Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work

"Mahler's way of thinking in music did not easily conform to the rules of the symphonic scholars. He could not contain himself in the A B A divisions of symphonic form. In this unique first movement he adapted large-scale sonata form to his own power of improvisation. He believed that music should continually grow, phrase by phrase, one section balancing another, by laws not only of musical form as usually obeyed but also by psychological and organic growth and the logic of contrast. . . ."

-- Neville Cardus, in his "Appreciation of Mahler's Third"
[reproduced in part in the last post in this Mahler 3 series]

"This final published version [of the Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony] is clearly both tauter and richer, for there is less repetition and more diversity, and Brahms has cast fresh light on his themes by bringing them into new relationships. Altogether these changes provide a deeply fascinating insight into genius at work."

-- Robert Pascall, vice chair of the New Complete Brahms Edition (and editor of the symphonies), in his notes for the Mackerras-Teldec Brahms 1

REMEMBER THE VERY DIFFERENT VERSIONS WE'VE
HEARD OF THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO OF BRAHMS 1?

BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto

► A reconstruction of the "initial performing version":

► And this: the familiar published (i.e., final) version
(which we'll be hearing -- and thinking about -- a lot more!):

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, January 1997

WE'LL TALK ABOUT THEM, BUT FOR NOW MIGHT WE HAVE
MAESTRO M. PLAY US ANOTHER SYMPHONIC ANDANTE?

BBC Philharmonic, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. BBC Music Magazine, recorded live in Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (England), Nov. 16, 2002 (published 2005)

by Ken

It's taken us a long time and a crazy path to get here, "here" being out-the-other-end of the first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony --

OUR CRAZY PATH TO WHEREVER WE ARE NOW:

► "Setting out to trace the lineage of Boston Symphony concert-masters back to 1962, we wind up trapped in the gigantic first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony," July 23

► "Coming momentarily (if not sooner): An adventure in musical metamorphosis -- presented in a pair of mutually accessible parts," Sept. 22

► "Part 1: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind!," Sept 23

► "Part 2: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind! (Then again, are we so sure?)," Sept. 27

► "Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work," today

BECAUSE THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO IS SO DEAR TO ME,
THE SC ARCHIVE TEEMS WITH PERFORMANCES OF IT

While we've got another whole group of recordings coming up in this post, for immediate hearing I've plucked out two, from the Brahms symphony cycles I feel closest to, returning to them regularly with tingly expectation that's always rewarded. Kurt Masur's Andante sostenuto and Kurt Sanderling's are different; notably, though Masur sounds in no way rushed, Sanderling sets a still-more-spacious pace, which the Dresden players fill with glowing life. But both draw me back above all because the orchestras have achieved real identification with the music, playing not just with heart-enriching beauty and finesse but with a soul-stirring sense of really living the music, whether in melodic or accompanimental or ensemble writing -- all of it sounded and made to fit together with such fullness and depth and general "rightness" of expression.

(It sobers me to realize that I've been loving the Sandering-Dresden Brahms cycle for something like half a century now, especially enjoying, in the early decades, those beautiful Eurodisc LP pressings.)

Coming momentarily (if not sooner): An adventure in musical metamorphosis -- presented in a pair of mutually accessible parts

EARLY MORNING UPDATE: Part 1 of the post is now posted. Part 2 will be coming soon.

UPDATE: Two more clips added, clearly related to each other, and to the other clips -- can you figure out how they're related?

STAGE 1 -- a grand old theme, which comes to us stated in three distinctly different ways:


Vienna Philharmonic, Rafael Kubelik, cond. Decca, recorded September 1957

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded April 1977

Staatskapelle Dresden, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Eurodisc, recorded Nov. 1971

STAGE 2 -- Talk about a transformation! Again, we hear it at three slightly but noticeably different paces:


Berlin Radio Symphony, Heinz Rögner, cond. Berlin Classics, recorded 1983

Bavarian Radio Symphony, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded May 1967

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded April 1993

STAGE 3 -- This one's a doozy, which'll really come into its own in Part 2 of the post:


Bavarian Radio Symphony, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded May 1967

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, April 1972

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, cond. Live performance, Nov. 1974

by Ken

That's right, what's coming up is a two-part post, whose two parts (and I've never attempted this) are going to be posted at the same time and be mutually accessible, meaning that you can, if you wish, jump back and forth between them. I apologize for, but am not going to further comment on here, my long blog silence. (There'll be a few words in Part 1 of the post. But I can't change what is, or was. What is, or was, is -- or was.

Before we take our closer look at Gurre-Lieder, I want to think about two performers who make one performance a special case

The ruins of Gurre Castle (as of 2007), in the far northeast of Denmark (on the map Gurre looks like a stone's throw across the water from Sweden) where King Valdemar I is supposed to have tucked away his beautiful, dearly beloved mistress Tove -- until, well, thereupon hangs a tale.

Which we'll get to. Just maybe not right away.

So it begins --


Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded live in the Kongress-Saal of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, March 9-12, 1965

Staatskapelle Dresden, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. Teldec, recorded live in the Semper Oper, August 1995

Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton, cond. Live performance from Grieg Hall, in the Bergen International Festival, June 4, 2008

Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

In time, these Gurre-Lieder, or Songs of Gurre, come to Tove's declaration, "Nun sag' ich dir zum ersten Mal, 'König Volmer, ich liebe dich'" (replaying the performances we've already heard) --

Now I say to you for the first time, "King Volmer, I love you."
Now I kiss you for the first time, and fling my arms around you.
And if you were to say I had earlier said it
and ever given you my kiss,
then I say, "The king is a fool,
who recalls vague rubbish."
And if you say, "Indeed I am such a fool,"
then I'll say, "The king is right."
But if you say, "No, I'm not that,"
Then I'll say, "The king is bad."
For I have kissed all my roses to death,
all the while I was thinking of you.

Gundula Janowitz (s), Tove; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

Jessye Norman (s), Tove; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live in Symphony Hall, April 1979

by Ken

Believe it or not, we're making progress, even if it's of a kind of sidewise sort. I remember there was a plan to illustrate the special qualities I hear in the conducting of Josef Krips (1902-1974), which at the time seemed to require nothing more than plucking an abundance of for-instances out of the Sunday Classics Archive. I'm not so good at just-plucking-out, however, and as soon as I started, the project began to grow and shift, especially when I found myself taking a better listen than I have before to a performance I've owned for ages: Krips's 1969 Vienna Festival rendering of Arnold Schoenberg's monumental cantata-oratorio-or-whatever (I'm not aware of a term that begins to cover it), Gurre-Lieder.

At that point it seemed necessary to pause the Krips quick-tour and spend a jot of time with Gurre-Lieder, one of the most arresting and astonishing musical creations I know. No sooner had I set out on that tack (well, maybe many, many hours of toil after I set out on that tack), I realized that before we got to that, it might be useful for me to explain why that particular performance exerted such a fascination for me. Which meant a closer look at conductor Krips and the singer who incarnated King Waldemar's inamorata Tove, which is to say the soprano Gundula Janowitz (born 1937).

Again, I first thought this could be accomplished easily and painlessly by a simple raid of the archives. And probably it could have. But again, my mind doesn't work that way. Soon enough I was back at work crafting whole new sets of audio clips and puzzling out a navigable path through them. And in just a moment we're going to partake of a teasing taste of G.J.


BUT FIRST, BACK TO THE BEGINNING -- OF GURRE-LIEDER

Dvořák comes to the New World -- plus afterthoughts on last week's audio clips

The first page of the contract (put on public display in 2013 after being recently rediscovered) proffered by Mrs. Jeannette Thurber and signed by Antonín Dvořák in 1892 which brought the composer to New York to serve as director of her new National Conservatory for Music [from a photo by Chang W. Lee for The New York Times]

It was an audacious act of Gilded Age New York. Jeannette Thurber, a wealthy patron trying to create not just a new American music school but, more broadly, a new American school of music, decided in 1891 to hire one of the greatest composers of the day: Antonin Dvorak.

She offered him $15,000 a year — more than 25 times what he made at home in Prague — and promised him summers off. In exchange, she made him promise to work regular hours six days a week at her school, instruct “the most talented pupils only” and conduct concerts.

After months of trans-Atlantic negotiations, they eventually struck the deal that brought Dvorak to New York City in 1892 for an eventful three-year sojourn to lead Mrs. Thurber’s National Conservatory of Music of America — a period in which he composed some of his best work, including his American-inflected “New World” Symphony and Cello Concerto. . . .

-- Michael Cooper, in The Times, Aug. 24, 2013

Vienna Philharmonic, Rafael Kubelik, cond. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, October 1956

by Ken

The last time I took the walking tour that Francis Morrone calls "Dvořák in Love" (a title borrowed from the novel by the Czech-Canadian novelist Josef Škvorecký, which takes off from the true-life story of the composer's three-year sojourn in the U.S., Francis gave me a quizzical look and asked, hadn't I already taken this tour?

Before I get to my answer, I should explain that while the title Dvořák in Love to most of us suggests some sort of romantic dalliance, in fact, as a Goodreads blurb puts it, "This splendid novel tells the story of Dvorak's utterly requited love affair with America."

Now, back to Francis's question. I acknowledged that I had taken the tour before, and explained that, first, even among Francis's tours, than which walking tours don't get any better, this one had left a powerful imprint in my imagination, and, second, given how much I forget of what I "learn" on a tour (my standard estimate is that I remember on a good day maybe 10 percent of what I've been told), not to mention how much probably never properly registered, I wanted a chance to "fix" more of the tour in my brain.

I might have added something I know from experience of other tours of Francis's that I've done more than once: that even when he repeats a tour, it isn't exactly the same tour. Not to mention that on the later occasion(s) I'm not exactly the same person I was.


I STILL MEAN TO TALK ABOUT THE "DVOŘÁK IN LOVE" TOUR,
BUT LET'S GET BACK TO THE BIT OF MUSIC WE JUST HEARD

For one thing, it was Francis who got me to thinking about Josf Suk and Kurt Masur as they relate to the subject of Dvořák, as you may have noticed in last week's post -- and maybe not just on that subject, which will also involve some more talk and, more happily, more music. I wasn't surprised, when I took a look in the Archive, to see how much from each of these special performers we've heard. This wasn't planned; it just happened that way.

And speaking of last week's post, I also want to make some remarks of a housekeeping nature about the audio clips, which I'm emboldened to want to talk about a bit -- just not right now.

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

The First Symphony sets out the modus operandi for Mahler's symphonic career

MAHLER: Songs of a Wayfarer:
iv. "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes")

Thomas Allen sings the last of Mahler's Wayfarer Songs, "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes"), with Václav Neumann conducting the Mahler Youth Orchestra, in Frankfurt's Alte Oper, 1991.

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded Oct. 18, 1958

Maureen Forrester, contralto; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded Dec. 28, 1958

Thomas Quasthoff, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, cond. DG, recorded June 2003

by Ken

In Friday night's preview, preparing for today's assault on the Mahler First Symphony, we heard, or rather reheard, the transformation Mahler wrought to transform the second of his four Songs of a Wayfarer into the exposition of the symphony's first movement, something we first heard in the March 2012 preview post "From song to symphony -- the journey of Mahler's lonely wayfarer," when we were tackling the Wayfarer Songs. In another preview post a couple of weeks later we listened to the transformation of the second section of the final Wayfarer Song, "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes"), which we just hear complete, into the haunting central section of the third movement of the First Symphony. As I also mentioned, we've also heard the second movement of the First, meaning that the only thing that will be (mostly) new for us is the Finale.


LET'S DIG RIGHT IN WITH THE FIRST MOVEMENT

Karl Ridderbusch as the King in "Lohengrin" -- this is what's now called "shouting"???

ELSA has appeared in a very simple white garment and overwhelmed the assembled nobles with the purity and innocence of her bearing. Now KING HEINRICH tries to get, well, anything at all out of her regarding the disappearance of her little brother Gottfired, which she is accused of being responsible for.

KING HEINRICH: Are you she, Elsa of Brabant?
[ELSA nods her head affirmatively.]
Do you recognize me as your judge?
[ELSA turns her head toward the KING, looks him in the eye, and then affirms with a trust-filled gesture.]
Then I ask you further:
Is the charge known to you,
which has been brought so weightily against you?
[ELSA glances at TELRAMUND and ORTRUD, shudders, bows her head sadly, and affirms.]
What do you have to say against the charge?
[ELSA through a gesture: "Nothing!"]
So you acknowledge your guilt?
ELSA [staring sadly for a long time around her]: My poor brother!
ALL THE MEN: How wondrous! What strange behavior!
KING HEINRICH: Speak, Elsa, what do you have to confide to me?

by Ken

Can't somebody get that damned Ridderbusch fellow to stop ferchrissakes shouting? (This is a very tiny joke, which I'll explain in a moment.)

This two-minute-plus extract comes from what is still my favorite Lohengrin recording, the 1971 DG studio version conducted by Sunday Classics stalwart Rafael Kubelik. In it we hear Karl Ridderbusch in his matchless prime as King Heinrich and Gundula Janowitz singing Elsa's single line, one of the most haunting lines in opera, "Mein armer Bruder. (I had thought of doing a collage of maybe ten singers singing it, but do you have any idea how much time editing such a thing would have taken?) If there are two more beautiful, riveting minutes of music anywhere in the recorded annals, I don't know what they are.

Since we last dipped into Lohengrin, this past February in the "Remembering Eugen Jochum" posts that included excerpts from his 1954 Bayreuth performance, I've gotten hold of a CD edition of the Kubelik-DG recording, which I had only on LP and open-reel tape, and my admiration is if anything greater than ever. I think the Act I Prelude is an excellent example.

WAGNER: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded April 1971

We've heard some beautiful performances of the Lohengrin Prelude. In that February post, for example, we heard one by Sir Adrian Boult. But I'm not sure I've ever heard a fuller, more pulsing-with-life one than Kubelik's. And this is true of the Lohengrin performance as a whole. I'm not sure people generally appreciate just how difficult an opera this is to make musical and dramatic sense of, and Kubelik's performance has a riveting continuity I've never heard matched in a lifetime that has included a lot of Lohengrin performances. (Curiously, Kubelik's 1967 Bavarian Radio broadcast Meistersinger, which acquired a legend before anyone without archival access was able to hear it, and which to my ears turns out to be crashingly ordinary, is praised to the skies by the online cognoscenti.)


IT WAS, IN FACT, A BIZARRE ONLINE REVIEW OF THIS
RECORDING THAT TRIGGERED THIS SERIES OF POSTS

Remembering Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe

The arrival of the Comedians in Act III of The Bartered Bride

BEDRICH SMETANA: The Bartered Bride:
Overture and Dances (Polka; Furiant; Dance of the Comedians)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. EMI, recorded 1951

by Ken

With no particular rhyme or reason, as I explained in Friday night's preview, we're hearing snatches of treasures I found in an embarrassingly large order I just received from that indispensable repository of (mostly but by no means only) classical cut-out and overstock CDs and DVDs, the Berkshire Record Outlet. These particular snatches spotlight three "K" conductors. I'm especially fond of their solidly grounded musicianship, making music from the inside rather than imposing external "rules" or playing for crowd-grabbing "effects."

Friday night we heard orchestral excerpts by Berlioz and Hindemith from a four-CD "portrait" of the wonderful Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996, seen here around the time he was music director of the Chicago Symphony, 1950-53) drawing on his early recordings for EMI, Mercury, and Decca. I thought we'd start out today's wider sampling by listening to some of my favorite music, the Overture and Dances from Bedrich Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride (which in fact we already heard back in a November 2009 post, "It's not for nothing that Smetana was dubbed 'the father of Czech music'").


LONGTIME READERS HAVE HEARD LOTS OF KUBELIK,
AND ALSO LOTS OF JOSEF KRIPS AND RUDOLF KEMPE

Preview: Three "K"s -- remembering three conductors who were great artists

The gossamer "Ballet of the Sylphs" from Berlioz's Damnation de Faust is played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik in this 1950 EMI recording, from a four-CD Kubelik "Portrait," one of the treasures that came out of my nearly 17-pound Berkshire Record Outlet carton this week.

by Ken

I'd been good for so long. Oh sure, I usually scanned the new classical overstock and cut-out listings on the Berkshire Record Outlet website most every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and sure, I dumped stuff in my shopping cart. But that didn't commit me to anything, and I figured that by and large the things that interested me would interest enough other site followers that they would soon enough go out of stock -- "soon enough" in this case being "in time to protect me from actually buying them."

Every now and then, something appears that (a) I really want and (b) I know can't remain in stock very long. Which happened just recently with a CD issue -- finally! -- of the not-quite-complete series of Beethoven string quartets recorded by the Paganini Quartet for RCA Victor between 1947 and 1953. Not only have these never been on CD; I'm not aware of them ever being reissued on LP. And in fact, all the LP copies I've ever come across have been really chewed up. They may not have sold a huge number of copies, but the people who bought them apparently played the heck out of them.

What that means, when there's an item I really want, is that I have to take a look at my shopping cart, to see what might still be available. And apparently it had been long enough since my last order that, even though yes, a fair number of things I'd dumped in had indeed gone out of stock, there was a heckuva a lot of stuff still poised for purchase. I started studying the list like it was a work of scholarship, or maybe a primary source document. I tried everything in my powers (which unfortunately include only a small store of willpower) to jettison items to get the order down to manageable size. But still there remained something like 46 other items (CDs and DVDs, many of them of course multiple sets). What could I do? The flesh is weak.

I won't tell you how much the order came to in dollars, but in weight it came to nearly 17 pounds. Since it arrived earlier this week, andI've only begun to sift through the treasures. But I noticed a number of samplings from conductors of a sort I'm especially fond of.

It goes back to a point I was making just last week, contrasting performers who think they can assemble performances by tacking bunches of notes together following some rules they think they've found in some book or article with performers who understand that the only way you find you way inside a piece of music is by finding how and why it moves from the inside.

WE'VE ALREADY HEARD A MORSEL FROM
ONE OF OUR THREE K'S, RAFAEL KUBELIK'S . . .

. . .  "Ballet of the Sylphs," above, and we'll hear another Kubelik tantalizer in a moment, along with samples from our other conducting "K"s.

Mahler's most characteristically "Mahlerian" symphony is also his least loved

Claudio Abbado conducts the first five minutes of the chamber-music-like fourth movement, the second "Night Music" (yes, with guitar, mandolin, and cowbells!), of Mahler's Seventh Symphony -- at the 2006 Lucerne Festival.

by Ken

We concluded Friday night's "Night Music" preview with a two-minute-plus "glimpse" of "what I think qualifies as the ultimate in Night Music." Here's the complete movement:

MAHLER: Symphony No. 7 in E minor:
ii. Nachtmusik I (Night Music I): Allegro moderato


Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971

If you wonder about that movement designation "Nachtmusik I," it means just what it says. It's the first of two "Night Music" movements. Here's the other, "Nachtmusik II," from the same recording.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 7 in E minor:
iv. Nachtmusik II (Night Music II): Andante amoroso


Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971


IT'S FITTING THAT WE START WITH THE 2ND
AND 4TH MOVEMENTS OF MAHLER 7'S FIVE

. . . because that's where Mahler started. As it happens, we've already heard his Sixth Symphony ("The Andante of the Sixth Symphony -- the most beautiful movement Mahler ever composed?" and "Is Mahler's Sixth Symphony any more 'tragic' than life itself?," July 2011), so we're starting more or less where he did. And the first ideas that came to him which seemed capable of being developed further were the two Nachtmusik movements. And then he was stuck. He doesn't seem to have lost confidence that his pair of "Night Music"s could be the core of something; he just couldn't figure out what.

In a useful liner note for Otto Klemperer's 1968 EMI recording of the Mahler Seventh, the Austrian-British musicologist-critic Mosco Carner (1904-1985) tells the story of how the composer overcame this creative block:

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.