Steven Martin wrote:

>OK this is clarification that I was unaware of.  But I think you may be
>missing the forest for the trees.  When he wrote Das Lied the words to
>the Der Abscheid are literally saying farewell.  Could he perhaps maybe
>possibly be talking about Death? This coming from a man that was just
>told of a heart condition.  Methinks this is one whale of a coincidence.

Mahler was, obviously, concerned with mortality (including his own) when
he came to write Das Lied but, as has been said, so are many great creative
artists and Mahler is therefore not really unusual in that.  I also think
it worth pointing out that as great a stimulus to compose that work was the
discovery of the poems that came to be set and that didn't take place until
after the diagnosis of the heart condition.  Of course, the diagnosis did
make him more concerned for his own health than he had been before, but he
was never told at that time that what he had wrong with him was going to
kill him.  After seeing a leading specialist in 1907 Mahler wrote to his
wife: "Dr.  Hamperl found a slight valvular defect, which is entirely
compensated and he makes nothing of the whole affair.  He tells me I
can certainly lead a normal life, aside from avoiding over fatigue."
Unfortunately, he then saw another doctor who, whilst confirming the
verdict, was a bit more zealous about curtailing physical activity and it
was this latter set of instructions that Mahler chose to believe making him
more "heart conscious" than he needed to be.  Indeed, it has been suggested
that if he had kept up his usual habit of rigorous exercise he may have
been in better shape to throw off the infection that did kill him in 1911.

>Saying that Mahler suffered many tragedies in his life and seemed to deal
>with Death and the afterlife in his compositions does not strike me as an
>unreasonable conclusion for people to reach looking at the man and his
>music.

No, it certainly isn't.  The point Deryk and I are trying to make is that
the myth you often hear repeated that Mahler lived under a "death sentence"
for the last four and a half years of his life is just that - a myth.  That
he became concerned for his health after 1907 there is no doubt, but that
he was "dying" or believed he was fatally ill from 1907 is just not the
case.  Das Lied is certainly a work about farewell, mortality, even death.
But the well-springs for that must be seen as part of Mahler's whole life's
work and not just the product of something that had just happened to him.
In fact the death of his daughter probably had a far greater effect on him
than the diagnosis of his heart condition.

>If Mahler was nothing but doom and gloom, it would get pretty dull after
>a while.  My point was that Mahler had already stared into the abyss so
>many times before that, in a way, it would make sense for him to write a
>Requiem.

In 1900 he nearly died from an intestinal hemorrhage.  Another hour and he
would have done.  As he recovered he told Bruno Walter he believed that the
bleed had probably taken ten years off his life.  But the result of looking
into the abyss on THAT occasion, musically, was the Fifth Symphony which
is a work that starts in tragedy and ends in _triumph_.  Great creative
artists have a wonderful habit of doing the very opposite to what you
expect.  The Sixth Symphony is the nearest thing Mahler wrote to a Requiem,
a work that ends in total collapse, and yet the period in which he wrote
that was the happiest time of his life.

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.