Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde
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Musicologist Dr Flora Willson chooses her favourite recording of Mahler's orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde.
Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, 'Song of the Earth', is a set of six songs for two voices and orchestra, but is it a song-cycle or a symphony? Mahler certainly intended for Das Lied von der Erde to reflect the world in co taining everything, the whole range of human emotions and earthly experience, but the work doesn't easily fall into either the category of song-cycles or truly symphonic works. Mahler drew his texts for Das Lied from a compendium called The Chinese Flute, a translation of Chinese poems by the German poet Hans Bethge.
Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde in 1908-9 within a year of losing his beloved daughter Maria and receiving the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him in 1911. The work begins and ends with two of Mahler's most famous songs: Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (The Drinking Song of Earth\\u2019s Sorrows) and Der Abscheid (The Farewell), a hauntingly beautiful, bleak and heartrending farewell to life as the 'sun sets behind the mountains.' The intervening songs are the introspective\\u2018Der Einsame im Herbst\\u2019 (The Lonely One in Autumn) for mezzo soprano, the sprightly \\u2018Von der Jugend\\u2019 (Of Youth) for tenor, \\u2018Von der Sch\\xf6nheit\\u2019 (Of Beauty) depicting an innocent scene by a river bank where girls are picking flowers but are then briefly threatened by the arrival of boys on horseback, and \\u2018Der Trunkene im Fr\\xfchling\\u2019 (The Drunkard in Spring).
Presented by Andrew McGregor.
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