Luogo e data di registrazione		Grotezaal, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam (Olanda) - dicembre 1992
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Producer		Michael Haas
	Engineers		James Lock, Colin Moorfoot
	Tape editor		Sally Drew
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Edizione CD		Decca | 440 314-2 | (1 CD) | durata 62' 58" | (p) 1994 | DDD
	Note		The Decca Record Company Limited, London

Each of Mahler’s symphonies represents a stage in his life; together they form a kind of spiritual autobiography. The young, romantic hero of the First Symphony, feverishly endorsing life, is made to confront the larger issues of death and resurrection in the Second. The end of that work is a declaration of faith in the Christian God, and the Third and Fourth Symphonies go on to present a pantheistic vision of the chain of creation. In the Third this culminates in the love of God; in the Fourth, the innocence of the child. The middle-period symphonies, Nos. 5-7, present the battle of life in more purely human terms. Love is no longer idealised but focused on an individual: his wife, Alma. The Fifth and Seventh Symphonies end triumphantly; the Sixth, after a tremendous struggle, ends in stark tragedy: it is a work full of premonitions of death. Mahler sought to overcome his doubts in a massive reaffirmation of religious belief: the Eighth Symphony. Here, too, Alma has a supreme place, as Goethe's Eternal Feminine who leads man towards God. The end of the Eighth unites secular and religious themes in an unprecedented splendour of orchestral sound. Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which Mahler called a symphony, though he did not include it in his canon, inhabits an entirely different world. In the summer of 1907 all his forebodings came to pass. He was told that the condition of his heart was such that he probably had only a few more years to live. At the same time his elder daughter Maria died, and he was forced to resign from the directorship of the Vienna opera. In a letter to the conductor Bruno Walter he wrote: 'At a single fell stroke I have lost any calm and peace of mind I ever achieved. I stand vis-à-vis de rien, and now, at the end of my life, I have to begin to learn to walk and stand.' Beginning again forced Mahler to turn inward: Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony are the most introspective of all his works. The Chinese poems he found in Hans Bethge's volume Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), which was then greatly in vogue, expressed what he felt, both in their pessimism (more extravagant in Bethge's versions than in the Chinese originals) and in their poignant insights into the transient beauty of nature and human life. Characteristically, Mahler in places altered Bethge's texts (as he did with virtually all the texts he set). In particular, the final, consoling lines of 'Der Abschied', which speak of the earth renewing itself in spring, are entirely his. Bethge's poems were not direct translations from the Chinese but largely derived from earlier German versions by Hans Hellmann, which were themselves based on French versions by Judith Gautier (Wagner's last mistress) and Hervey-Saint-Denys. In two cases - 'Der Einsame im Herbst' and 'Von der Jugend' - no Chinese originals can be traced, and it is probable that they are pieces of chinoiserie by Gautier herself. The other four poems have acquired a veneer of late-Romantic embellishment which makes them quite remote from their sources. Similarly with Mahler's musical language: the pentatonicisms of movements three to five are merely an exotic element in what is a quintessentially late-Romantic score. Mahler's predicament - for he now felt he was writing on the brink of death - gives the music of Das Lied von der Erde a new clarity and urgency, and its emotional pitch is at times almost unbearably intense. The A minor of the first movement, the 'Trinklied', recalls the Sixth Symphony and looks forward to the Rondo Burleske of the Ninth. Mahler reserved A minor for his darkest statements. The falling refrain of the 'Trinklied' - 'Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod' - is also closely related to a phrase in the first movement of the Sixth. But instead of a battling march we have a frenetic, one-in-a-bar waltz which sweeps all before it. Only in the central orchestral interlude does the grim mood soften: a trumpet rises ecstatically to a high C, and the tenor sings of the eternal blue of the sky. The recapitulation, at 'Seht dort hinab!', restores A minor with a vengeance, Mahler making telling use of the basic sonata structure to emphasise the inescapability of his main key. The final A minor thud is like a coffin slammed shut. Whereas the emotional scale of the 'Trinklied' is frighteningly large, 'Der Einsame im Herbst', the slow movement, is intimate and restrained. The chamber-music textures are close to the middle songs of the Kindertotenlieder. Only once, at ‘Sonne der Liebe', does the mezzo-soprano's voice rise up in passion. The next three movements are short, contrasting scherzos, the first two delicate genre pictures like willow-pattern plates, though 'Von der Schönheit' has a rowdy middle section depicting a party of young horsemen. The boisterousness of this music is carried over into the next movement, ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling', which ends with the most desperately exuberant passage of the work, in A major, rounding off what may be seen as the first part of the symphony. The last movement, 'Der Abschied', is nearly as long as the other five together, and is one of the greatest movements Mahler ever wrote. It is in C minor, the key of the huge opening funeral march of the Second Symphony, and the two poems Mahler set are separated by another funeral march, gravely eloquent. In the long C major coda - infinitely long, as one imagines (and hopes) that the mezzo-soprano's 'ewig's’ will never cease - the endless yearning of Das Lied von der Erde finds some haven of rest, not in a Liebestod but in a surrendering of self to the healing power of the natural world. Nature, at least, was for Mahler a never-failing source of comfort. © David Matthews