The Farewell That Will Not End – on Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde

Gustav Mahler, photographed by Moritz Nähr in 1907. Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

I. The Last Word

Ewig. Ewig. Ewig.

The word comes again and again in the last minutes of Das Lied von der Erde. The alto soloist sings it, then sings it again, then once more. The orchestra thins out to celesta, harp, mandolin, a few strings. The notes grow longer. The silences between them grow longer. At the end only a chord hangs in the air – a chord in C major with an added sixth – and even that does not conclude; it simply rings out, as if someone had forgotten to close the door behind them.

I have listened to this ending many times, and I cannot get enough of it. It moves me in a quite particular way. It is as if Mahler has found a moment where music no longer relates to time in the usual way. We know someone is taking leave. We know something is ending. But the music does not end in the ordinary sense of the word. It continues somewhere we cannot follow it into, somewhere we living human beings have no access.

That is where I want to begin. Das Lied von der Erde is Mahler's great farewell, but it is a farewell that will not end. The work refuses to end – not only musically, but on several planes at once. It is a symphony that refuses to be a symphony. It is a farewell that refuses to conclude. It is a cadence that refuses to cadence. All these refusals belong together, and I believe they all say something about the same thing: about standing on a threshold, and about refusing to cross it fully. This is what makes the work unique, and what makes it perhaps the deepest meditation on mortality that Western music has produced. Bernard Haitink, one of my great conducting models, once said in an interview that Das Lied von der Erdeis the best thing Mahler ever wrote. I think Haitink was right. And what I want to attempt in what follows is to trace what it is in the work that makes it so.

II. A Work in the Evening of a Life

To understand Das Lied von der Erde, I believe it is necessary to remember where in his life Mahler stood when he wrote it.

The summer of 1907 was a crushing year for him. In July he lost his elder daughter Maria, four and a half years old, after a short illness. A few weeks later he was himself diagnosed with a serious heart condition and told he must remain quiet. The same year he was pushed out of his position as director of the Vienna Court Opera, after ten years that had defined him as a conductor. It was an autumn in which everything he had built – familial, medical, professional – collapsed almost at the same time.

The following year, in the summer of 1908, he sat in his composing hut in Toblach in the Tyrol, where he used to compose during the summers. There he began what was to become Das Lied von der Erde. The material he chose to set was striking. He picked up a small anthology of poems that had just appeared: Hans Bethge's Die chinesische Flöte, a collection of free German paraphrases of Chinese lyric poetry from the Tang dynasty. The poems were about youth and parting, about wine and melancholy, about the eternity of nature and the short time of human beings.

Mahler set six of these poems as a great song-and-orchestra cycle – three for tenor, three for alto (or baritone). And here I must pause at something that lies on the title page itself, and which I think is more than a biographical curiosity. Mahler gave the work the subtitle Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor- und eine Alt- (oder Bariton-) Stimme und Orchester. He himself called it a symphony. But he did not give it a number.

This last is the strange thing, and it should remain with us. Mahler's previous work had been his Eighth Symphony. If he had continued the series, Das Lied would have been his Ninth. But no major composer had written more than nine symphonies – Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Dvořák had all died after their Ninth, and Mahler, superstitious about precisely this, would not step into that line. If he just gave the symphony another name, he might escape. The irony, which history has preserved with a certain cruelty, is that he composed a Ninth afterwards anyway, and died before he could finish his Tenth. The superstition did not help.

But the refusal – to call the work a symphony and refuse to give it a number – is for me more than superstition. It is written into the title page itself. The work wants to be a symphony, but does not want to be the Ninth. It wants to be, but does not want to be numbered. This is the first refusal this work makes, and, as we shall see, not the last. The whole of Das Lied is a work that refuses to cross the threshold it stands on.

The work was completed in 1909. Mahler was never to hear it himself. He died in May 1911, half a year before Bruno Walter conducted the first performance in Munich in November of the same year. Das Lied von der Erde has since stood as something central in Mahler's list of works – not as his Ninth or his Tenth, but as a work that belongs in a category of its own: the symphony that became a long farewell song, or the song cycle that became a symphony, depending on where one stands when one looks at it.

What makes the work special among Mahler's symphonic works is that it is his most direct confrontation with mortality. The Sixth has its hammer blows, the Seventh has its nocturnal unease, the Ninth has its slow adagio farewell. Das Lied is the only large symphonic work where Mahler writes explicitly about having to die – and the only one where the text gives him a language in which to do it.

III. The Eternal Now

My reading of the work – and it is a reading, not a truth – is that Das Lied von der Erde is about what it is to be alive in the knowledge that we shall not be so any longer.

It is a particular kind of awareness that the work is about. Not despair. Not resignation. Rather an acute, almost sharp attention to what is around us all – the birds, the wind, the drop of water on a friend's gravestone, a glass of wine in a quiet moment – because we all know that one day we shall have to let go of all of it. Mahler does not write about death as an event. He writes about life as it is experienced by someone who knows he shall leave it.

It is this awareness that gives the work its characteristic duality. The first song, Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of the Earth's Misery), is almost violent – the tenor sings of the transience of the earth with a bitter force, while the orchestra shakes with brutal energy. It is life's last protest, the cry that will not go quietly. But already in the second song, Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely One in Autumn), the mood has shifted. The alto sings over a quiet oboe melody that her heart is weary and that she longs for "the solace of sleep". The whole work wanders between these two poles – youth's refusal to die and old age's quiet reconciliation with having to – and it is a wandering that ends but never quite becomes a conclusion.

The two voices never meet directly in the same movement until Der Abschied. The tenor sings his three songs, the alto hers, but they alternate – they speak in turn, but never together. Only in the great farewell movement is another voice present, in the form of a friend the alto is waiting for: Mein Freund! Mein Freund! is called out towards a landscape where no one answers. The dialogue in Das Lied is therefore not between the two singers; it is between the solitary voice and what does not come. It is a dialogical form, but the form of a waiting – for a meeting that does not become a meeting. This is one of the work's deepest gestures, and the conductor must respect it: neither voice is given an answer to what it is really asking.

For me as a conductor this is a central challenge. Das Lied cannot be carried through as a symphonic argument. It is not a form that builds up towards a climax and then resolves. It is six separate songs, each with its own inner time, which together form an arc in which the most important thing is not to hurry from one place to the next, but to let each song's world establish itself completely before it is released. This applies especially to the sixth song, Der Abschied (The Farewell), which alone makes up nearly half the work. It is about half an hour long, and one of the longest single movements in the symphonic literature. It is a movement where the task of conductor, alto and orchestra is not to carry a story, but to carry the present moment.

I think of Mahler in Toblach that summer of 1908 as a composer who wrote as if he were seen – by death, by himself, by what was left of time. Das Lied von der Erde is, in my view, the work in which he himself sees most clearly. What he has given us is that same seeing.

IV. Three Moments That Open

Three moments in the work make this clear to me.

The first is the opening of the first song. Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde does not begin tentatively. The orchestra explodes in A minor with horn calls and falling intervals, and the tenor enters at his highest tessitura with the words "Schon winkt der Wein im goldnen Pokale" (The wine already beckons in the golden goblet). It is an opening that must demand the utmost of the singer – the tenor part in Das Lied is notoriously difficult, not because the notes are extreme, but because they lie where there is least possible rest, throughout the whole song. Mahler asks the singer to sing on top of an orchestral storm.

But I do not think it is the difficulty in itself that is most important. What is important is what the opening says. The first song is a man drinking to forget that life is short. "Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod", he sings as a refrain – Dark is life, dark is death. It is not philosophy; it is a cry. The whole work's emotional journey begins here, in this burning refusal to accept what Mahler knows he must accept. It is an opening that sets everything that follows in relief: if the farewell in the final song is given such weight, it is because we have first been through this revolt.

The second is the strange instrumental passage in the middle of Der Abschied. After the alto has sung of the friend who has not yet come, and of her waiting in the evening coolness, the orchestra passes into a long interlude – more than five minutes of pure instrumental music. It is not a transition in the ordinary sense. It is as if Mahler wants us to dwell in the landscape without words for a while. The woodwinds trace nature sounds – birdsong, wind. A flute and oboe motif recurs like a quiet question. The timpani beat a steady, slow death march low in the register. It is not epic; it is almost chamber music, despite the large orchestra.

What Mahler is doing here is letting the farewell be a landscape rather than an action. We are not given a dramatic turning point; we are only given the chance to be there. It is one of the finest passages in all of Mahler's work, and it demands of the conductor that he resist any temptation to force the tempo or to make it "more interesting". It is interesting by being what it is. And it does something central to the work: it refuses to be a transition. It refuses to go on to the next place. It is a place in itself – another refusal, the same one that lies on the title page, only on the structural plane.

The third is the very last minute. After the alto has sung that she goes to find her land, her home, comes the open refrain: ewig… ewig… The first ewig is sung normally, the second a little more muted, the third more distant. Mahler marks each repetition with extended rests, so that for me it feels as if time itself expands between the words. While this is happening, the orchestra dissolves. The strings are drawn down to a scarcely audible drone. Celesta, harp and mandolin play separate, isolated notes that no longer form harmonic chords, but only points of light in the darkness. The last note is a C major chord with an added sixth (an A) that is left suspended. Mahler does not write a closing cadence. The chord is not resolved; it does not end. It simply rings away, it dies out.

This is what I believe is Mahler's great discovery. He found that music can end without concluding. It can stop being heard without being finished. And this is the third refusal, the one that now closes the circle back to the title page: the work that will not be called Symphony No. 9 does not end with a closing cadence either. It is the same gesture, on either side of the work's body. It is a gesture that no one before him had made so openly, and which I believe points forward to much of what twentieth-century music was to dare.

V. Coda

Das Lied von der Erde is not a comfortable experience. It is an hour to spend with a man who knows he is to die, who does not want to die, who nevertheless reconciles himself to it because he has no choice, and who leaves us with a chord that does not close.

For me this is the work's greatness. I read it as Mahler not asking us to accept something we cannot accept. He shows us instead what it is to be the one who is still here, while knowing that one day one too will no longer be. And he does it by refusing all the small closures that usually make music finished: he will not give the work a number, he will not give the farewell a conclusion, he will not resolve the chord. All three refusals are part of the same gesture. All three are ways of saying musically that it is not yet over.

For the conductor it is a matter of letting the work have its own time. It is not to be narrated; it is to be inhabited. For the singers it is a matter of carrying something greater than their own voice. And for the listener it is a matter of sitting still when the last ewig has passed into the silence – not applauding too quickly, not saying anything for a while.

What Mahler discovered, and what we still receive from Das Lied von der Erde, is that music can be with us in those moments where words no longer hold. And that to let something ring away, without closing it, is perhaps the deepest farewell that music can give.