Tom McGee's Blog

This Sun­day at 3 p.m. the Brook­lyn Sym­phony is doing Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth.” The venue is St. Anne’s Church on Mon­tague Street, Brook­lyn Heights. Stephanie Houtzeel and Matthew Gar­rett are the alto and tenor soloists.

“Das Lied” is a cycle of six orches­tral songs fin­ished in 1909, after the mas­sive Sym­phony No. 8.

The text is from a book of Ger­man trans­la­tions of ancient Chi­nese poems. The sub­jects are drink­ing, sor­row, nature, and more sor­row. Mahler added the final haunt­ing lines to the long and beau­ti­ful finale, “The Farewell”:

The beloved Earth blooms forth every­where in Spring, and becomes green anew! Every­where and end­lessly blue shines the hori­zon! End­less… endless…”

Where the word “ewig” (end­less) is repeated over and over while the orches­tra shim­mers off into the distance.

A super­sti­tious kind of guy, Mahler was con­vinced that after writ­ing a ninth sym­phony he would die, as did Beethoven, Bruck­ner and Schu­bert before him. So after the eighth he decided to write a symphonic-scale work but not call it a Ninth. Of course after this he did go ahead and write a ninth sym­phony. You can guess what happened.

I’m happy to be in this because this is another one to check off of my life­time have-to-play list, and because this is the sec­ond Mahler work I’ve per­formed in this month. With this, I’ll have per­formed in all the sym­phonies except the 3^rd, 5^th and 8^th (though I’ve rehearsed the 3^rd and the 5^th).