Page 203 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

ROMANTIC 1810–1920 201

Einsame im Herbst” (“The Lonely
One in Autumn”). Then comes a
group of three shorter settings,
prominently colored by the
pentatonic scale, recalling the
Is it at all bearable? Will it innocent happiness of youth and Mahler’s struggles are
drive people to do away the joys of springtime. The final those of a psychic weakling,
with themselves? setting, “Der Abschied” (“The a complaining adolescent
Gustav Mahler Farewell”), is longer than the other who enjoyed his misery,
five songs combined. Two different wanting the whole world to
poems are here separated by an see how he was suffering.
orchestral interlude and lead Harold Schonberg
eventually to a conclusion with American critic
words added by Mahler himself:
“Everywhere the dear earth
five-note “pentatonic” scale blossoms forth in spring and grows
(distinct from the Western seven- green again! Everywhere and
note scale), providing an element forever, distant horizons gleam
of local color that his European blue: forever … forever …”
audiences would easily recognize. The music seems not so much to Mahler’s deepest creative and
to end as to dissolve into this vision, personal concerns than to a fashion
Large ambitions in which awareness of human for “exoticism for exoticism’s sake,”
In Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler mortality is transcended by the but, without that fashion and the
managed to combine his two perception that life and the natural inspiration Mahler found in Eastern
principal musical concerns—song world will timelessly be renewed. culture, Das Lied von der Erde
and the symphony—in a single The work as a whole relates more could not have existed. ■
large-scale work for the first time.
In his Second, Third, and Fourth
Symphonies, there had been a
substantial overlapping of the two
genres; in Das Lied von der Erde
their fusion is so complete that
neither can be separated out. A
tenor and mezzosoprano alternate
in the six song settings, and Mahler
deploys a large orchestra with
exceptional sensibility to mood and
color, often with the finesse of a
chamber group of solo instruments.
The opening “Das Trinklied vom
Jammer der Erde” (“Drinking-Song
of the Earth’s Sorrow”), music of
wild and despairing fatalism, is
followed by the desolate depiction
of a mist-covered lake in “Der

Mahler’s diverse influences are
satirized in this caricature of him
conducting his Symphony No. 1 in D
major, from a November 1900 edition
of Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt.

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