Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Nereffid vs Mahler 4: The Singing Bone

Das klagende Lied (The Song of Lament) was completed in 1880. It's a "dramatic cantata" for soloists and chorus based on a folk tale - or rather, on two similar folk tales. In one collected by Ludwig Bechstein, a prince and princess compete to succeed the queen, who has decreed that the winner will be whoever finds a particular flower in the forest; in the Grimm brothers' tale, it's two brothers who are competing for a wife. In both cases, one murders the other and wins the prize, but later someone (a child or a minstrel) discovers a bone in the forest and carves it into a flute. When he plays, a voice emerges from the bone, telling the whole sorry tale. In Mahler's cantata, two brothers are competing to win the queen's hand in marriage, and the bone is discovered by a minstrel, who brings it to the castle on the day of the wedding and simply ruins everyone's day.

Mahler was 20 when he finished the work, and by now much of the groundwork for the Mahler we know has been laid. You can have fun playing "guess the influence", though - a mix of German romantics from Weber to early Wagner and Bruckner. Das klagende Lied has an odd compositional history, in as much as Mahler wrote it in 3 parts but subsequently dropped the first part entirely. How could he manage that? Part I tells the story of the brothers and the murder, and then in Part II the minstrel discovers the bone and learns the story; so there is a certain amount of dramatic repetition (Part III covers the minstrel's appearance at the wedding). Part I remained out of sight until 1969 (according to Wikipedia), and I think it's been essentially reinstated - aside from whether it's good music, the point is it's nearly a half-hour's worth of Mahler and so can't be ignored.

And yet, when listening to it for the first time in years, in the recording by Simon Rattle/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (EMI), I could see why Mahler chose to drop Part I. For all its musical qualities - already he's a master of the orchestra - the dramatic pacing's not great. He really shouldn't need 25 to 30 minutes to tell this story. I suspect he was enjoying himself a bit too much, revelling in the use of the orchestra to paint the tale. But then again, a couple of months later I heard for the first time the recording from Riccardo Chailly/Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (Decca) and found that I enjoyed it a lot more, and time seemed to pass much quicker. Was this just a case of increased familiarity, or is Chailly's performance better than Rattle's? Probably just the former; dramatically speaking there's not much to choose between them, I think. So yes, we could in theory dispense with Part I but then we'd be missing out on so many wonderful moments, not least the intriguing depiction of the murder itself. The relevant verse is His eye gleams with savage joy, Its look has told no lie; A sword of steel hangs at his side, Now he has drawn it! The elder laughs 'neath the willow tree, The younger smiles as in a dream. (This is from Eric Mason's translation with the Rattle disc). The big climax here is on the last two lines - and on the word "smiles" (lächelt), the choir descends in a weird, well, laughing phrase that we can assume is also the sound of the sword descending. Almost immediately, the music becomes serene and beautiful and gradually transforms into something that is recognisable as the ending of the song "Die zwei blaue Augen" from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, where again it's associated with a death-like sleep or sleep-like death (more on that ambiguity when we get to those Lieder). This is the sort of psychology we Mahlerians love - death, happiness, murder, and peace all mixed up together. And indeed in Part III we get another such juxtaposition, when Mahler uses an off-stage wind band as part of his depiction of the wedding festivities. After the minstrel has revealed the terrible truth, and everyone is stunned to silence, the band strikes up again, completely unaware of what's going on. It's a wonderfully twisted moment.

Although in terms of story-telling there may not be much to choose between Rattle and Chailly, I much prefer Decca's sound to EMI's, which is a little too close up and doesn't allow the orchestra much delicacy. This might well have been a contributing factor to why I was happier with Part I once I heard Chailly. A more pertient fact is that overall I prefer Chailly's soloists - Susan Dunn (sop), Brigitte Fassbaender (mez), Werner Hollweg (ten), Andreas Schmidt (bass) - to Rattle's - Helena Döse (sop), Alfreda Hodgson (mez), Robert Tear (ten), Sean Rea (bar). (The score calls for a baritone, not a bass, but I've written them as they appear on the discs. I just compared the 2 singers in one passage and I'd have said Rea was the bass and Schmidt the baritone. Go figure.) One key piece of casting I've omitted here is the singing bone itself. Mahler's original idea was to have a boy soprano and boy alto, the alto combining with the contralto when the flute begins to sing. He dropped this idea, but Chailly reinstates it, or rather has a boy alto (Markus Baur) without the contralto. The effect is ghostly - he's not an ethereal child soprano but is still not quite in the world of the regular singers - and certainly adds to the drama.

Conclusions, then: we're not quite at mature Mahler, and indeed the handful of songs that we'll look at next may even be regarded as a step backwards, but pretty much all the elements are in place by now. Hopefully Das klagende Lied's appearance in DG's and EMI's Mahler editions (the two recordings above, in fact) will prove an impressive surprise to those who haven't yet encountered it.

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