Origins
Mahler conceived the work in 1908. This followed closely on the publication of Hans Bethge's volume of ancient Chinese poetry rendered into German, Die Chinesische Flöte ("The Chinese Flute"), based on several intermediate works (see Text). Mahler was very taken by the vision of earthly beauty and transience expressed in these verses and chose seven (two of them used in the finale) to set to music. Mahler himself wrote: "I think it is probably the most personal composition I have created thus far." Bruno Walter called it "the most personal utterance among Mahler's creations, and perhaps in all music."
According to the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in Chinese poetry Mahler found what he had formerly sought in the genre of German folk song: a mask or costume for the sense of rootlessness or "otherness" attending his identity as a Jew. This theme, and its influence upon Mahler's tonality, has been further explored by John Sheinbaum. It is also claimed that Mahler found in these poems an echo of his own increasing awareness of mortality.
Mahler's experiences during the preceding summer (1907) are likened to the three hammer blows of his Sixth Symphony (written in 1903–1904). He was pushed to resign his post as Director of the Vienna Court Opera, through political intrigue partly involving anti-semitism. His eldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diphtheria. In addition, Mahler himself was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. "With one stroke," he wrote to his friend Bruno Walter, "I have lost everything I have gained in terms of who I thought I was, and have to learn my first steps again like a newborn".
Mahler had already included movements for voice and orchestra in his Second, Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies. However, Das Lied von der Erde is the first work giving a complete integration of song cycle and symphony. The form was afterwards imitated by other composers, notably by Shostakovich and Zemlinsky. This new form has been termed a "song-symphony", a hybrid of the two forms that had occupied most of Mahler's creative life.
Mahler was aware of the so-called "curse of the Ninth", the fact that no major composer since Beethoven had successfully completed more than nine symphonies before dying. He had already written eight symphonies before composing Das Lied von Der Erde, which he subtitled A Symphony for Tenor, Contralto and Large Orchestra, but left unnumbered as a symphony. His next (instrumental) symphony was numbered his Ninth. That was indeed the last he fully completed, for only the first movement of the Tenth had been orchestrated at the time of his death.
The original public performance was given on 20 November 1911 in the Tonhalle in Munich, with Bruno Walter conducting and sung by Sara Cahier and William Miller. One of the earliest in London (possibly the first) was in January 1913 at the Queen's Hall, under Henry Wood, where it was sung by Gervase Elwes and Doris Woodall: Wood thought it 'excessively modern but very beautiful'.
Read more about this topic: Das Lied Von Der Erde
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