In which we chart our course from Beethoven's visionary symphonic adagio to the great symphonic adagios of Bruckner and Mahler

(And we run smack into the dread Ninth Symphony snafu)

Maestro Furtwängler will get us from Beethoven's sublime symphonic adagio to Bruckner; then Carlo Maria Giulini will carry us on to Mahler.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125:
iii. Adagio molto e cantabile


Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond. EMI, recorded live in the Festspielhaus, July 29, 1951

Berlin Philharmonic, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, Feb. 1989 & Feb. 1990

by Ken

Last week, you may recall, "Our ongoing Seiji Ozawa remembrance sidetracked me into some aural pondering of the symphonic adagio." I'm afraid we're not going to get much farther today than scouting the route, but that still leaves us in for some remarkable music.

You'll note that in last week's post I've upgraded the audio clip of the 1951 Furtwängler Beethoven Ninth, and this week we've heard it again, paired with Carlo Maria Giulini's performance, and that duo will escort us to -- in fact, all the way through -- Anton Bruckner's symphonic adagio-ing, to his final Adagio, the last movement he composed, the Adagio of his Ninth Symphony, whose intended finale he ran out of either time or inspiration to "complete."

The sound of Furtwängler's 1944 Bruckner 9 is less happy even than that of his 1951 Beethoven 9 [AFTERTHOUGHT: however, the upgraded Beethoven 9 audio clip sure sounds better (how 'bout those timpani?), and for that matter the Bruckner 9 clip sounds a lot better than I expected -- Ed.], but it's good enough, and will have to do, since it's the only Bruckner 9 he left us. And if there's one thing classical-music lovers generally agree on (there aren't many!), it's that the Furtwängler Bruckner 9 is one of the greatest and least dispensable recordings we have. That said, Carlo Maria Giulini's Bruckner 9 seems to me of comparable stature. In the fullness of his long career, Maestro G. had the opportunity to show us how deep and darkly perceiving an artist he was -- I've described this performance as "dripping blood."

Finally for this week, Maestro Furtwängler not being a Mahler guy, Maestro Giulini will lead us the final step to Mahler, represented by a movement I don't think is often thought of as a "symphonic adagio" -- only it is, isn't it?


LISTENING TO FURTWÄNGLER'S AND GIULINI'S
PERFORMANCES OF THE ADAGIO OF BRUCKNER 9 . . .

Bernard Haitink (1929-2021),part 2

In 1961-63 Haitink's career path merged with Eugen Jochum's. We'll hear them side-by-side in Bruckner, and in Mahler side-by-side-by-side with their Concertgebouw predecessor Eduard van Beinum

HOLD EVERYTHING! We're going to need a "part 3," for a Haitink-Jochum Beethoven Ninth face-off: an anticipated five performances of the Finale ranging in time from 1938 to 2005 -- coming soon!

Bruckner in Vienna's Stadtpark (City Park) -- bronze bust by Viktor
Tilgner, crop of photo by Mealisland from Wikipedia Commons

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded Nov. 1-3 1966

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Eugen Jochum, cond. Live performance, Mar. 3, 1970

Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded 1976

Orchestre National de France, Eugen Jochum, cond. Live performance from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Feb. 6, 1980

by Ken

Do you notice any progression in the four clips above, of what I'm calling the "main theme" of the second-movement Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony, even though it comes maybe half a minute into the movement? We could hear it as a continuation or branch of the opening theme, but in harmony and orchestration it seems so clearly a new, benedictory idea, and an idea of such physical power, intersecting with that opening theme that it seems to me clearly a second theme, and one of such power that it can only be the "main" theme, can't it?

The progression I'm thinking of happened fairly accidentally. It started with the Böhm clip, simply for convenience -- we've heard it before, so it was sitting in the SC Archive waiting to be called upon again, and indeed for a time it saved me from having to make a new clip. Except I felt guilty that it left us starting off without reference to the conductor we're remembering, or the conductor who's our secondary focus today. So I must have made first the 1966 Haitink clip and then, still feeling guilty, the 1970 Jochum one. And still I coudln't relinquish the Böhm clip, even though it seemed to have outlived its purpose and usefulness; the problem was that I like, I really like it. Eventually, many thousands of clips later, it seemed only natural to tack on the 1980 Jochum-in-Paris clip.

Okay, so this is part 2 of our remembrance of Bernard Haitink, who died peacefully in his sleep, we're told, on October 21, at the age of 92. Since he remained active through 2019, that leaves us a heap of remembering to do, and I thought we would start with a point I kept meaning to make last week, in "Bernard Haitink (1929-2021), part 1." In fact, we've got a subhead left over from the drafting of last week's installment, when I still imagined that all our Haitink remembering could get remembered in one fell swoop. This subhead was planned to be the first of a series of them; now it seems a good way to get us started on part 2.

(1) IT'S GREAT TO BE GOOD, BUT
IT'S ALSO SMART TO BE LUCKY

That's "lucky" as in, for example, being in the right place at the right time, which in Haitink's case meant being an up-and-coming young Dutch conductor at a time when a critical need arose for just such a commodity.

He'd had a formal relationship with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra since 1955, and been its principal conductor since 1957, when the Concertgebouw Orchestra's chief conductor, Eduard van Beinum [right], died suddenly (though his health seems to have been iffy for a long while) following a heart attack in April 1959, creating an urgent need for a Dutch conductor capable of taking the reins of what was not just the Netherlands' premiere orchestra but one of the world's elite ones. The 30-year-old Haitink was offered the position of "first conductor" (previously given in 1941-43 to a fellow name of . . . Eugen Jochum), but there was clearly still reluctance to elevate him to the chief conductorship. For the record, Van Beinum himself had served a period as "second conductor" to Mengelberg before being made co-chief conductor, remaining as sole chief in 1945 when the orchestra severed ties with Mengelberg over his overfriendliness with the Nazi occupiers. Van Beinum thankfully had an unimpeachable anti-Nazi record.


HAITINK FINALLY GOT HIS BUMP-UP, IN 1961,
BUT PROBABLY NOT THE WAY HE HAD HOPED

A tease for this week's actual post, in which we hear more from Yvonne Minton (plus maybe, uh, some other stuff)

Yvonne Minton as the Rheingold Fricka in a production by . . . no, no, I can't try to pretend that this is one of those don't-mean-no-goddamn-thing modern-style misstagings. Actually, I did find a shot of YM as the Walküre Fricka -- a kind of funny-looking one, at that -- but I thought I'd best save that for the "real" post. No apologies for depicting her as the title character of Der Rosenkavalier, though -- as we heard in last week's post spotlighting "Four variously special singers," she was a radiant Octavian.

Now, speaking of the two Frickas --

"It's very difficult to do very much with Rheingold. One just looks dignified, and you just really do what the text dictates because [Fricka] never has more than two lines at a time. There are one or two really beautiful phrases, but they are very short."

-- Yvonne Minton, in a 1981 interview with Bruce Duffie, asked how
different the roles of Fricka in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are

And I'd guess these are among those "really beautiful phrases" --

Dearest sister, sweetest delight,
are you restored to me?

See how our pure one stands humiliated and ashamed:
her anguished look mutely pleads for release.
Wicked man, to ask this of a loved one!

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

by Ken

Yes, I know, you don't want to hear this week's litany of woes -- you know, all the difficulties and obstructions and whatnot. I think I know how a post of some sort will come together, and the two Frickas will be at the heart of it. So enjoy this hint, and this other maybe-sort-of-hint.

JULE STYNE with BETTY COMDEN and ADOLPH GREEN:
Do Re Mi: "Take a job"


Nancy Walker (Kay) and Phil Silvers (Hubie), vocals; Original Broadway Cast recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded 1961


NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH FOR YOU? OKIE-DOKE --

Mahler's Song of the Earth in full orchestral dress and chamber-scaled

The inspiration for Das Lied, and the source for the texts, was Hans Bethge's German reworking of a bunch of Chinese poems in Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute).

by Ken

As I mentioned in last night's preview, I was then about to head out for a chamber-scale performance of Mahler's Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the Songs of a Wayfarer, and Das Lied von der Erde. It was actually pretty nice -- at least an experience of the music was had, something that isn't at all guaranteed these days.

The chamber version of Das Lied, first proposed and begun by Arnold Schoenberg, then finally realized in 1983 by Rainer Riehn, has become strangely popular. It's really no more than a stopgap, a way to experience this masterpiece on the cheap, but it does have charms of its own, and when I realized that I actually have six recordings of it, I decided we'd hear one song from each of the dozen soloists involved.

Then I made the large decision to go ahead with the full Das Lied that was promised last month. And we've covered the piece so much that I further decided not to say anything more. Oh, eventually I'll probably throw in some links to earlier posts (you'll find some in the February 2 post noted above). But for now I thought I'd let the songs stand on their own.

In our missing "Song of the Earth" song, Mahler's "Lonely One in Autumn" begs for "peace" and "consolation"

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Israel Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded live, May 18, 20, and 23, 1972

by Ken

In the above audio clip we're near the end of the second song of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), "Der Einsame im Herbst" ("The Lonely One in Autumn"), where Mahler pulls another of those minor-to-major switcheroos we've talked about. It occurs at 1:25 of our clip. Well, that's the lead-in; the actual moment occurs at about 1:31 -- and it's one of the stupendous moments of this extraordinary song-symphony, the first new project the composer undertook after learning that he was suffering from terminal heart disease.

From the heaven-storming conclusion of the Eighth Symphony to Das Lied represents, one of the most striking sudden changes of course in the work of any creative artist I'm aware of. We actually heard the juxtaposition in the August 2010 post "In the opening vision of Mahler's Song of the Earth: 'Dark is life, is death,'" which focused on the opening tenor song, "The Drinking Song of Earth's Sorrow," but also included the two later tenor songs.

In this week's preview I said we would be filling in the one song we still haven't covered and then hearing the six movements of Das Lied finally put together. For all sorts of reasons we're not going to manage that today. I'm going to content myself with presenting that final missing link, the second song (and the first for the alto or baritone soloist who alternates with the tenor).


THERE'S A DIFFERENCE IN CHARACTER
BETWEEN THE TENOR AND ALTO SONGS

Preview: One loose end we CAN tie up -- our missing movements from Mahler's "Song of the Earth"

by Ken

Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) is sort of Mahler's Symphony No. 8½. Even though it's a series of six songs with orchestra, alternating between tenor and alto (or baritone) soloists, he probably would have called is his Ninth Symphony if the already-dying composer hadn't been such a baby about that "Ninth Symphony" business -- their Ninths had been so fateful for Beethoven and Bruckner. Since he had his next symphony mapped out, he thought that by calling that his Ninth, when it was really his Tenth, he would have the jinx beaten. As we know, though, the joke was on him. He did complete the symphony he called his Ninth, but died leaving his Tenth incomplete.

Colin Davis's surprising triumph in Mahler's "Song of the Earth"

The firmament is eternally blue, and the earth
will long stand fast and blossom in spring.
But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?
Not a hundred years canst thou delight
in all the rotten trash of this earth!

-- from "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde" ("The Drinking Song of Earth's Sorrow"), the opening movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth); English translation by Deryck Cooke

Jon Vickers, tenor; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded March 1981

by Ken

In Friday night's preview I argued that Jon Vickers's massive but "slow-speaking" tenor was heard to limited advantage in "On Youth," the finely detailed second of the three tenor songs of Mahler's song-symphony The Song of the Earth. I certainly wouldn't say the same of at least this fraught chunk of the opening song. This seems to me very much the kind of sound -- that of a full-fledged heroic tenor -- that Mahler must have had in mind.

We're going to hear the full song momentarily, but first I think we need to repeat an experiment we've done before in approaching Mahler's Song of the Earth(1908-09), his six-movement setting of Hans Bethge's then-recently-published German renderings of classical Chinese poems, which was the first work he conceived after learning that he had untreatable heart disease. We're going to listen again to his final, confidently heaven-storming musical utterance before the fateful diagnosis. (It's the conclusion of Goethe's Faust.)

MAHLER: Symphony No. 8 in E-flat (1906):
conclusion, "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"

All things transitory are but parable;
here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
here the indescribable is accomplished;
the ever-womanly draws us heavenward.
[much repeated]

-- English translation by Peggie Cochrane

Soloists, choruses, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. BMG, recorded live, July 7-8, 1996

Soloists, choruses, London Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. BBC Legends, live performance from the Royal Albert Hall, March 20, 1959

Preview: Colin Davis's surprising triumph in Mahler

Tenor René Kollo sings "On Youth" from Mahler's Song of the Earth, with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, in May 1972.

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth):
iii. "Von der Jugend" ("On Youth")
[English translation by Deryck Cooke]

In the middle of the little pool
stands a pavilion of green
and of white porcelain.

Like the back of a tiger
arches the bridge of jade
over to the pavilion.

In the little house friends are sitting,
beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting;
several are writing verses.

Their silken sleeves slip
backwards, their silken caps
perch gaily on the back of their necks.

On the little pool's still
surface everything appears
fantastically in a mirror image.

Everything is standing on its head
in the pavilion of green
and of white porcelain;

Like a half-moon stands the bridge,
upside-down its arch. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking, chatting.

by Ken

In this series devoted to Colin Davis, my general proposition has been that most really good CD performances seem to result from our boy "just doing it" -- hearing basic qualities in music and executing them decisively. This doesn't leave a lot of room for imagination or "creative re-creation," or what in general I would think of as really enlightened or illuminating interpretation.

And then there was his recording of Mahler's Das Lied von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth), the song-symphony composed based on Hans Bethge's German translations of Chinese poems composed between the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies. Crucially, it was conceived and composed following the diagnosis of the composer's untreatable heart disease. It would be hard to think of a work that depends more on deep understanding, of empathetic projection of its tiniest musical cells. Not, in other words, material in which we would expect to hear CD at his most persuasive.

And certainly CD's other Mahler recordings -- of the First, Fourth, and Eighth Symphonies, that I know -- are the generally drab affairs one might expect. But the recording of Das Lied . . . .


TONIGHT WE FOCUS ON THE LITTLEST OF THE SONGS,
THE TENOR'S SECOND, "VON DER JUGEND" ("ON YOUTH")

Sunday Classics goes on hiatus (continued)

Tenor Michel Sénéchal (born 1927 and apparently still with us), whom
we're going to hear sing, of all things, Mahler -- and something else

by Ken

As I wrote Friday night in connection with this hiatus Sunday Classics has chosen to go on, a happy surprise for me in beginning to tinker with the heap of hundreds and hundreds of posts that have by now accumulated was the discovery that by golly there really and truly is a heap of wonderful music buried in that heap. This at least slightly undercuts the feeling I generally have when one of these posts is sent out into the ether (beyond the feeling "Thank goodness that's done, or done-ish"), which is "What the [expletive deleted] was the point of that?"

Sharing a lot of music that I love was the basic point of the enterprise -- that and helping people approach it, especially (ideally) people who for whatever reason have been shy about listening. I try like the dickens not to try to tell people how they should listen, because my feeling is that the whole deal with listening is precisely each individual working out his/herself how to listen, and hear. The best I thought I could do was to provide some clues based on my own habits of listening -- that and perhaps providing a nudge and a maybe little courage, and a glimmering of some of the rewards that lie in store.

For the time being, as I also mentioned Friday night, I want to focus on getting that heap of stuff accessible in the form of a stand-alone blog (at sundayclassicswithken.blogspot.com), which I've only just begun doing. (At some point I reckon we'll add a button or some kind of link thingie here on DWT.) I won't bore you with the heap of difficulties involved in this project -- or the even more fierce, and tedious, difficulties involved in the parallel project of updating the index that would provide some sort of overall access to the material, which sputtered and stalled as of July 11, 2010. I myself have spent more time than I care to admit yahoo-ing for links to old posts. What's worse is that I keep finding indications that over these last four to five years there have been posts of which I have no ready recall at all.


NOW TO BUSINESS!

Preview: Before and after -- Mahler learns that he's dying

by Ken

We've actually heard the music we're going to hear (again) in tonight's preview -- an an August 2010 poat called "In the opening vision of Mahler's "Song of the Earth": "Dark is life, is death", which focused on the three tenor songs -- Nos. 1, 3, and 5 -- from Das Lied von der Erde, the work that Mahler undertook following his diagnosis of untreatable heart disease. It seemed obvious to begin by hearing the way his preceding work work, the Eighth Symphony, had closed, with the conclusion of Goethe's Faust. (FYI: This excerpt begins very softly. It gets louder.)

MAHLER: Symphony No. 8 in E-flat: conclusion, "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"

All things transitory are but parable;
here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
here the indescribable is accomplished;
the ever-womanly draws us heavenward.
[much repeated]

-- English translation by Peggie Cochrane

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. BBC Legends, live performance from the Royal Albert Hall, March 20, 1959 (6:39)

CONTRAST THAT WITH THE START OF DAS LIED

In the opening vision of Mahler's "Song of the Earth": "Dark is life, is death"

Jon Vickers, not in his best vocal shape but still a powerful presence, sings "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth" in a 1985 Proms concert, with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. (The other soloist was Vickers' partner in the 1982 Philips recording with Colin Davis, Jessye Norman.)

by Ken

Nobody who's visited Sunday Classics will be surprised that we're taking on Mahler's Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) backwards. This is the work, you'll recall that Mahler conceived, after soaring with Goethe to the cosmological heights in his Symphony No. 8, in the aftermath of the diagnosis of his terminal heart condition.

In Hans Bethge's German translation and adaptation of Chinese poems, The Chinese Flute, Mahler found texts for the six song-movements that made up what should by rights have been his Symphony No. 9, if he hadn't had such superstitious dread of the doom a Ninth Symphony had spelled for Beethoven and Bruckner. (To compound the craziness, by the time the decision about naming was made, the work he would call his Ninth Symphony was mapped out in his head, which led him to believe that he had circumvented the jinx. Of course the joke, such as it was, was on him. He didn't live to complete the work that by his numbering would have been his Tenth Symphony.)

Talk about working backwards! First, in a need to celebrate the artistry of Maureen Forrester, we simply blundered into the undisputed crowning glory of Das Lied, the half-hour final alto song-movement, "The Farewell" ("Der Abschied"). In a way, though, it was helpful to be focusing on Forrester, since it allowed us to focus on her stupendous performances of this music. That spared us the distraction of other, differently glorious performances.

Now, as I explained in Friday's and last night's previews, we've been working our way backwards through the three tenor songs of Das Lied: movements No. 5, "The Drunk in Spring"; No. 3, "On Youth"; and now finally No. 1, "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth." I made the point, in connection with "On Youth," that I have found rather circuitious paths to personal identification with the songs of Das Lied, and I might make the general point that this is what, for me, music or any other art form is about: finding one's own connection to it. I don't believe that anyone can "teach" us how to listen, though many people can, by design or otherwise, provide us with lessons of varying usefulness as we develop our own way of listening.

Just by way of demonstrating how never-ending this process is, in the course of my relistening for these posts, I put on the 1959 EMI recording conducted by Paul Kletzki (made, by cosmic coincidence, some two weeks before the memorable RCA recording conducted by Fritz Reiner), intending to listen, of course, to the first movement, but I let it play, and for as much as I've said I'm unpersuaded by the octave-lower baritone option Mahler offered for the alto songs, and as often as I've listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's performance in this recording and been left unpersuaded by it, this time I found myself warming to it more, especially in the movement that I confess remains most elusive for me, No. 4, "On Beauty." Just goes to show ya . . . er, something.

I've already made an embarrassing attempt to describe my personal connection to "On Youth." You'll surely be relieved to learn that I don't propose to do the same with "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of Earth." Let me just say that this movement, despite being not even a third as long as "The Farewell," has come to be just as personal. But then, it is perhaps one of the abiding deep truths of Das Lied that the small matters as much as the big.

Mahler doesn't leave much idea about the central idea of this drinking song. Three times, at the end of what we might think of as the song's three stanzas, the tenor sings to us:

"Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod"
("Dark is life, is death")


Jon Vickers, tenor; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded March 1981

BREAKING IT DOWN

I've broken this movement down according to those three "stanzas" defined by the "Dunkel ist das Leben"s. I had a much more ambitious musical plan, though still following this breakdown plan, but it self-destructed via my clumsy editing skills and the obstreperousness of the editing software I'm using. Still, we do have what I'm calling parts A, B, and C, more or less as I intended them, with parts parts A and B going beyond their "Dunkel ist das Leben" to include the orchestral music between "stanzas" (and in one case maybe a tiny bit into the next) and parts B and C going back to the previous "Dunkel ist das Leben," so that there is considerable musical overlap. That was intentional, if only to give you an opportunity to hear this amazing music more often.

Before we go there, however, I thought it might be helpful, since I keep mentioning the shocking transformation of Mahler's artistic identity between the climax of the Eighth Symphony and the start of its successor work, to hear that climax of the Eighth Symphony, a setting of the final scene of Goethe's Faust, so here it is.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 8 in E-flat: Part II, conclusion: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"

[English translation by Peggie Cochrane]

All things transitory are but parable;
here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
here the indescribable is accomplished;
the ever-womanly draws us heavenward. [much repeated]


Soloists, choruses, London Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. BBC Legends, recorded live in the Royal Albert Hall, March 20, 1959

Now let's hear the start of Mahler's Song of the Earth, the opening chunk of "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth." Note that all of the Das Lied translations are by Deryck Cooke.

part A

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,
but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!
The song of sorrow
shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.
When sorrow draws near,
wasted lie the gardens of the soul.
Withered and dying are joy and song.
Dark is life, is death.

Murray Dickie, tenor; Philharmonia Orchestra, Paul Kletzki, cond. EMI, recorded October 1959

part B

Dark is life, is death.
Master of this house! Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!
Here, this lute I name my own!
To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,
these are the things that go together.
A full goblet of wine at the right time
is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!
Dark is life, is death.

Francisco Araiza, tenor; Berlin Philharmonic, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. DG, recorded Feb.15-17, 1984
[UPDATE: Thanks to my clip-editing and -processing ham-handedness, and to my general organizational gracelessness under time pressure, I originally posted a defective version of this clip, which started in the right place but continued to the end of the movement. I've got it right now. I think.]

part C

Dark is life, is death.

The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth
will long stand fast and blossom in spring.
But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?
Not a hundred years canst thou delight
in all the rotten trash of this earth!

Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves
squats a mad spectral figure!
It is an ape! Hear how his howling
screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!

Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!
Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!
Dark is life, is death!

James King, tenor; Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded September 1975


NOW LET'S PUT IT BACK TOGETHER

Now we're going to hear "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth" from my three all-around favorite recordings of Das Lied. (There's a large group of wonderful recordings, including some we've sampled, like the Reiner-RCA, the Kletzki-EMI, and the Giulini-DG, or even better the live Giulini performance with the Vienna Philharmonic on Orfeo, that occupy what for me is an elite "second tier.")

We start with Bruno Walter's final recorded crack at this work whose premiere he had conducted not quite 50 years earlier, in Munich in November 1911, five months after the composer's death. This is the eternally splendiferous New York Philharmonic recording for Columbia, from which we heard tenor Ernst Häfliger sing the fifth song, "The Drunk in Spring," Friday night.

Colin Davis's Philips Das Lied offers its share of frustrations but nevertheless seems to me a truly great performance. Davis has never been known for his "way" of working with singers, and in this recording he seems hardly aware of what sort of tenor he's working with in Jon Vickers, with that oddly produced but engulfingly huge voice and singular personal intensity; clearly, to take advantage of his special qualities, he should have had less driven tempos, and a bit of give and take with his conductor, which might also have smoothed out his German. (Vickers traveled with his own set of vowels, which weren't right for any of the languages he sang regularly in -- German, Italian, French, and English.) Davis was more considerate of his alto soloist, Jessye Norman, whose voluminous soprano descended easily into true contralto territory.

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth):
i. "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde"
("The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth")

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,
but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!
The song of sorrow
shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.
When sorrow draws near,
wasted lie the gardens of the soul.
Withered and dying are joy and song.
Dark is life, is death.

Master of this house!
Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!
Here, this lute I name my own!
To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,
these are the things that go together.
A full goblet of wine at the right time
is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!
Dark is life, is death.

The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth
will long stand fast and blossom in spring.
But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?
Not a hundred years canst thou delight
in all the rotten trash of this earth!

Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves
squats a mad spectral figure!
It is an ape! Hear how his howling
screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!

Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!
Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!
Dark is life, is death!

Ernst Häfliger, tenor; New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded April 1960

Jon Vickers, tenor; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded March 1981

And now, from what just may be my very favorite Das Lied recording, Otto Klemperer's EMI stereo remake (which by the way was Christa Ludwig's first recording of the piece, when she claims she didn't understand the music yet -- ha! so much for the importance of "understanding"), let's hear all three tenor songs, in part for the opportunity to hear the astounding Fritz Wunderlich sing them. I think, by the way, that it must surely have been via the Wunderlich-Klemperer recording that I experienced the revelation regarding "On Youth" which I tried to describe last night; now if only Colin Davis had had the sense to take a tempo like this in his recording with Jon Vickers!

(I notice that we haven't talked at all about the strange vocal requirements of this music, which result in its being sung by such a strange assortment of tenors, from light "character" tenors like Murray Dickie and Richard Lewis to full-fledged heroic tenors like Vickers and James King. Well, some other time perhaps.)

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde
i. "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde"
("The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth")

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,
but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!
The song of sorrow
shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.
When sorrow draws near,
wasted lie the gardens of the soul.
Withered and dying are joy and song.
Dark is life, is death.

Master of this house!
Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!
Here, this lute I name my own!
To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,
these are the things that go together.
A full goblet of wine at the right time
is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!
Dark is life, is death.

The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth
will long stand fast and blossom in spring.
But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?
Not a hundred years canst thou delight
in all the rotten trash of this earth!

Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves
squats a mad spectral figure!
It is an ape! Hear how his howling
screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!

Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!
Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!
Dark is life, is death!

iii. "Von der Jugend" ("On Youth")

In the middle of the little pool
stands a pavilion of green
and of white porcelain.

Like the back of a tiger
arches the bridge of jade
over to the pavilion.

In the little house friends are sitting,
beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting;
several are writing verses.

Their silken sleeves slip
backwards, their silken caps
perch gaily on the back of their necks.

On the little pool's still
surface everything appears
fantastically in a mirror image.

Everything is standing on its head
in the pavilion of green
and of white porcelain;

Like a half-moon stands the bridge,
upside-down its arch. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking, chatting.

v. "Der Trunkene im Frühling" 
("The Drunk in Spring")

If life is but a dream,
why then toil and fret?
I drink till I can drink no longer,
the whole livelong day!

And when I can drink no longer,
since gullet and soul are full,
then I stagger to my door
and sleep stupendously!

What do I hear on awakening? Hark!
A bird sings in the tree.
I ask him if the spring is here;
I feel as if it were a dream.

The bird twitters, "Yes!
Spring is here -- came overnight!"
In deepest wonder I listen.
The bird sings and laughs.

I feel my glass again,
and drain it to the dregs,
and sing, until the moon shines bright
in the black firmament.

And when I can sing no longer,
then I go back to sleep;
for what does spring matter to me?
Let me be drunk!

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Philharmonia/New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded 1965-66

#

Preview: Mahler's view of idyllic youths turns them upside-down

Tenor Robert Dean Smith sings "On Youth" from Mahler's Song of the Earth, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink, in November 2006 (part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Haitink's association with the orchestra).

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth):
iii. "Von der Jugend" ("On Youth")
[English translation by Deryck Cooke]

In the middle of the little pool
stands a pavilion of green
and of white porcelain.

Like the back of a tiger
arches the bridge of jade
over to the pavilion.

In the little house friends are sitting,
beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting;
several are writing verses.

Their silken sleeves slip
backwards, their silken caps
perch gaily on the back of their necks.

On the little pool's still
surface everything appears
fantastically in a mirror image.

Everything is standing on its head
in the pavilion of green
and of white porcelain;

Like a half-moon stands the bridge,
upside-down its arch. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking, chatting.

by Ken

As I explained last night, heading toward tomorrow's Sunday Classics post, we're working our way backwards through the three tenor songs (Nos. 1, 3, and 5) of Mahler's Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), starting last night with the last of them, "The Drunk in Spring" ("Der Trunkene im Frühling"). Tonight we come to the shortest of the song symphony's six movements, No. 3, "On Youth" ("Von der Jugend"), which typically lasts 3-3½ minutes -- though tomorrow we're going to hear the longest as well as most remarkable performance of the song I've ever heard.


FOR THIS SONG I PROMISED YOU A STORY . . .

. . . of "the special personal identification that opened this song up for me -- or perhaps opened me up for this song" type. Here goes.

Preview: In Mahler's "Song of the Earth" we meet a springtime drunk

The elegant Swiss tenor Ernst Häfliger is our first

soloist in Mahler's song "The Drunk in Spring."

by Ken

Bruno Walter's 1960 Columbia recording of Mahler's song symphony Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), the composition that fell between his Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and would have been No. 9 if he hadn't been so superstitious about allotting that fateful number to a symphony, was originally released on three LP sides. Surprisingly quickly, though, it was compressed onto two very well-filled sides, and that was my first recording of Das Lied, whose texts are German adaptations by Hans Bethge (from the collection The Chinese Flute) of Chinese originals.

Even as I was getting to know the piece, it was obvious that the emotional center of gravity was the concluding sixth movement, the half-hour song "The Farewell" ("Der Abschied," which we blundered our way into in our Maureen Forrester remembrance), about equal in length to its five predecessors put together, so that was where I usually headed, and since it was preceded on Side 2 by the last of the tenor songs, that meant I listened just as often to the contrastingly very brief song "The Drunk in Spring" ("Der Trunkene im Frühling"), as sung by the elegant Swiss tenor Ernst Häfliger -- a studio replacement, you'll recall, for the English tenor Richard Lewis, who sang in Walter's live New York performances that April but had only months earlier recorded Das Lied with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony for RCA. (We're going to hear some of that performance tomorrow night.)


INEVITABLY, THE ATTENTION OF THE DAS LIED LISTENER
GRAVITATES TO THE WEIGHTIER ALTO SONGS (NOS. 2, 4, 6)