Programme notes – Humanity and Nature

The composer Du Yun was born in Shanghai in 1977, and is based in New York. Her opera Angel’s Bone, composed to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for music, and was praised for its eclectic sound-world drawing on punk rock, opera, and cabaret. In this parable of modern-day slavery and human trafficking, one disturbing scene is accompanied by a duet for oboe and tam-tam. Du Yun calls for unusual techniques to draw strange sounds from both instruments, creating an atmosphere suited to the intoxication and danger of the story’s seedy underworld.

From this chilling contemporary tale, we travel back in time to ancient China for Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song-cycle The Song of the Earth. Written for tenor and mezzo-soprano soloists with orchestra, the work sets Hans Bethge’s German translations of Tang Dynasty poems, which were published as The Chinese Flute.

The Song of the Earth emerged at a particularly troubled period in the composer’s life. In 1907, Mahler was having problems with the administration of Vienna Court Opera, where he had conducted for ten years, exacerbated by antisemitic attacks against him in the press. That same year, while on summer break in the country with his family, both of his young daughters fell ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. Tragically, after two weeks, his eldest daughter Maria died.

In these unbearable circumstances, there was a further cruel blow: Mahler was diagnosed with a heart defect, and advised to avoid strenuous activity. He had always found solace and inspiration from walking and cycling in the countryside. As he put it in a letter: ‘I have never been able to compose only at my desk. I need outside exercise for my inner exercises’.

That same summer, Mahler was given a copy of The Chinese Flute. It seems that, while confronting bereavement and his own mortality, the book’s themes of transience and the ever-renewing beauty of nature spoke to him. The following year, having now taken up a position with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, he spent his summer break in a retreat in the Dolomites, and began composing music for a selection of the poems.

The Song of the Earth takes the unusual step of alternating its songs between the two soloists. ‘The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow’ opens the work with restless energy. The tenor describes wine as a crutch for life’s miseries, with a sung line that frequently stretches high, as though in drunken excess. Contrastingly, ‘The Lonely One in Autumn’ is much more sober in its melancholy. Soprano and strings move in steady, quiet steps, suggesting a still autumn day.

Two songs then cover happier ground, with poems that paint idealised scenes. ‘Of Youth’ imagines young people socialising on an island in a pond, while ‘Of Beauty’ describes girls picking flowers. Both have an airy quality, including orchestral music in a chinoiserie style. The spirit of jollity is carried over into ‘The Drunken Man in Spring’, which reprises the bibulous theme in a more carefree vein: life is just a dream, we’re told, so we may as well get drunk.

The final song, ‘The Farewell’ is almost as long as the rest combined, and is undoubtedly the emotional core of work. Time seems to slow down for a twilight scene, filled with liquid bird calls and other nocturnal murmurings. The words speak of parting friends, but the subtext of mortality is brought out in lines that Mahler added to the very end. Over softly glowing chords and twinkling celesta, the soprano repeats the consoling mantra of the earth blossoming again, ‘eternally… eternally…’.

The Song of the Earth was not performed in Mahler’s lifetime, but is now regarded as one of his finest works. Tonight’s arrangement for the smaller ensemble of 16 players was made by Iain Farrington, and allows performances to be held in a wider range of venues. Farrington only used instruments found in the original score, and writes that he aimed to capture the work’s ‘timbre and balance’ as much as its ‘spirit and energy.’

Simon Brackenborough, 2024