"Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod"

("Dark is life, is death")





Jon Vickers, tenor; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded March 1981

[English translation by Peggie Cochrane]



All things transitory are but parable;

here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,

here the indescribable is accomplished;

the ever-womanly draws us heavenward. [much repeated]





Soloists, choruses, London Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. BBC Legends, recorded live in the Royal Albert Hall, March 20, 1959

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,

but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!

The song of sorrow

shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.

When sorrow draws near,

wasted lie the gardens of the soul.

Withered and dying are joy and song.

Dark is life, is death.

Dark is life, is death.

Master of this house! Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!

Here, this lute I name my own!

To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,

these are the things that go together.

A full goblet of wine at the right time

is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!

Dark is life, is death.

Dark is life, is death.



The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth

will long stand fast and blossom in spring.

But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?

Not a hundred years canst thou delight

in all the rotten trash of this earth!



Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves

squats a mad spectral figure!

It is an ape! Hear how his howling

screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!



Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!

Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!

Dark is life, is death!

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,

but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!

The song of sorrow

shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.

When sorrow draws near,

wasted lie the gardens of the soul.

Withered and dying are joy and song.

Dark is life, is death.



Master of this house!

Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!

Here, this lute I name my own!

To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,

these are the things that go together.

A full goblet of wine at the right time

is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!

Dark is life, is death.



The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth

will long stand fast and blossom in spring.

But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?

Not a hundred years canst thou delight

in all the rotten trash of this earth!



Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves

squats a mad spectral figure!

It is an ape! Hear how his howling

screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!



Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!

Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!

Dark is life, is death!

Now beckons the wine in the golden goblet,

but drink not yet, first I'll sing you a song!

The song of sorrow

shall in gusts of laughter through your souls resound.

When sorrow draws near,

wasted lie the gardens of the soul.

Withered and dying are joy and song.

Dark is life, is death.





Your cellar holds its fill of golden wine!

Here, this lute I name my own!

To strike the lute and to drain the glasses,

these are the things that go together.

A full goblet of wine at the right time

is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!

Dark is life, is death.



The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth

will long stand fast and blossom in spring.

But thou, O man, how long then livest thou?

Not a hundred years canst thou delight

in all the rotten trash of this earth!



Look there, down there! In the moonlight, on the graves

squats a mad spectral figure!

It is an ape! Hear how his howling

screams its way through the sweet fragrance of life!



Now take the wine! Now it is time, companions!

Drain your golden goblets to the dregs!

Dark is life, is death!





In the middle of the little pool

stands a pavilion of green

and of white porcelain.



Like the back of a tiger

arches the bridge of jade

over to the pavilion.



In the little house friends are sitting,

beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting;

several are writing verses.



Their silken sleeves slip

backwards, their silken caps

perch gaily on the back of their necks.



On the little pool's still

surface everything appears

fantastically in a mirror image.



Everything is standing on its head

in the pavilion of green

and of white porcelain;



Like a half-moon stands the bridge,

upside-down its arch. Friends,

beautifully dressed, are drinking, chatting.





If life is but a dream,

why then toil and fret?

I drink till I can drink no longer,

the whole livelong day!



And when I can drink no longer,

since gullet and soul are full,

then I stagger to my door

and sleep stupendously!



What do I hear on awakening? Hark!

A bird sings in the tree.

I ask him if the spring is here;

I feel as if it were a dream.



The bird twitters, "Yes!

Spring is here -- came overnight!"

In deepest wonder I listen.

The bird sings and laughs.



I feel my glass again,

and drain it to the dregs,

and sing, until the moon shines bright

in the black firmament.



And when I can sing no longer,

then I go back to sleep;

for what does spring matter to me?

Let me be drunk!





#

Nobody who's visited Sunday Classics will be surprised that we're taking on Mahler's) backwards. This is the work, you'll recall that Mahler conceived, after soaring with Goethe to the cosmological heights in his Symphony No. 8, in the aftermath of the diagnosis of his terminal heart condition.In Hans Bethge's German translation and adaptation of Chinese poems,, Mahler found texts for the six song-movements that made up what should by rights have been his Symphony No. 9, if he hadn't had such superstitious dread of the doom a Ninth Symphony had spelled for Beethoven and Bruckner. (To compound the craziness, by the time the decision about naming was made, the work hecall his Ninth Symphony was mapped out in his head, which led him to believe that he had circumvented the jinx. Of course the joke, such as it was, was on him. He didn't live to complete the work that by his numbering would have been his Tenth Symphony.)Talk about working backwards! First, in a need to celebrate the artistry of Maureen Forrester , we simply blundered into the undisputed crowning glory of, the half-hour final alto song-movement, "The Farewell" (""). In a way, though, it was helpful to be focusing on Forrester, since it allowed us to focus on her stupendous performances of this music. That spared us the distraction of other, differently glorious performances.Now, as I explained in Friday's and last night's previews, we've been working our way backwards through the three tenor songs of: movements No. 5, "The Drunk in Spring"; No. 3, "On Youth"; and now finally No. 1, "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth." I made the point, in connection with "On Youth," that I have found rather circuitious paths to personal identification with the songs of, and I might make the general point that this is what, for me, music or any other art form is about: finding one's own connection to it. I don't believe that anyone can "teach" us how to listen, though many people can, by design or otherwise, provide us with lessons of varying usefulness as we developway of listening.Just by way of demonstrating how never-ending this process is, in the course of my relistening for these posts, I put on the 1959 EMI recording conducted by Paul Kletzki (made, by cosmic coincidence, some two weeks before the memorable RCA recording conducted by Fritz Reiner), intending to listen, of course, to the first movement, but I let it play, and for as much as I've said I'm unpersuaded by the octave-lower baritone option Mahler offered for the alto songs, and as often as I've listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's performance in this recording and been left unpersuaded by it, this time I found myself warming to it more, especially in the movement that I confess remains most elusive for me, No. 4, "On Beauty." Just goes to show ya . . . er, something.I've already made an embarrassing attempt to describe my personal connection to "On Youth." You'll surely be relieved to learn that I don't propose to do the same with "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of Earth." Let me just say that this movement, despite being not even a third as long as "The Farewell," has come to be just as personal. But then, it is perhaps one of the abiding deep truths ofthat the small matters as much as the big.Mahler doesn't leave much idea about the central idea of this drinking song. Three times, at the end of what we might think of as the song's three stanzas, the tenor sings to us:I've broken this movement down according to those three "stanzas" defined by the ""s. I had a much more ambitious musical plan, though still following this breakdown plan, but it self-destructed via my clumsy editing skills and the obstreperousness of the editing software I'm using. Still, we do have what I'm calling parts A, B, and C, more or less as I intended them, with parts parts A and B going beyond their "" to include the orchestral music between "stanzas" (and in one case maybe a tiny bit into the next) and parts B and C going back to the," so that there is considerable musical overlap. That was intentional, if only to give you an opportunity to hear this amazing music more often.Before we go there, however, I thought it might be helpful, since I keep mentioning the shocking transformation of Mahler's artistic identity between the climax of the Eighth Symphony and the start of its successor work, tothat climax of the Eighth Symphony, a setting of the final scene of Goethe's, so here it is.Now let's hear the start of Mahler's, the opening chunk of "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth." Note that all of thetranslations are by Deryck Cooke.[UPDATE: Thanks to my clip-editing and -processing ham-handedness, and to my general organizational gracelessness under time pressure, I originally posted a defective version of this clip, which started in the right place but continued to the end of the movement. I've got it right now. I.]Now we're going to hear "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth" from my three all-around favorite recordings of. (There's a large group of wonderful recordings, including some we've sampled, like the Reiner-RCA, the Kletzki-EMI, and the Giulini-DG, or even better the live Giulini performance with the Vienna Philharmonic on Orfeo, that occupy what for me is an elite "second tier.")We start with Bruno Walter's final recorded crack at this work whose premiere he had conducted not quite 50 years earlier, in Munich in November 1911, five months after the composer's death. This is the eternally splendiferous New York Philharmonic recording for Columbia, from which we heard tenor Ernst Häfliger sing the fifth song, "The Drunk in Spring," Friday night.Colin Davis's Philipsoffers its share of frustrations but nevertheless seems to me a truly great performance. Davis has never been known for his "way" of working with singers, and in this recording he seems hardly aware of what sort of tenor he's working with in Jon Vickers, with that oddly produced but engulfingly huge voice and singular personal intensity; clearly, to take advantage of his special qualities, he should have had less driven tempos, and a bit of give and take with his conductor, which might also have smoothed out his German. (Vickers traveled with his own set of vowels, which weren't right for any of the languages he sang regularly in -- German, Italian, French, and English.) Davis was more considerate of his alto soloist, Jessye Norman, whose voluminous soprano descended easily into true contralto territory.And now, from what just may be myfavoriterecording,'s EMI stereo remake (which by the way was Christa Ludwig's first recording of the piece, when she claims she didn't understand the music yet -- ha! so much for the importance of "understanding"), let's hear all three tenor songs, in part for the opportunity to hear the astounding Fritz Wunderlich sing them. I think, by the way, that it must surely have been via the Wunderlich-Klemperer recording that I experienced the revelation regarding "On Youth" which I tried to describe last night; now if only Colin Davis had had the sense to take a tempo like this in his recording with Jon Vickers!(I notice that we haven't talked at all about the strange vocal requirements of this music, which result in its being sung by such a strange assortment of tenors, from light "character" tenors like Murray Dickie and Richard Lewis to full-fledged heroic tenors like Vickers and James King. Well, some other time perhaps.)

Labels: Mahler, Sunday Classics