an!?' ('For what does spring matter to me?'), he howls.
'Lasst mich betrunken sein!' ('Let me be drunk!') In short, we're
back to drinking again; and that this fifth movement culminates in
a seemingly exuberant A maior makes the pain of it the more
intense. We are witnessing a moment of disconcerting self-delusion
and self-destruction.
Thus ends Part I, and if we are allowed a real pause here before
SCRUTINY
embarking on Part II - something I believe Mahler himself would
have welcomed (introduced, even) - then it becomes impossible to
avoid acknowledging the unique importance that the act of drink-
ing has accumulated in Part I; as we shall see, 'Der Abschied' will
i d e n t i ~ r an act of 'intoxication' to which, guilt-free, we may all
aspire. (Drinking, I know, is a feature also of 'Von der Jugend', but
there it is doubtless Chinese tea that the poet and composer had in
mind.)
When 'Der Abschied'- Part II - opens, we find ourselves some
place else. (Hence the importance of my suggested pause.) The
stroke of the tam-tam alone, together with the onset of the new
tonal centre on C, establishes that we are no longer where we were.
The gong may also assert what we may tlnally come to recognize
as the genuine 'Chinese' dimension of Das Lied, a sense, that is, of
an 'otherness' that was essential to Mahler's purpose, and no\vhere
more so than in 'Der Abschied', a point to \vhich I shall return. But
what is certain is that we are no longer in a familiar world of love,
Nature, human beauty, rage, despair, of recourse in sorrow to
intoxication: the gong stroke cleanses the slate and propels us on a
new JOUrney.
Mahler, as I have so often remarked, was an inveterate, ceaseless
traveller through numberless varieties of landscapes and human
experience, through time, through musical history itself. So it came
as no great surprise to me, years ago, when I realized that it \vas his
knowledge ofBach's Passions and cantatas that helps us to compre-
hend the peculiar form of'Der Abschied', the sixth and final move-
ment of Mahler's symphony. With that knowledge in mind we can,
I suggest, begin to understand that it is in fact an innovatory solo
cantata that brings the \Vork to its conclusion, a cantata, if you like,
which '\Ve might justifiably regard as Mahler's own Passion, his soli-
tary exercise (if that colourless word may be forgiven) in this form.
In this context, the recitatives, three of them, so astonishing in
their impact, so totally unheralded, speak for themselves. Each, be
it noted, defines a different stage in the protagonist's - the soloist's -
journey. I use that \vord advisedly because it is now, with the onset
of'Der Abschied', that we realize that, as distinct from Part I, sealed
off as that is by its tonal scheme and the framing function of the
DAS TRINKLIED VON DfR fRDE?
two Tri11klieder, a journey is what we ourselves are to undertake,
along \Vith the protagonist. And the vehicle for that journey will be
the great funeral march in C minor, which begins to assemble itself
in fragn1entary form in the brief orchestral prelude to 'Der
Abschied' which precedes the first recitative.
There is much that might be said about the recitatives alone.
However, I must content myself \Vith remarking briefly on how
Mahler chooses to compose them, tor example that in the first two
the singer-narrator is accompanied by an elaborate obbligato for
the flute, improvisatory in character (though not in notation) and
thereby reflecting in its deliberate irregularity the irregular sound,
rhythms and patterns of Nature. This first recitative, indeed, marvel-
lously depicts the \Vorld at sunset and prepares us for the sight of
the rising moon and a \vorld asleep. By the time we reach the sec-
ond recitative the narrator, still accompanied by the flute, has been
transformed into the protagonist whose journey we are about to
share. Responses to and descriptions of Nature give \vay to excla-
mations of an altogether pro founder identity '\Vith the Earth. In the
'aria' that succeeds this recitative its vocal climax is reached to
words that summon up an image of spiritual intoxication generated
by the earth's capacity ever to renev,; itself: '0 Schonheit! o ewigen
Liebens, Lebens trunk'ne Welt!' ('0 beauty! 0 eternal-love-and-
life-intoxicated \Vorld!') Now it is the \vorld that is the source of
intoxication.
It is no accident that the liberating ecstasy of this passage clearly
anticipates the character of the coda which brings the movement
to a close. (Or, rather, it doesn't, because as the youthful Britten
perceived in 1937 the final moment, that final chord of the added
sixth, is 'printed on the atmosphere', 'goes on tor ever'.) But, as we
shall see, the calculated recall at this critical point of imagery cen-
tral to the concept of Das Lied takes on additional significance,
especially in the light of the path that the narrative is just about to
pursue. (To the ultimate act of drinking I shall return below.)
I have already touched on the narrative concept that underpins
Das Lied and suggested that with the onset of'Der Abschied' \Ve
tlnd ourselves not only somewhere else (both sonically and in loca-
tion) but going somev,;here else. It is tor that last reason, I believe,
SCRUTINY
that after the second recitative (and ensuing 'aria') Mahler inter-
polates a funeral march in C minor for the orchestra alone, in which
all the fragmentary 'march' elements we have been aware of from
the start of the movement are developed, cohere, into an impas-
sioned, extended lament. This is not, hmvever, a stationary moment
of ritual but on the contrary an unequivocal rite 4 passage. When
we arrive- accompanied by climactic ~ f o r z a ~ ~ d o strokes on the tam-
tam, the very sonority that has initiated the movement pia11issimo in
its first bars - \Ve have indubitably passed over, passed to the other
side. (Mahler himself in his short score designates the strokes on the
tam-tam that mark the beginning of the funeral march, 'Grab-
gelaiite' (funeral bells).)
I am reminded here inevitably of the narrative sequence we
encounter in Mahler's Second Symphony, \Vhich opens with a
huge funeral march, again in C minor, the Todter!feier. For me, as I
have argued else\vhere, this represents not so much a concluding
ceremony of death as a continuation of the narrative of the pro-
tagonist whom we have already got to know in the First
Symphony. According to the composer himself, the finale of the
First should not be 'read' as evidence of his protagonist's triumph
over adversity but in fact also embodies his defeat and eventual
death. 'The victory is won only with the death of my struggling
Titan,' Mahler remarked to Natalie Bauer-Lechner in Berlin in
r890. It is my vie\v that the funeral march in the Second does not
represent so much a finite burial as the initiating stage in the self-
same protagonist's journey through the rest of the symphony until
Resurrection is attained. In short, there is a continuously evolving
narrative from the start of the First Symphony, on through death
and into the afterlife, until the culminating end of the Second. The
latter symphony's Todter!feier, I believe, different though it is in style
and character, can be regarded as anticipating the comparable jour-
neying function played by the funeral march of 'Der Abschied',
which transports us from life to death's door: we have died, and
when "\Ve get there it is Death who receives us.
But what in fact is the clear evidence for believing that in Das
Lied too, in its finale, at its most critical point, we have made the
crossing to the other side? I believe this rests with a feature of the
DAS TRINKllED VOK DER ERDE?
third and last recitative, which, again to my mind, has received
insufficient scrutiny and assessment from scholars and performers.
I refer first to the conspicuous absence of the flute obbligato that
has previously characterized the first and second recitatives. I com-
mented, it is true, on this absence in my earlier work on Das Lied,*
noting that now, in recitative three, it is none other than a distantly
tolling obbligato, this time for the tam-tam- the very sonority sym-
bolic of death' - that accompanies the voice. But what I failed to
do was to draw the obligatory conclusion that the abandonment of
the flute had to be so. There was no longer any possibility for the
protagonist to overhear the sounds of Nature or discern their irreg-
ularities; he is no\v somewhere quite else, in that silent no-man's-
land, awaiting - or awaiting to confront - his final destiny. He is
beyond life. The silencing of the flute, and the strokes of the tam-
tam, tell us that. Furthermore, the momentum of the orchestral
lament carries over into the contour and rhythm of the recitative's
opening phrase, 'Er stieg vom Pferd .. .'('He alighted from his horse
.. .'). (After all, it is only logical that he should dismount to the
music by which he has arrived.) There is also a purely practical
consideration that I am certain Mahler would have had in mind at
this critical moment in the narrative, to be as little distracted as was
musically possible from the voice and - above all - the words.
It is not my purpose on this occasion to traverse ground that has
been pretty thoroughly explored and commented on. I am think-
ing here of the seeming confusion of identity that Mahler, no
doubt inadvertently - it would surely have been cleared up if he
had lived to conduct a performance - brought on himself by
necessarily substituting the third person ('Er'/'He') for Bethge's
personal pronoun 'Ich'/'1'. In so doing, however, he created an
ambiguity that persists to this day. I \Vrote about this at not incon-
siderable length in Songs and Symphonies ~ f L!fe and Death (pp.
424-32), and since then Stephen Hefting has returned to the topic
in his monograph on Das Lied, suggesting that the 'musical persona
[my "protagonist"] and the archetypal figure of Death have become
one, inseparably fused, no longer adversaries'. Hefling puts this
* D,\1SSLD, p . ..j.O I.
SCRUTINY
very convincingly, though I think it was the late Christopher
Palmer who was the first to suggest that it is 'symbolically,
[Mahler's] old enemy, death, vvho arrives on horseback' and hands
the waiting friend the drink, the draught, the elixir - call it what
you will - that will enable him to experience, to become part of,
the bliss that attends man's recognition of the life that death in fact
bestows: our 'immortality' is embodied in the process by \vhich the
earth perpetually renews itself, and thereby its inhabitants. Small
wonder that it \Vas precisely here, for the coda, the work's denoue-
ment, no less, Mahler had to ditch Bethge and find his mvn words
to match the culminating freedom of the music, for which we have
been prepared by earlier stages in the movement's evolution:
Die Iiebe Erde allliberall
Bliiht auf im Lenz und grunt auts neu!
Alliiberall und ewig blauen Iicht die Fernen,
Ewig ... ewig!
I11e dear Earth eJ'er}'ll'herc
Blossoms i11 spring and grofi'S green a.<Zaill'
Eueryll'hcre and etemally the distance shines br(r;ht and blue!
Etemally ... etemally ...
But intriguing though the question is of the identity of the parti-
cipants in the final dialogue, it is not really the issue that tor me is
of prime importance. It is, rather, that in the special context of the
third recitative, the moment we have reached in the narrative,
Mahler turns yet again - and tor the last time - to the image of an
act of drinking:
Er stieg vom Pferd und reichte im dm Trw1k des Abschieds dar
(my italics].
He alighted rom his horse and handed hi111 the drink 4.f<1rewe/l.
Thus it is, though the significance of it has long gone unappreciated,
that the image of drinking that has been central to the symphony's
DAS TRINKI.lED VOK DER ERDE?
t!rst part resurfaces in 'Der Abschied': we witness the consumption
of the elixir that leads directly to the final intoxication and ecstasy -
'Die Iiebe Erde .. .'- by which we must now suppose the protag-
onist is himself consumed. All sense of a unique personal identity
is gone but like the last chord, to quote Britten's \Vords for the last
time, we must imagine him continuing to exist for ever, 'printed
on the atmosphere'. Here for the first time the image of spring is
released in the guise of the Earth's capacity for perpetual renewal,
wherein is incorporated mankind's immortality. It is that final
enlightenment that constitutes the last image of'intoxication', one
this time that erases anv distinction between death and an eternitv
' '
of liberation trom lite. Ewig ... ewig!
Should we not retitle the symphony? It is my belief that 'Das
Ttinklied von der Erde' would remind us of the image about which
rhe \vhole work is built and, in Mahler's final articulation of it, finds
its consummation.
How very strange it seems no\v that one of the work's critics
after hearing its premiere under Bruno Walter in 191 r complained
that the chief disappointment lay in the symphony's coda: what was
missing, it seems, was any sense of 'redemption'! If nothing else this
crass response is suggestive of how far removed in Das Lied was
Mahler's philosophy from the conventional beliefs of his day about
the afterlife.
There can be little doubt that the philosophy that generated Das
Lied was significantly influenced by an interest in the philosophies
of the East that had long been established in Europe by thinkers
with whose work Mahler was known to have been familiar: Schopen-
hauer, for instance, and Nietzsche, and Gustav Theodor Fechner,
who \Vas perhaps not of a like stature, but undoubtedly one whose
ideas clearly had a role in shaping Mahler's own. And there \Vas
Wagner, of course, himself a further channel of communication and
influence, with his own undoubted interest in the East.
It is always a complex matter to try to pin down and assess the
specific relationships between ideas, whether philosophical or aes-
thetic, and their realization in terms and images of music. In so far as
this can be done it seems to me that Stephen Hefling in his mono-
graph on Das Lied has admirably documented the relevant sources.
SCRUTINY
TON HALLE
Montag, den 20. November, abends 8 Uhr
(Dfrentliche Hauptprobe: Sonntag, den 19. November, vormittags 11 Uhr)
ORCHESTERKONZERT
Ausflihrende:
Dirigent: Hofkapellmeister BR UN 0 WALTER
Soli: MME CHARLES CAHIER (Alt)
MARIE MOHL-KNABL (Sopran)
WI L L I A M M I L L E R k. k. Hotopernsinger (Tenor)
chor: ORATORIEN-VEREIN AUGSBURG
unter dem bohen Protektorate
S. K. Hoheit des Prinzen Ludwig Ferdinand von Bayern
orchester: KO N ZERTVEREI NS-ORCH ESTER
(auf 100 Kiinsrler verstirkt)
Orgel: Hoforganist Prof. LUDWIG MAIER
I. ABTEILt:,..G: URAUFFUHRUNG
,DAS LIED VON DER ERDE"
Eine Symphonie fi1r eine Tenor und eine und groGes Orchester
lDichtung aus Hans Bethge's .,Chines1sche FlOte"j -
J. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
2. Der Einsarne im Herbst
3. Von der J ugend
4. Von der SchOnheit
5. Der Trunkcne im FriihJing
6. Der Abschied
II. ABTEILUNG:
ZWEITE SYMPHONIE C-moll
ft1r grofles Orchester, Soli, Chor und Orgel
1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante moderato
3. In sehr ruhig flieBender Bewegung
4. ,Urlicbt" (Sehr und scblicht)
5. lm Tempo des Scherzos (Sehr zuriickbaltend)-
,Oer Rufer in der Wiiste'',- ,Der groSe Appell''.
The programme for the fmt performance of Das Lied !'Oil der Erdc
on 20 N oven1ber 1 9 I I
[FIRST PUBUCATIOI\Oj
DAS TRINKLIED VOt" DER ERDE?
But the question that I find the most fascinating, though no less
teasing and certainly no less complicated, is this: hmv do we discern
what is undeniably 'Chinese' about Das Lied, purely in terms of
music, and hmv, if we think we have found it, do we go about
defining it? And, no less urgent and specific, what precisely \Vas it
that triggered off Mahler's voyage east\vards'
There is no overlooking Bethge, naturally, and I for one continue
to be grateful to him for releasing in Mahler the inspiration that gave
us Das Lied. I put some emphasis on 'releasing' because I believe it to
be the case that the inspiration was already there, pre-Bethge, in the
person and poetry of Friedrich Ruckert, himself an orientalist and
philologist of high repute (the language in question was Chinese).
Mahler himself let it be known how much Ruckert's poetry
meant to him during his last years, and it has often struck me as
extremely odd that relatively little attention has been paid to
Mahler's late Ruckert settings, in particular the Riickert-Lieder of
1901-2. The unique beauty of these songs has long been recog-
nized, and in the case of at least one of them, 'Ich bin der Welt
abhanden gekommen', endless parallels have been drawn bet\veen
the song and 'Der Abschied' of Das Lied, though often the signifi-
cance of the most striking parallels in compositional technique has
gone unremarked.
In short, the time has surely come when Bethge is no longer
thought of as the 'onlie begetter', practically speaking, of Das Lied
and for more serious \Vork to be done on the Mahler-Ruckert
relationship, \Vith especial attention being paid to what in fact were
the first stirrings in Mahler of compositional techniques that can
novv be readily identified as themselves articulating his 'Chinese'
dimension. And of course it is the existence of Das Lied that enables
us retrospectively to make the identification and perhaps thereby
document an eFolFing process in which Ruckert played a crucial
initiating role. I have no doubt now that this was the case and that
when Mahler had Bethge brought to his notice by a friend, the
techniques \Vere already basically in situ. I do not one bit under-
estimate the importance ofBethge's contribution, but it was not by
him that Mahler \Vas prompted to acquire the new technical means
that we encounter in his later masterpiece, Das Lied.
+70
SCRGTINY
For all these reasons, I continue to harbour substantial doubts
about any direct influence on Mahler supposedly exerted by a
number of wax-cylinder recordings, issued, as I have nmv come to
believe, in early shellac disc form, and which, as Henry-Louis de La
Grange recounts in the third volume of the French edition of his
biography of Mahler, p. 341, were discovered bv a fiend the banker
Paul Hammerschlag, in a shop near the in and
passed on to the composer, at a time \Vhen an interest in perhaps
vvhat one might term the 'Chinese' dimension \Vas still musically
active in his mind. You will remember what I have just said about
Mahler and the late Ri.ickert songs, composed already in 1901.
I shall be returning to all these matters and in the context in par-
ticular of highly significant information conveyed to me by Peter
Revers. But first I thought it might be helpful to be briefly
reminded that it was Berlin that \Vas one of the most important
turn-of-the-century centres to pioneer the recording of authentic
musics - my plural is deliberate - from the East, an activity that in
itself was part of the growing exploration o( and with,
the arts of the East. Bethge \vas part of this powerful cultural trend
which also included a widespread general taste for the consump-
tion of the exotic. By the way, it is not only a scholarly or cultural
appetite we encounter in these diverse fields but also the appetite
of COIIIIIICI'CC.
Although we may never be able to be wholly confident which
items of Chinese music Mahler himself might have heard, \vhat we
can inform ourselves about very precisely is the kind of sound
Mahler would have encountered if he did indeed listen to record-
ings that first originated on wax cylinders at the turn of the
century. It is for this reason that I have brought with me todav a
typical wax-cylinder recording (transferred to tape) made . in
Beijing in I9I2-q (a year or two after Mahler's death) by a field
researcher from the Berlin Ethnomusicological Museum, a brief
excerpt of background music to a theatre play, performed on the
shenJ;, a kind of elaborate Chinese mouth organ. And please do
understand my chief reason tor playing this is to acquaint you with
the extreme primitiveness of the sound and the inevitable brevity
of the excerpt. The point I am making is principally to acquaint
D:\S TRINKLIED VON DER ERDE'
471
you with what recording techniques could at best achieve at the
early stage of their evolution (electrical recording did not begin
until 1925 or thereabouts):
RECORDED MUSIC EXCERPT
The recording referred to above
I in no way underestimate the importance of that illustration, nor
that of the very many other similar recordings that date rom the
same period and earlier. I merely wonder seriously how realistic
and meaningful in tact it is to suggest or believe that, if Mahler did
find himself listening to the music represented on wax cylinders at
the technical level we have just ourselves experienced, \Ve could
properly speak of a subsequent 'influence'. Judged purely from the
perspective of information, one surely has to rate the possibility as
pretty remote.
None the less, Mahler's, as I now think, probable contact with
'live' Chinese music remains of real importance, and it is exactly
here that Peter Revers. himself a distinguished contributor to this
conference, has come up \Vith some highly significant evidence. In
a ground-breaking text,* he dra\vs our attention in its third and
tina! section, 'Uberlegungen zu Mahlers Rezeption fernostlicher
Musik' ('Considerations on Mahler's Reception of Far East
Music'), to a series of recordings issued by Beka, a Berlin record
company that made a special feature in I906 (NB!) of a release on
ten-inch shellac discs of a variety of 'exotic' musics, from China,
Japan and Malaya (as it was at the time), along with many others.
The discs of particular relevance to our purpose are numbered
2086, 2130, 2 I 75 and 2176, and represent a transfer of wax-cylinder
recordings to shellac discs. We also learn from Revers that these
discs tormed part of the 'Phonogrammarchiv der Osterreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaft' ('Phonographic Archive of the
Austrian Academy of Science'). founded in I899- These few tacts
lend \veight to a point I \Vas making earlier, the spread of investiga-
tive scholarship into new areas of technical documentation, from
* 'A-;pekte der Osrasienrezeprion Gustav !\-tahlers D1b Lied !WI dt'r Erdc.
472
SCRUTINY
wax cylinder to shellac disc, which in turn represents a shift from
exclusive academic circles to a much broader public interest. We
should also take note that from I 899 Vienna, like Berlin, was in the
business of both meticulously exploring and, more broadly, dis-
seminating the 'exotic'- selling it, in fact, to an eager public.
Once again through Professor Revers's kindness I have been able
to hear a transcript on tape of the 'Beka-Grand-Record' (so the
label reads) items numbered above; but once again, and despite
some justifiable efforts to have improved the clarity of the sound, I
find myself still in doubt about the ultimate - that is, creative -
relevance of Mahler's supposed confrontation \vith 'authentic'
Chinese music in recorded form. Hmvever, in the light of Revers's
research, it seems to me nmv that the fact of that confrontation has
now been virtually established, and that in itself is of no small
importance. Furthermore, I also believe that it is more than likely
that it was the Beka discs that Mahler would have heard, that were
brought to him - bought for him - by Hammerschlag.
Revers remarks in his text on a feature of the music on the Beka
discs that Adorno so memorably characterized in his Mahler study
as 'unscharfes unisono' - 'blurred unison' is perhaps the best and
most Adorno-like equivalent in English. In other words the
unequivocal presence of'heterophony'; and it is \vith that topic in
mind, and with one last musical excerpt, that I wish to conclude.
What I want you to hear is a shellac disc issued by the famous
German label Odeon. My guess, in which I have been valuably
assisted by Joanna C. Lee, is that the recording belongs to the (early)
1930s, some years, that is, after the introduction of electrical record-
ing in 1925, a date that puts it well beyond the reach of Mahler!
But that is not the point I really want to make. It is, rather, to
present you with an illustration that will show you first hmv rapid
was the evolution of recording in the first decades of the twentieth
century \Vith remarkable advances being made in the quality and
clarity of sound and secondly how these advances in technical
achievement also made their impact in the sphere of exotic or, as I
prefer, non-Western musics, above all on their accessibility and
distribution. For here \ve find Odeon follo\ving in the footsteps of
Beka in r 906, perhaps with less stress on 'authenticity', but
DAS TRINKLIED VON DER ERDE? 473
undoubtedly with an eye on a grmving market with customers in
both East and West. As I have remarked before, commerce was soon
playing an active role in the cultural trend - the 'mystery of the
East' - that \vas so pronounced a feature at the turn of the century
and inevitably, for good and ill, exploited by the nevv technologies.
The intertwining of culture and commerce is by no means an
insignificant phenomenon, but my principal reason for playing this
Odeon disc is that it enables us to hear very clearly Adorno's
'blurred unison' in audible action. It is a number for voice and flute,
accompanied by percussion, with both the singer and flautist seem-
ingly delivering an identical melody, though it \Viii soon strike you
that what we are actually hearing is a less than perfect unison,
Adorno's 'unscharfes unisono', in fact, which in the West we iden-
tifY as the practice of heterophony, a form of polyphony which, in
many manifestations in the Orient and South East Asia, services the
unique contrapuntal textures characteristic of the regions' musics:
RECORDED MUSIC EXCERPT
Odeon A 26012
I am bold enough to suggest that if Mahler had lived long enough
to hear the example I have just played you, he might \Veil have
enjoyed it, admired it even, as I do. But none of this is really
relevant to the main issue that I am trying to address. If it was not
from wax cylinders or shellac discs, from what source was it
precisely that Mahler derived the heterophony he practises so bril-
liantlv in Das Lied?
Y;u \von't be surprised to hear that I believe the historical truth
to be that the source that fundamentally inspired him was the
pioneering investigative \vork prominent among scholars in Vienna
at the turn of the century, activities that in many respects were in
parallel with those in Berlin, though it was that city that led in the
field of recording. If nothing else, the first of my t\vo music
examples testifies to that, as do the Beka records brought to our
notice by Revers.
We k ~ m v that Mahler was an insatiably inquisitive personality
and no less intellectually curious and explorative. A close friend of
474 SCRUTINY
his was the remarkable scholar Guido Adler, whom Edward Reilly
has so valuably studied; and I have little doubt that during the years
that \Vere to culminate in the composition of Das Lied, Mahler and
Adler must have conversed about the topic of'other' musics from
the East. I am pretty certain, moreover. that Mahler would have
found himself an absorbed and stimulated reader of Adler's text of
I908 entitled 'Uber Heterophonie' ('On Heterophony')* - might
not Adler have shown it to him even before its appearance in print?
What we should never forget is that these topics and the issues
they raised were vividly alive and the subject of vigorous discussion
and debate in the culture of the time. Indeed, the work of pioneer-
ing investigative musicologists like Adler was, if you like, a com-
parable response to that being shown in almost all fields of creative
and decorative activity in Mahler's day: the 'exotic' was a concept
in full flovver at all levels. It so happened that Mahler was more
serious than most about finding out what the 'exotic' might, com-
positionally. have to otTer him.
I want to read you a text that I believe to be crucial. Adler
quotes it in his own I908 article, a description of heterophony by
a fellmv musicologist, Carl Stumpf, to my mind a model of its
kind. The music he writes about was Siamese in origin:
It is not a question here of various themes being played simultane-
ously but rather of all the instruments compiling a texture out of
basically identical materials whilst allmving themselves significant
individual liberties: one instrument proceeds in simple crotchets,
another plays around it with all kinds of ornamentation, a third
resolves this completely into semiquaver passages, triplets and so on,
at the same time as the semi quaver passages of the individual instru-
ments are in utmost cohesion. In some principal motives, they all
come together again in perfect unison.
The first 'Trinklied' in Das Lied tells us \Vith dramatic energy
that, master of counterpoint though Mahler was, what \Ve are hear-
ing is something arrestingly nev1r in his polyphony. In fact, if we
* Peters Jahrb!lch Il)Ol'l. pp. 1 7-2 7.
DAS TRJNKLIED VON DER ERDE'
475
listen to the first 'Trinklied', and after it read Stumpf, then we find
ourselves reading a precise description of what, contrapuntally
speaking, we have just heard. The lows classiclls, I believe, is the
tourth strophe. the critical point of recapitulation in the first song,
'1m Mondschein auf den Grabern .. .' ('In the moonlight, on the
graves .. .') (the first time incidentally that Ex. I is allotted to the
voice
1
), where, benveen figs. 39 and 45. we hear Mahler in top-gear
heterophonic action, a living example of a 'style' the promotion of
which Adler was to call for in his concluding sentence: 'We are
bound to have to acknowledge heterophony ... theoretically to be
the third category of style besides homophony and polyphony.'
What Mahler gives us, of course, is not theory but practice, the first
major breakthrough of heterophony in his music, which, after
long-postponed recognition, can now be assessed as a moment of
exceptional significance and eventual influence in the history of
twentieth-century music.
(In this connection I should like briefly to mention my theory
that it is composers who, in the course of their compositional
histories, have shown a predilection for canon, and a conspicuous
facility in the use of it, that are the more likely to succumb to the
appeal and challenge of heterophony. Both Mahler and Britten, I
would like to suggest, support my contention.)
Heterophony, ironically enough, tor all its authenticity, would
not necessarily have been heard by audiences (past, present or
future) as an immediately audible sign or evidence of the informing
presence of the East. Nor, for that matter, I suggest, transparently
pentatonic though the conception of the symphony's basic motive
is from the start (see Ex. I), I do not think we can assume that the
obligatory sense of 'otherness', of a different location, of embark-
ing on a journey to another world, could have been achieved alone
by the pentatonic and heterophonic features revealed in the first
song. It \vas tor this reason, I believe - and it was essential, surely,
tor Mahler to get the process going before 'Der Abschied' is
reached - that he took such care to demonstrate the Chinese con-
nection in a torm that would have been readily recognizable.
Hence the overt pentatonicism of, say, 'Von der Jugend' or 'Von der
Schonheit', the Chinese-ness of which was part of the popular
SCRUTINY
culture of Mahler's dav, and has continued to be, to our own day.
-
We might \vel! think that Mahler here was pursuing the merely
decorative, but \Ve would be \Vrong on t\vo counts. First and fore-
most, perhaps, because of the wealth of imagination, the sophisti-
cation, subtlery of nuances, and refinement he brought to these
numbers; and second, because, while the decorative was not his
objective- though it seems to me that even here he achieves much
more than any of his contemporaries - communication was; and it
is in fact as a means of communication, of virtually instant accessi-
biliry to the idea of relocation, to a\vareness that we are now some-
where else than the world \Vith which we are familiar, that Mahler
puts overt pentatonicism to use. It is a means of preparing us for
the eventual 'otherness' of'Der Abschied', its music and its narra-
tive, in which the 'Chinese' dimension of Das Lied finds its ultimate
and most profound musical and philosophical expression.
There is much to be thought about, discussed, contended,
debated, decoded; and there are surely tresh approaches still to be
made. But of one thing I think we can be certain: that in the
history of the creative relationship benveen East and West in the
nventieth century, 'Das Trinklied von der Erde' must stand as an
achievement of genius that has not been equalled or surpassed. It
represents music's O\Vn contribution to the philosophy of life, death
and- bv wav of that final draught - transcendence, no less.
Mahler and Nature:
Landscape into Music
~ : 1986 ~
I am going to speculate about a possible relationship benveen land-
scape and music; and about one particular landscape- Toblach, now
Dobbiaco, in the Italian Dolomites - and Gustav Mahler. Before
the First World War the area was part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and accessible by train from Vienna. It \Vas there, amid this
landscape of forests, lakes and mountains, that Mahler in the last
summers of his life, from I 908 until his death in May I 9 I I, wrote
his last works, Das Lied vorz der Erde, the Ninth Symphony and the
incomplete Tenth.
Why Toblach? To answer that one has to look back to I907,
when Mahler spent his summers composing in the only house he
ever owned, at Maiernigg on the Worthersee. Here, three heavy
blO\vs fell on him: it was in this year at Maiernigg that one of his
nvo daughters, Maria, caught diphtheria and cruelly died; at almost
the same time, Mahler's doctors diagnosed a heart condition that
certainlv caused him amciery, restricted his physical activities,
though' not his creativiry, and contributed to the weakening of his
hitherto powerful constitution, which finally succumbed to a viral
infection in I 9 I I. In addition, in the same year, r 907, he found him-
self at loggerheads with the bureaucrats in Vienna; and, frustrated
and taxed bevond the tolerable, he resigned as Director of the
Hofoper- t h ~ Vienna Court Opera - and signed a contract to con-
duct at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
Maiernigg could no longer offer him the serenity of spirit he
needed for composition. He had to find a new place to make a new
start. What was found was a farmhouse near Toblach, at Alt-
Lecture, 'Musik"voche i11 mcmrJriam Gustav Mahler'. Toblach, 22 July 1986: originally
given with recorded musical illustrations.