Gustave Mahler, T’ang Dynasty Poetry
and Das Lied von der Erde
May 22, 2020
“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him…”
Psalm 8:3-4
The Holy Week of 2020 was memorable for me in that it coincided with the last days of my enforced quarantine at home. For the most part of the day, I was alone with my thoughts, in deep reflection, grappling with the enormity of the cataclysmic change that was confronting us all. It seemed to me that we were caught in the middle of some kind of battlefield and I could not discern the nature of the forces arrayed against each other, as they were legion. On facebook, one persistent message was that, as we locked ourselves away from each other, and confined ourselves in our private spaces, the earth outside took this time to heal itself of the ravages we had committed in the name of the paradoxically local yet globalized and overextended gods of post-modernity. Post after post for countries that had imposed strict quarantines and lockdowns remarked that the skies were bluer, the air was cleaner and the birds could now be heard. This counterpoint was a steady obbligato against a bass line of the narrative of horrors from stricken cities, of men and women dying in the street, of scores of the dead carted away to be incinerated, of suppression of these truths by the state to “save face” and stay in power.
It was while considering these message threads and surfing through the internet that I came upon an old musical friend, “Der Abschied,” (The Farewell) from Gustav Mahler’s monumental Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). I renewed our acquaintance with fondness. In the second semester of the academic year 1980-81, I had taken a graduate class in Romantic Music at the UP College of Music under the late national artist Francisco Feliciano, who had also been my first Music Theory teacher before I formally entered the university as an English major in 1967. For our final requirement, he assigned us to write an analytic paper on this massive and rather overwhelming work from the late romantic period (ca. 1890-1920). I buried myself in the classic Bruno Walter version featuring the divine Kathleen Ferrier and the amazing Julius Patzak, studying the score (which is now lost from my files); teasing out the intricacies of form and structure; and of course, because I come from a background in literary criticism, analyzing the texts, which are derived from T’ang dynasty (618-907 CE) poetry. It was the longest and most complicated piece of music I had been challenged to take apart and put back together and, on the way to completing this task, It became part of me.
In the years after that encounter, I had tucked that memory away in my mental data bank, only to have it come to the surface in the present, out of the chaos of the Covid 19 lockdown. I posted the “Der Abschied” Youtube video in one of my FB Messenger threads that counted as its members a group of musicians and intellectuals. One replied, “Napaaga ako sa Das Lied von der Erde.Wala kasi akong nakikita at nararamdamang magaan.”[1] Mahler himself commented to Bruno Walter, who was preparing for the premiere performance of the work:
Can you think of a way of conducting that? Because I can’t…Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?[2]
The oppressive heaviness that bears down on the listener in the work is thought to be the result of many influences on the composer. One is the personal devastation that attended Mahler’s years immediately preceding the writing of the work – his forced resignation from the Vienna Court Opera due to political maneuvering and racial prejudice against his Jewish ancestry; the sudden death of his daughter, Maria, due to scarlet fever and diphteria; and the almost simultaneous diagnosis of a congenital heart defect that made an invalid of the distraught composer.[3]
But a second source is the strong influence of the Nihilist philosophers of the 19th century, Alfred Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzche, on the composer’s life and work. After finishing his music degree at the Vienna Conservatory, “he pursued his interest in literature and philosophy,” at the Vienna University. Here he encountered the most radical ideas of his time. The then cutting edge of nihilism was keenly felt. It believed that, “all values are baseless and nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence.”[4] Wicks notes that the older philosopher, Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860), position was that:
the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being inherently meaningless.
Anderson cites the younger Nietszche (1844-1900), who is roughly contemporary to the composer, as even more belligerent in his position:
He (Nietszche) launches the famous, aggressive and paradoxical pronouncement that “God is dead”….The idea is not so much that atheism is true…but instead that because “the belief in the Christian God had become unbelieveable,” everything that was, “built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it,” including “the whole of our European morality,” is destined for, “collapse” (GS 343).[6]
The world is irrational, there is no organizing principle behind it beyond man’s daily exercise of his appetites and will against the appetites and will of others. Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s epic novel The Brothers Karamazov puts it quite succinctly when he matter-of-factly notes that, “everything is permissible.”[7]
Musically speaking, Mahler does not reach the point where he totally rejects the harmonic system he had been born into. He neither predicts the breakdown of the entire system of major/minor tonality in his work, nor does he practice the deliberately destructive processes of the atonal composers of the next decades. But he certainly stretches tonality and functional harmony to its limits, loading them with unbearable burdens. From the low blatting of the trombones and horns as they intrude at key points of a sublime harmonic progression, to the screaming of the tenor at the top of his range; from the unbearable modulations and sudden shifts to strange keys, to the demanding vocal lines with their difficult chromatic passages and daring leaps, we understand why the historians have problems categorizing his work. His is not the music of a Bach, reflecting the supreme assurance of style and confident technique of a master steeped in tradition; neither is it iconoclastic and ground breaking as that of the next generation of Mahler’s peers - Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg or Anton Webern. It is the exquisitely wrought, beautiful yet intensely troubled sound of doubt and despair in a period of transition and confusing change.
Mahler did not step fully into the void. After all, Schopenhauer, for all his pessimism, believed in aesthetic perception as a temporary sanctuary where the individual could find the tranquility to accept the harsh reality of a meaningless existence.[8] I hope, therefore, that I am not overreading in thinking that for Mahler, too, it is in art that solace resides. And I ask myself, where do I detect that note that provided me, in those dark days of Holy Week, with a strange sense of hope as I listened to Das Lied von der Erde?
The first clue lies in the still sensuous beauty of his work – alongside its dark discordance and its strident straining there are moments, or even long, achingly beautiful passages where the heavens seem ready to open. Alongside the feverish screaming of the drunkard in “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow) is the quietly sublime voice of the lonely poet in “Der Abschied.” I sit quietly, reflecting on the mind that created this perilous beauty, living on the edge of despair.
The second clue lies in Mahler’s choice of text. It is common knowledge that in the terrible year of 1907, Hans Bethge published, Die Chinesische Flöte, a third-hand German rendering of classic T’ang dynasty poems. As Bethge could not read Chinese, he probably paraphrased, improvised on, added to and removed passages in the poems as translated into French and German by various translators.[9] Thus reframed according to the European perspectives and intellectual currents of the time, Bethge’s expansive renderings of the Taoist thought suffusing the poetry took on an a Schopenhauerian mode that could have not escaped the composer, grappling with his intense grief and spiritual pain.
One of the more compelling examples of this comes from the aforementioned “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde.” In the original Li Bai poem, the guest asks leave from the gracious host of the drinking party to sing a song on his 3-foot q’in before the latter brings on the goblets of his rare wine. The q’in in the reference is the scholar’s instrument, associated with contemplation and quietness. The drinker ruminates on the meaninglessness of wealth and power and the instability of the human condition, recalling the fates of kings and courtiers that have risen and fallen in the course of history. This image quickly evaporates as the first ferocious passages of “Das Trinklied,” rendered by the brasses in chorus at their most raucous level, create in my mind the musical image of a tavern full of noisy German Vikings chugging their flagons of mead as their leader sings lustily of the hollowness of life and material success, rising, in the fourth stanza, to a savage cry of despair and horror. Li Bai’s sadly quiet refrain, translated variously as, “sorrow comes,”(Lixu Yu, BBC interview) or, “sorrow is here,” or, “all is woe,”(Yeung) is transformed into the nihilist vision, “Dunkeln is das Leben, is der Tod,” (Dark is life, dark is death), that is Mahler’s cri de coeur.
In Jessica Yeung’s brilliant analysis of the early 20th century translations of Li Bai’s poetry,[10] the literary critic demonstrates in detail how the translations available during the time of the composition of the opus might have metamorphosed into the texts in “Das Lied.” Yeung takes the image in the penultimate sixth line in the first stanza of the poem, “On a grave sits a lonely ape howling,” and notes that this is, in T’ang poetry, a conventional expression of sorrow. She then shows how Heilman alters the balance of this line by dividing the original first stanza into four parts, repositioning the ape image strategically at the beginning of the last stanza of his translation. He then changes the syntax of the line and extends it so that the short declarative sentence is divided into 2 longer, more forceful questions. The ape then becomes the final powerful image in the poem. Yeung proceeds to study the Bethge’s second hand rendering, noting that here, the latter:
…brings the poem even further away from Li Bai’s version and closer to a post-Nietzchean attitude to life. Li Bai’s emotive exclamation, “All is woe,” is concretized into the metaphysical image of non-existence, “!” and the image of the howling ape is expanded into four lines:
Look down there in the moonlight, on the graves
Crouches a wild and ghostly figure.
An ape, that’s what it is! Do you hear his howls
Ring out in the evening’s sweet fragrance?”
Finally, Mahler himself alters the last line in the sequence changing the reference, “the evening’s sweet fragrance,” to, “the sweet fragrance of life.” This slight change alters the entire context of the four-line passage and provides a commentary, not on the time and space of the setting, but on life and human existence itself.
Look down there! In the moonlight, on the graves
Crouches a wild and ghostly figure.
an ape, that’s what it is! Do you hear his howls
Ring out in the sweet fragrance of life?
Yeung notes that by 1859, Charles Darwin had already published On the Origin of the Species and that all the aforementioned translators and the composer himself could not have been ignorant of its implications. By 1907, in Europe, the image of the ‘howling ape’ was no longer the T’ang symbol of sorrow and loss but had, as Yeung puts it, become:
a strong signifier of proto-type humanity…(making the image)…a forceful ontological statement on life and death within the framework of Western thinking.
The dislocation of the poetic image from its original cultural context and its reconfiguration in the work of another time and space straddles the weltanschauung of the two worlds, enriching and impoverishing both.
Still another absorbing example of deconstruction and recontextualization is to be found in the deeply moving Der Abschied, which is the final movement of Mahler’s ninth (and last) symphony. The music is set to two poems, the first, written by Meng Jaoran[11] and the second, by Wang Wei,[12] who were the best of friends. The poems record the visit of two long separated friends. The first describes the state of anxious longing as one waits for the arrival of his friend. The second gives us a taste of the bitterness of parting.
Meng Jaoran’s poem is eight lines long. The first six lines describe the bucolic landscape at twilight. The last two lines describe the poet playing the q’in in the growing darkness, waiting for his friend. Wang Wei’s poem is six lines long. The poet describes the visit in five broad strokes, thusly:
line 1 the friend dismounts from the horse as the host offers the
cup of welcome
line 2 the host inquires of the friend’s situation
lines 3/4 the friend responds, and
line 5 they bid each other farewell.
The sixth line is a philosophical comment on the cosmic order, “White clouds will drift on for all time.”
Mahler’s final text is much longer. The first poem swells from 8 to 24 lines. The second, from 6 to 15. The additional texts are rhapsodic, emotional and effusive in character, elaborating on the restrained beauty of the Chinese texts. The two texts, if laid side by side share some similarities – there is the feeling of sadness and isolation, of being separated from people and friends; there is a sense of the instability and insignificance of the individual in society; and above all, there are the breathtaking examples of the natural landscape.
But the texts differ. Imbedded in the quietness of the Chinese texts is the concept of the Tao, the principle behind the cosmic order, the, “seamless web of unbroken movement and change, filled with undulations, waves, patterns of ripples and ‘standing waves’ like a river.”[13] Rawson and Legeza continue, “Every observer is himself an integral function of this web. It never stops, it never turns back on itself, and none of its patterns…are real in the sense of being permanent, even for the briefest time we can imagine.”[14] The wise man, the scholar-poet, accepts the reality that man and history are only a small part of a much bigger dynamic that animates the universe. Man neither fuels nor directs its progress. He must learn to ride its currents, as seen in the natural world, adapting and changing, as he seeks to discern and understand them. The image of white clouds drifting forever, therefore, is the core of the combined poems, the expression of the Tao, working its way through intimate human histories.[15]
On the other hand, the late romantic and nihilist positions - having destroyed both the Judeo-Christian concept of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God; and the ordering of the rational mind as the first principle of the Greco-Roman world and the Enlightenment – reflect the difficulty of coming to terms with the fact that what is left after the deconstruction is a meaningless, impenetrable, and inescapable void. The existential dilemma, the idea that the world is in a, “condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular…as it goes essentially nowhere…and will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquility,” [16] gives one reason to despair.
To be fair, Schopenhauer does consider the possibility that aesthetic contemplation might possibly be a way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, even momentarily. Mahler seems to echo this when he gives the contralto the extreme emotional utterance:
O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk'ne Welt!
(O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-bedrunken world!)
Which closes the first section of the work.
Mahler further expands the emotional intensity of the entire movement by stretching lines 3 and 4:
He says he has not achieved his aims,
Is retiring to the southern hills.
to read:
Ah my friend,
Fortune was not kind to me in this world!
Where do I go? I go, I wander in the mountains.
Finally, the composer appends seven effusive lines to the Wang Wei poem at the end of the movement:
I seek peace for my lonely heart.
I wander homeward, to my abode!
I'll never wander far.
Still is my heart, awaiting its hour.
The dear earth everywhere
blossoms in spring and grows green anew!
Everywhere and forever blue is the horizon!
Forever…forever…forever
This added text heightens the emotional quality that comes at the end of the entire symphony. He contemplates the beauty of the landscape with quiet rapture anticipating the end. The serene music floats away as if in the distance, leaving us in a resigned state of peace and acceptance.
And so I sit, waiting for Easter, thankful for Li Bai, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei who help me understand my place in the universe; and equally thankful to Gustav Mahler and Arthur Schopenhauer and even Friederich Nietszche, whose tortured efforts to question and critique and negate, force me to reassess and reconsider the constructs I have been socialized all my life to believe. In the end, I come to the conclusion that I stand on solid ground when I plant my feet on the faith of my fathers. I affirm their conviction that – yes, though the world can seem a dark and chaotic place, a place of sorrow and pain, a vale of tears; nevertheless, it is a meaningful universe with an order we can intuitively sense. If we so choose, we are free to play a part in this order that we might, in our frailty and weakness, only faintly be able to sense. My father, Manuel,[17] put it quite succinctly when he defined his view of the place of human freedom in such a vast and confusing world full of sorrow and disappointment:
This is the kind of freedom you and I would like to have. The freedom to do good, to create beautiful things, to follow the endeavors that will make us useful to the community, the freedom to think and worship our God.[18]
Daddy firmly believed in the existence of such an order in the world. He quietly went about doing what he perceived of as his role in this order – doing good things, creating things of beauty, making one’s self useful to others and praising God for being given the opportunity to do so. I thank God for such a father who quietly held fast to this world view in the face of much disorder and sorrow and whose discernment continues to give me strength to live and work in such a world. Laus Deo!
[1] Conversation with Marian Pastor Roces, Facebook Messenger, April 9, 2020.
[2] Mahler quoted in, “Das Lied von der Erde, Scottish Chamber Orchestra Program Notes.”
[3] Gustave Mahler, “ Wikipedia
[4] Alan Pratt, “Nihilism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Alan Pratt, ISSN 2161-0002, May 2020
[5] Robert Wicks, “Arthur Schopenhauer,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.) First published Mon May 12, 2003; substantive revision Thu May 11, 2017
[6] R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietszche,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
[7] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (1880)
[8] Wicks, op. cit.
[9] Jessica Yeung, “The Song of the Earth: An Analysis of Two Interlingual and Intersemiotic Translations," special issue of The Translator, Vol 14, No. 2 (2008), pp. 273-74. Yeung cites Judith Gautier, Henry-Saint-Denys, and Hans Heilman as translators of French and German versions of T’ang poetry.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Meng Jaoran was a major poet and landscape painter who had, early in his official life as a scholar in government service, had incurred the displeasure of the emperor. His career suffered as a consequence of this development. The poem reads:
At the Mountain-Lodge Of the Buddhist Priest Ye, Waiting in Vain for my Friend Ding
Meng Haoran
Now that the sun has set beyond the western range,
Valley after valley is shadowy and dim....
And now through pine-trees come the moon and the chill of evening,
And my ears feel pure with the sound of wind and water
Nearly all the woodsmen have reached home,
Birds have settled on their perches in the quiet mist....
And still -- because you promised -- I am waiting for you, waiting,
Playing lute under a wayside vine. (Shigeku.org)
[12] The more famous of the two courtier poet/painters, Wang Wei’s political fortunes ebbed and flowed but he retained a shaky foothold in various positions until his death. The poem reads:
Farewell
Wang Wei
Dismounting, I offer my friend a cup of wine,
I ask what place he is headed to.
He says he has not achieved his aims,
Is retiring to the southern hills.
Now go, and ask me nothing more,
White clouds will drift on for all time.
(all poetry.com)
[13] Philip Rawson and Laszlo Legeza, Tao: the Chinese Philosophy of Time and Change (1973), p. 10.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Reading this paragraph in August, four months after I had written it, a vivid sequence from “Dust,” the third episode of the recently released Netflix series, Connected, stops me in my tracks. The footage follows the movement of a myriad tiny particles of dust from the Sahara desert as they move into the Atlantic Ocean and cross as far as the Amazon rainforest, affecting land, sea and air currents, weather patterns and environmental balance in their wake. The computerized simulations and renderings produce compelling images of the dynamic forces and undulating webs of relationships pulling all of life together in a cosmic order.
[16] Wicks, op. cit.
[17] My father, Manuel Traico Rivera, was converted to the Protestant faith at Silliman University where he took an AA in preparation for a medical degree at the UP College of Medicine. Born in poverty, he lived through the Second World War. He was Chief of the Orthopedic Section of the Department of Surgery from the 1950's to the 1970's and was medical director of the Masonic Charities for Crippled Children, which ministered to children from poor families with bone deformities and illnesses from 1952-1997.
[18] Manuel Traico Rivera, “Higher Levels,” draft manuscript of an address to the graduates of Mary Johnston Hospital School of Nursing (n.d.) edited by Elena Rivera Mirano, 1997
Link to the Music:
Gustave Mahler, “Das Lied von der Erde,” conducted by Bruno Walter with Kathleen Ferrier (alto) and Julius Patzak (tenor) and the Wiener Philharmoniker, on Youtube, Recorded in 1952, New Mastering, May 7, 2019.