Das Lied / Das Trinklied

[stdio.h]

The first lines of the lute player's promised song (Doch trinkt noch nicht, erst sing’ ich euch ein Lied! / Don't drink yet, first I’ll sing you a song!) are a mirror image of the last three lines of the Abschied, complete even, with the celebrated '[E]wig':

Das Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde
Wird lange fest steh’n und aufblüh’n im Lenz.

This suggests to me a bookending of the symphony, and this seems to put a premium on the lute player's song. At the climax of the lute player's song, the command, "Now! Drink the wine!" rings out to a gathering that is witnessing a diabolic spectacle.

On its own (ie., without the music), the text suggests to me that when we see evil violating our world, we must accept it. The worst disasters of life are an inescapable reality, and sometimes, are even the point (hence, 'Now! Drink the wine!').

Well that's fine as far as it goes. But the music seems to me to go even further. Mahler's score settles with surprising haste from this turbulence and horror, into the dreamy and peaceful passage at "[...] Becher zu Grund! Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod".

To accept the reality of evil (or disaster, or the occult, or whatever is conjoured up by the image of the howling ape) is one thing, but to dreamily embrace it is quite another!

This easeful sharing of space with the screaming ape doesn't seem to be reinforced in the Abschied. Why does Mahler want us to be so positively relaxed with it?

[barry guerrero]

He was ahead of his time - he wants to be nice to the apes?

[barry guerrero]

OK, OK, your thoughtful post deserves a deeper response. Here's mine: I don't know. Who does?

Mahler almost always fooled around with the text that he was working with. Yet, Mahler was surprisingly poor and 'guarded' when it came to discussing his own works (I've come to that opinion after a tremendous amount of biographical reading). I'm also not convinced that he fully understood what he had just done, or why he was motivated to so so to begin with. He often spoke of a 'greater power' taking hold of him. Even though he composed incredible works, I think he sometimes demonstrated a poor understanding of what he had just composed, and why. This seems to be more true as we move into his middle period, with the fourth symphony acting as a transition into that turbulent middle period. I think the fact that Mahler was a prolific reader of literature greatly affected him. When he worked with written texts, he was nearly acting as a critic - tailoring the written word to what he thought it should have said in the first place. But then the question remains, why (?).

It's a bit like Mahler's driven desire to present the already established Austro/German 'classics' in his own 'retuschen' (a great word). And while I very much like Mahler's 'retuschen', he was such a fine conductor that he really didn't need to do those things (personally, I'm glad that he did). Is it any wonder that he drove the music critics mad? It's all very strange and somewhat mysterious.

On the one hand, Mahler rejected any 'programmatic' ideas because he found that people simply misunderstood the programs in the end. But then he went to the other extreme, where he really wouldn't help his own cause to have his works better understood by his critics. He wanted to be 'loved' on the one hand (he was really sensitive and feared rejection), but refused to meet people half-way in getting there. So, is it any wonder that we're left with question regarding his texts - altered texts - to "DLvdE"?