Late Life Thoughts and Das Lied von der Erde

1

It was a rainy evening in early October of 1962, like most evenings in Liverpool that year. I had been in that lively city for a year but the fine, almost molecular, grey drops still chilled me to the bones. In retrospect, it was a brave act on my part to accept a free ticket and walk down about a kilometer to the concert hall for my first visit to a performance of Western classical music. I had no idea of what to expect. I suspected it would be very different from the classical music I had grown up with in India. However, I was encouraged by the reputation of Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra as top notch and that of John Pritchard as a very promising young conductor.

I took my seat in good time to study the program. Mozart’s symphony no. 41 was performed in the first half. Although it is one of my favourite symphonies now, it made so little impression on me that I even forgot about it being performed in that concert. It was the second half that got me hooked. The title “The Song of the Earth” impressed me. ‘Song’ was actually six verses which I read with great interest during the intermission. Although I did not really understand many of the allusions, the poetry made a deep impression. Fortunately for me, they were, as was the custom in England then, presented in English translation of the German text used by the composer. I later learned that the German poems were a translation from French version of what was originally written in Mandarin. The singers were tenor William McAlpine and Alto Sandra Warfield. I followed closely the words while listening to the singers, a practice I have stuck to ever since. Even though ignorant of Western music, I was struck by how the music had captured the soul of poetry. The desperation of “The life is gloomy, so is death” was driven home, as was the forlorn mood of the autumn. The clincher, though, was the final words, “The beloved Earth everywhere blossoms in spring and becomes green again! Everywhere and for ever the horizon shines bright blue, for ever, for ever …. .” The expression of sorrow at taking one’s permanent leave from the earth that will always return to lushness and beauty will move a heart of stone even with amateur performers leave alone the distinguished artists performing that day.

The ‘song-symphony’ has six ‘movements’ sung alternately by the tenor and the Alto. First song, “Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow” laments the short sorrowful human life on this beautiful Earth with the refrain - Life is gloomy, so is death. In “The Lonesome in Autumn” the grieving singer extols the beauty of the landscape before cold winds destroy it and wishes for either death or love to tenderly dry her tears. “Of Youth” describes an assembly of young men writing poems in a beautiful garden. “Of Beauty is a lovely song where girls are picking flowers when handsome young men on beautiful horses gallop by creating tumult in the hearts of the ladies. In “The Drunken Man in Spring” the young man lives as if in a dream singing and drinking all day and sleeping all night. “Farewell” is the last song. On a beautiful and pleasantly cool evening the forlorn singer is waiting for her friend who arrives to tell her that he is returning home leaving this beautiful place for ever. Mahler’s version combines two Mandarin poems separated by a haunting interlude. The composer added at the end a line similar to one in the first song and this coda, mentioned earlier, is probably the most moving music in the Western classical canon.

What was it that attracted a 24 year old postgraduate student to this pinnacle of melancholy? It could not be loneliness, away from the family and friends. I had left home six years earlier and never really missed my family. I never had any bosom friends and moving away was never a heart wrenching experience. I was living in a foreign country but I had lived in Liverpool for a year and was familiar with English literature, British history and politics since the early teens. Therefore I was not in an altogether strange environment, my work was going well, I had received additional funding and there was no reason to fall in love with this song of sorrow. In fact, I did not feel sorry, rather felt the elation of reading and hearing something beautiful; beautifully expressed emotion in poetry and music. The emotion was not strange of course. If it were, the beauty would not have been appreciated. But excitement was with the beauty of words compounded by the musical setting, not sorrow expressed by them. Melancholic music in ‘Farewell’ made me pensive for a few moments; it did not bring tears to my eyes leave alone induce me to jump in the Mersey. I do believe that my interest was more intellectual than emotional.

2

I owe an immense gratitude to the local Rotary Club who donated a pair of season tickets to the International Students Residence where I lived. I went to as many concerts as the graduate student workload allowed. I was also introduced to the world of opera with Mozart's The Magic Flute. It did make a more lasting impression than Symphony no. 41 had done. A young English girl, mature beyond her years, was a source of inspiration and information in my acculturation. A couple of years later she agreed to marry me for better (for me) or worse (for her).

I got a taste of a wide range of music over next four years in England. Five following years in Libya were a cultural desert. My wife, two daughters and I settled in North America nine years after the first Das Lied and we renewed our association with the concert scene. At this stage, the works of Beethoven and Mozart were the staple and our small record collection consisting mostly of their symphonies and piano concertos with Mahler songs and symphonies being somewhat on the periphery.

It was around this time, in 1981, I read the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by Lewis Thomas, a New York physician. The connect between the sad situation of the human race and the coda of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and the memory of my introduction to the Western classical music induced me to spend an evening listening to the ninety minute work which was composed around the same time as Das Lied in the last years of composer’s life. I was intrigued by it. I decided that to appreciate what the composer was telling me, the listener, I had to become familiar with his other compositions. Thus I began the journey which is nowhere near its end almost thirty years later.

My first discovery was that the set of Mahler’s symphonies, including Das Lied numbered 8 ½, is one long book. Each individual symphony is a chapter and a movement is a section. In each chapter the composer asks the question, “Why am I on this Earth?” He provides a provisional answer in the last movement and then revisits it in the next work. Although there is continuity musically, each chapter is philosophically different reflecting the circumstances and the maturity of Mahler at that stage of life. The first symphony often called ‘Titan’ suggests heroic deeds while the second ends with all living creatures participating in the glory of the Heavenly Father. Third is about love – love of nature, love of life, love of God in an ascending order. Fourth further expands on the theme but in a humorous way. Fifth is the joyful homage to love, love of another human being, which creates a range of emotions from the tragedy of loveless life in first two movements to excitement of love in the third to peace and harmony of the fourth movement and finally the great joy and brilliant climax – sexual in its intensity – of the last movement. It is as if the composer has found a reason for living in the love of a woman.

The pendulum turns the other way in the sixth symphony, originally titled Tragic. The beauty and joy is snuffed out by brute force and life is snuffed out by three strokes of a sledge hammer. The joy is ephemeral in this long work and the last movement, as long as most symphonies, is a litany of misfortunes which lead to doom with no redemption. Perhaps as a reaction to the undiluted joy of Fifth and unmitigated disaster of Sixth, the Seventh is a ‘purely musical’ creation: three haunting nachtmusic movements, albeit one termed scherzo, sandwiched between two joyous sunshine ones. It is as if the composer is telling us that joy and sorrow were fleeting emotions and Art was his reason for living. The Eighth is a Song Symphony dedicated to Love in all its forms. It integrates Latin hymn “Come Creator Spirit” in Part 1 with Goethe’s Redemption of Faust in Part 2. Eros, God of Love, is the creator of all things material and spiritual and the symphony ends in a wonderful crescendo “Eternal womanhead, Leads us on high.”

Das Lied, Ninth and the unfinished Tenth are different than previous works. These symphonies were written after Mahler had suffered three blows of misfortune and was living under constant fear of death. They are about coping with the finality of death and a deep melancholy hovers over the entire symphonies. While the ninth ends in a great coda of reconciliation described most aptly by Alex Ross as “a whisper of love at the edge of the grave”, the tenth is, if it is at all possible, even more grief-stricken but it ends with “music of love” in Deryck Cooke’s words.

3

Das lied is the first in the final phase of Mahler’s composing career, the last three summers in the life of this ‘summer composer’. I love all of them dearly and have traveled far to hear their performances. But Das Lied has been my favourite since that fateful day in Liverpool and any of 24 CDs of it that I own remain my first choice for listening pleasure. But my reaction to this work has changed over the years. The ‘intellectual sympathy’ of the first few years when only the strangers passed away started becoming tinged with emotion as the parents and then older friends started taking their leave. By my own late fifties “Farewell” was creating new emotional sensations; I began to feel as if I was taking leave of my world of a beautiful family, kind friends, and the glorious Mother Earth whose bounty I had the good fortune to enjoy in its many forms. But this was only an intermediate stage.

In my seventieth year I have gone beyond feeling emotional about my own death. During this year my granddaughters returned to live with us again because of their special needs. While helping their mother and grandmother in the recovery of the children’s health, my concern increasingly became the headlong rush of humanity towards its destruction. Two major threats to the human survival are global warming and environmental pollution, both directly related to gluttonous consumption by human race. We destroy the forests to create farms, then destroy farms to build shopping centres and clusters of palaces which are left deserted a few years later to start the process somewhere else. We still live under the code devised two millennia ago in entirely different circumstances and ignore the permanent destruction due to an exponentially growing population. We create an economic system which threatens collapse if the economy does not grow day to day; leave alone shrink even for a few months. When handed a golden opportunity to lead the populace towards a system based on steadily reducing and eventually sustainable consumption, our leaders desperately try to reverse a miniscule slowdown in breakneck rush to consume and destroy while paying lip service to environmental protection. Already weak environmental regulations are being relaxed to encourage more production of unnecessary goods (!) all over the world. Alberta, my own province, is a particularly discouraging example where incentives are being offered to extract more oil from tar sands with total disregard for extensive pollution of air, water and land; all in the name of protecting jobs. In order to promote our commercial interests we encourage increasing consumption among the middle classes in developing countries at the expense of the poor who have even less to eat and disregard the consequences in those lands of multiplying population, overcrowded cities, evermore scarce water and polluted air. We are rushing to our inevitable end with our eyes shut with the exception of a few isolated voices who cry in the wilderness.

Given this scenario, I feel more and more disheartened with every passing hour. To me the third stroke in the sixth symphony is about to come and fell the human race and the deep melancholy of the coda of Das Lied is not a lament for an individual but for all of us. That is why I worry about my grandchildren’s future and Das Lied echoes in my mind when these thoughts keep me awake at night.

If you liked the essay, please introduce others to the blog.