Das Lied von der Erde

In the summer of 1907, Mahler was in a state of shock: the traumatic death of his adored daughter Maria, aged four, had been followed by the diagnosis of a heart defect—a serious blow to such a physically active man. Then a friend gave him an anthology entitled The Chinese Flute, based on ancient Chinese poems, in which an intense, almost desperate love of life is balanced by awareness of its terrible fragility. The following year Mahler began work on what he called a “song-symphony”, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), whose six movements chart a profoundly moving spiritual progression from horrified nihilism through loneliness and poignant celebration of beauty to resignation and, finally, ecstatic self-abandonment. Facing his fears and sadness head-on concentrated his mind as never before. Mahler had certainly risen to ecstatic heights and plumbed profound depths before Das Lied von der Erde, but never with such emotional and intellectual concentration, or such exquisite technical refinement. The orchestral sound palette here has a rare delicacy and clarity, while the vocal writing, for alto and tenor soloists, is glorious, with word-setting as acute in its responsiveness to the nuances of the German texts as in anything he had written before. Listening particularly to the long final movement, “The Farewell”, it is easy to understand why, for many, this is simply the greatest thing Mahler ever achieved.