A study of the Chinese text sources, passed through translation, for Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. By Donald Mitchell in his collection of essays about Mahler from 2007.
A study of the Chinese text sources, passed through translation, for Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. By Donald Mitchell in his collection of essays about Mahler from 2007.
A study of the Chinese text sources, passed through translation, for Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. By Donald Mitchell in his collection of essays about Mahler from 2007.
'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
-;------.. , )'I e J I ". 0) ff
. [I Ex. 2 'Der Abschied' G- I' h I b d anz 1c es er en eel
ob pp !:; : :
-- _:-_ ..::::: ppp Str. ! I
J I tbn.-6-:
.... :-...
ppp harp
[!' [i 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.