The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gustav Mahler · a symphony for a tenor and an alto (or baritone) voice and orchestra, after Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte · six songs scored as one work, the last as long as the other five together · about an hour in performance
Mode
Song-symphony; six orchestral songs for two alternating voices, with no movement in sonata form
Mythos
Departure: the drinker against the dark, the tired heart in autumn, the friend’s farewell made a death, the earth renewed without us
Phase
Six songs across the seasons, autumn to spring and an evening to a parting; A minor at the first song, C major at the last, not the opening key
Presentation
Concert music; tenor in the odd songs and alto (or baritone) in the even, a large orchestra used mostly as chamber groups, setting Bethge’s German as Mahler altered it
Register
From a horn cry and a refrain rising a semitone at each return, through porcelain, lotus and birdsong, to a funeral march over low C and one word repeated over an open chord
Scale
Two voices, one life, its friends and the earth; about an hour, nearly half of it the last song
Governing Proposition
Two voices that never sing together take turns through six songs: a tenor who drinks against the dark, and an alto who grows tired in autumn and at the end takes leave of a friend and of the world, while an orchestral funeral march between two poems tells the death the words never name. The wager of the work is that a self can consent to its own ending while loving what will go on without it, and that an ending can say so by not closing: the last word repeated over a chord that does not resolve, the earth going on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work opens on a cry. Horns give out a falling figure, A, G, E, three notes from the A minor pentatonic scale, and the tenor enters against the full orchestra with a drinking song. The figure is the work’s cell, and it will be heard again in the last song, in another key and another mood. The voice has to fight to be heard here, and often does not win: the balance of the first song is the one place where the score asks more of its singer than the hall will give.
Each stanza closes on a refrain, “Dunkel ist das Leben” (“dark is life”), and each time it comes back it is a semitone higher. Three times the floor rises under the same words, and the rise is the terror: not a climax reached but a pressure that will not stop. Between the refrains the firmament and the earth are set against the span of one life, and on the graves something howls. “Ein Aff’ ist’s” (“it is an ape”). It is what despair sees when it looks at the dead.
His answer is to drink. The song ends where it began, in A minor, with the cup raised against the dark, and nothing in it has moved beyond that answer. The work is called a symphony, by its composer, for a tenor and an alto or baritone voice and orchestra, and this is its first movement, but it is a song with a refrain, not a sonata. The tenor will sing three of the six songs, the first, third and fifth, and each is a pleasure set against death. The other voice has not yet been heard.
Movement II
“Der Einsame im Herbst”, the lonely one in autumn, is in D minor, and its sound is the opposite of the first song’s. Muted violins turn in a slow figure that does not stop, and the oboe draws a line over it, a second melody heard against the first. The orchestra that shouted is now a handful of players. The alto enters on an autumn scene, and the voice is tired before it says so.
Then it says so: “Mein Herz ist müde” (“my heart is tired”). The song is a lament that does not rise to protest. Where the tenor drank against the dark, the alto waits in it. This is the second answer to mortality, and from here on the two alternate: the tenor in the odd songs, the alto in the even, and the two never sing together. Mahler allowed a baritone for the even songs, and both are the work as written; the alto is the usual choice.
The two voices are kept apart as the two answers are. The drinker’s songs are short and bright at the surface; the solitary’s are long and withdrawn, and by the end the solitary will hold most of the work. Already in the second song the method that will govern the whole is in place: a large orchestra written as chamber music, two lines sounding one melody at once, the pentatonic not as a colour of the East but as the material from which melody and harmony are made.
Movement III
The middle of the work is three pictures. “Von der Jugend”, in B flat major and the shortest song, is a porcelain pavilion in a pond, where young friends sit together, and woodwind and mandolin make the porcelain audible. The whole scene is reflected in the still water, and in the reflection everything stands on its head. It is the work’s emblem: a world that holds its own inversion, youth seen upside down.
“Von der Schönheit”, in G major, is the alto’s picture: girls picking lotus flowers, and young men galloping past on horseback, the orchestra breaking into a gallop with them, and the girls’ longing watched from the bank. The galloping episode is a genre picture more than a step in the argument, and the song’s beauty is watched from outside, as everything in the middle of the work is watched. “Der Trunkene im Frühling”, in A major, gives the tenor back his cup: he asks a bird whether spring has come, and does not care. He drinks again.
These songs are charm and wit, and about a quarter of the work’s time is light. Their order is not arbitrary: drink, youth, beauty, drink again, each a pleasure stated against the outer songs, and each obeys the work’s law as a picture before it does as an argument. The fifth song restates the first song’s answer in a lighter key, and it is where the subtractive test finds the most give. The law is heard in them because the first two songs taught it, and the last will confirm it.
Movement IV
The last song, “Der Abschied”, the farewell, is as long as the other five together: nearly half the work. It begins on low C and a stroke of the tam-tam, the oboe gives out a turning figure, and the alto enters in something near recitative, the solo flute winding birdlike arabesques around the voice. Voice and flute move in free time over a held bass. It is evening, and the song, in C minor, is about a friend and a parting. The large orchestra is used here as a few players at a time.
The text joins two poems, and Mahler set them as one song with a gulf between them. The gulf is an orchestral interlude, a funeral march over low C with strokes of the tam-tam, several minutes without a voice. Nothing in the text has said that anyone is dying. The march says it. Remove it and the friend’s arrival becomes a scene; with it, the farewell that follows is a passing, and the death the words never name has been told in orchestra alone.
Then the second poem, after a night. The friend comes on horseback, a last cup is offered, and he is going into the mountains; he wanders “nach der Heimat” (“toward home”), and home turns out to be the earth itself. The parting at evening, the friend on horseback, the last cup are the oldest gestures of farewell, and Bethge’s China, a picture book of pavilions and lotus pickers, falls away from them. What remains is the opposition the whole work is built on: the earth, which is renewed, and the person, who is not.
Movement V
The last lines turn from the self to the world: “Die liebe Erde allüberall” (“the dear earth everywhere”) blooms in spring. The key has reached C major, the relative major of the A minor in which the work began, so the end is the beginning’s other face. The falling cell of the first song’s horn call returns. Then the alto repeats one word, “ewig” (“for ever”), over a chord of C, E and G with an added A, while celesta, harps and mandolin hang over it. The chord does not resolve, and no cadence follows. The work ends by not ending.
Mahler sketched the work in the summer of 1908 at Toblach and called it a symphony, after Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte of 1907, whose German he cut, reordered, retitled and added to. He did not live to hear it. He died in Vienna on 18 May 1911, and Bruno Walter conducted the first performance in Munich on 20 November 1911, six months later. Mahler revised his scores in rehearsal; this one he never heard, and the tenor’s struggle with the orchestra in the first song is the kind of balance he would have adjusted. His own version for voices and piano survives, and Schoenberg began an arrangement for chamber ensemble that Rainer Riehn completed: evidence of the work, not the work.
Walter recorded it in Vienna in 1936 and again in 1952, the second time with Kathleen Ferrier, and it has been in the concert hall and on record continuously since, central to the Mahler repertory and to the alto’s. Whether the ending is consolation or dissolution is still argued, and the score holds both: a voice that consents, a harmony that does not close. On this desk it stands a step below the Symphony No. 9 that followed it and below Winterreise, both at 9.2, and a tenth above Verdi’s Otello. What it brought into the open holds without the biography: that the earth goes on without us, and that a life can be given up in love of what it leaves.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance at the ends. The first song states the case and the last answers it, and the funeral interlude that joins the two poems of “Der Abschied” is the death the text never names; remove it and the friend’s farewell becomes a scene, not a passing. The alternation of voices is required: the tenor’s songs are intoxication, the alto’s solitude and leave-taking, and the order sets them against each other. “Von der Jugend”, the shortest, is needed for its mirror. The give is in the middle: “Der Trunkene im Frühling” restates the first song’s answer in a lighter key, and the horsemen of “Von der Schönheit” are a genre picture more than a step.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the earth renews itself without us, and a self can consent to its own ending while loving what will go on without it. The work gives two answers to mortality and lets the second judge the first. The tenor drinks against the dark, and the ape howling on the graves, “Ein Aff’ ist’s” (“it is an ape”), is what his despair sees. The alto answers with leave-taking, and at the end the last lines turn from the self to “Die liebe Erde allüberall” (“the dear earth everywhere”). The unresolved last chord discloses what the words cannot hold. Held down because the proposition is old, and because resignation lies near the line between meaning and mood.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height reaches the ceiling and returns. The first song’s opening horn cry, and the refrain rising a semitone at each return, are the sublime of terror. The second song is beauty at its most withdrawn: muted violins in a slow ostinato, the oboe’s line over them, a tired voice. “Der Abschied” is the summit: the low C and tam-tam of its opening, the flute’s birdlike arabesques over a voice in near recitative, the long funeral march between the poems, and the close, where one word is repeated over a chord that does not resolve while celesta, harps and mandolin hang over it. Held off the top on frequency, by design: about a quarter of the time is light.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The archetype is built, not cited. The work is a journey through the seasons toward a departure: autumn in the second song, spring in the fifth, and in the last, after a night, the friend’s going into the mountains, “nach der Heimat” (“toward home”), where home is the earth itself. The earth is the one figure that does not die, and the whole is built on the opposition of the earth, which is renewed, and the person, who is not. The parting at evening, the friend on horseback, the last cup are the oldest gestures of farewell, and the funeral march makes the farewell a death. Held down by the particular: Bethge’s China is a picture book of pavilions, lotus pickers and horsemen, and the friend is no one in particular.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the late Romantic symphony and the orchestral song, Mahler’s own above all. The departures: a symphony made wholly of songs, with no movement in sonata form; a last song as long as the other five together; a large orchestra used as chamber groups, with mandolin and celesta; the pentatonic and heterophony, two lines sounding one melody at once, as structural method, not colour; voice and solo flute moving in free time over a pedal; an ending without a cadence. The stake was real: at its date nothing in symphonic practice ended on an unresolved added sixth. Held below the top because the road was his own: the Wunderhorn symphonies had already put song inside the symphony, and the Kindertotenlieder had made orchestral song a chamber texture.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Two voices that never meet are the two answers to mortality, kept apart. The weight of the last song is the knowledge: the farewell takes as long as everything before it, so time stretches at the point of leaving. The ending’s form is the claim: the voice repeats “ewig” (“for ever”) and the harmony does not close, so the work ends by not ending, and the added sixth is the earth going on. The interlude is form as event, a death told in orchestra alone. Recast for voices and piano, as Mahler also wrote it, the work loses the colour of its earth; as a symphony without voices, its words. Held below the top by the middle songs, where the form is nearest to a container of pictures.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and a century of it. The literature: Adorno’s Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (1960), Donald Mitchell’s Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985), Stephen Hefling’s Cambridge handbook (2000), and a large body of writing on the sources and the Chinese texts. The performing tradition is a record of contest: Bruno Walter’s recordings of 1936 and 1952, the second with Kathleen Ferrier; Klemperer’s; Bernstein’s with a baritone. The questions stay open: alto or baritone; how slowly the last song may go; how the tenor can be heard in the first; whether the ending is consolation or dissolution; whether the China is a mask or a subject. Held below Winterreise for volume: the literature is large, but narrower and later.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made the song-symphony a form of its own, showed that a large orchestra could be written as chamber music, used heterophony and the pentatonic as structure inside the Austro-German tradition, and ended a symphonic work on an open chord. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and concentrated. Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony (1923), with its two alternating voices, stands in its line; the Schoenberg circle studied it, and Schoenberg’s arrangement for chamber ensemble is a record of the study; its open ending is often set at the threshold of the modern. The field is narrow, and the main roads after it, serial and neoclassical, ran elsewhere.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the score is complete and was published, and the only question of text is the composer’s permitted choice of voice, which divides performances and loses nothing. Presence: continuous in the concert hall and on record since 1911, recorded in Vienna under Walter in 1936, and central to the Mahler repertory and to the alto’s. About 115 years have passed, and the figure is the one the desk gives a work of that age with wide presence that is not the widest of its decade. The surface fixed to its moment is Bethge’s chinoiserie of 1907, which dates more than the music. Held there.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium at the height of Mahler’s output. The orchestration bears weight throughout: woodwind and mandolin in the porcelain pavilion; the muted strings of the second song; the flute and oboe obbligatos of the last, which make the instruments the voice’s companions; the low C and tam-tam; the celesta and harps of the close. The motivic economy is close: a pentatonic cell, the falling A, G, E of the first song’s horn call, returns in the last, and heterophony is controlled, not effect. The costs are in the score. The tenor in the first song is notoriously hard to hear over the orchestra, and Mahler, who revised in rehearsal, never heard it. Bethge’s verse is part of the work, and often merely decorative.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the drunken bird of the fifth song and the funeral march of the sixth. One law governs them. Every pleasure in the work is held against death and set beside the earth’s indifference: the drinker asks the bird whether spring has come and does not care; the youths in the pavilion are seen upside down in the water; the lotus girls’ longing is watched from the bank. The keys move outward from A minor and arrive at C, its relative major, so the end is the beginning’s other face. The strain is in the middle: songs three to five obey the law as pictures more than as argument, heard there because the outer songs taught it. The range governed is wide, from terror to wit.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in the drinker’s despair and the farewell; the natural order, as the earth and its seasons, which is the work’s ground, not its setting; friendship, in the last song and the pavilion; youth and desire, in the lotus girls and the horsemen; mortality, built as the departure; and cosmic time, the firmament and the earth set against the span of one life. They are held together by one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour, history, the family and the sacred as such do not appear, and society is seen as pictures from outside. The figure says that two voices and six songs hold one life, its friends and the earth.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.3, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.2. A farewell that rises from low C and a tam-tam stroke to one word repeated over an open chord; a large orchestra written as chamber music, with a pentatonic cell and heterophony as its grammar; a form in which two voices never meet and the last song weighs as much as the rest, so that time stretches at the point of leaving; a century of argument over voice, tempo and what the ending means; and one law, every pleasure held against death and the earth’s indifference, from the drunken bird to the funeral march.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the earth and its seasons, friendship, youth and desire, mortality and cosmic time are held by one law, but the state, labour, history, the family and the sacred as such do not appear, and society is seen as pictures from outside. Above it, four axes at 8.8: The Inevitable, where the middle songs give; The Unconcealment, where resignation lies near the line between meaning and mood; The Archetypal Deep, held by Bethge’s picture-book China; and Pressure on Tradition, real in force and narrow in reach. The work stands below the Symphony No. 9 (9.2) and Winterreise (9.2), and a tenth above Otello (8.9).
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear it by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met, and the aggregate stands at the line: the twelve sum to 107.5, an average of 8.958 that displays as 9.0, a tenth of sum above the 107.4 at which the summit begins.
Basis · the orchestral score of Das Lied von der Erde, six songs for tenor, alto (or baritone) and orchestra, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The six songs are scored as one work, a set Mahler called a symphony; they are not scored separately, and no performance or recording is the object. The baritone Mahler allowed for the even songs is part of the work as written. His version for voices and piano, and the chamber arrangement begun by Schoenberg and completed by Rainer Riehn, are not the unit and are used as evidence only. The words are Bethge’s German paraphrases as Mahler altered and extended them, read in the original; the Chinese poems behind them are not the work, and nothing is credited or charged to them. The German is quoted only in fragments of four words or fewer whose wording is sure, each with the desk’s own plain gloss; no published translation is used. The date of the full score, the first edition, the singers of the first performance, the poets behind each song, the authorship of the closing lines, the keys of the refrain, the last note of the voice, the length of the interlude, the full instrumentation and the tempo headings could not be verified and are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.