Robert Peters wrote:

>>My criticism of Mahler's Lied is that there is not even one good poem in
>>the work...

To which Steve Schwarz adds:

>I'd be interested to know (since I thought enough of them to do a
>"literary" translation of them) what makes them so bad in your eyes.

In my mind Das Lied is Mahler's masterpiece, and I like the poems he sets.
I am concerned why he picks on these poems when there are large numbers of
German language Lieder set to texts by less than first rate German poets?
Although I must admit to knowing more about German literature than that
of any other language, I cannot but fear a certain cultural imperialism
('Auslaenderfeinlichkeit') to be at work here.  It is an irony when Robert
Peters condemns Wagner as guilty of just this sort thing.  Although I do
not read Chinese I do know that Li-Po is regarded as one the literary
masters of the far East.  He is like a Chinese Hafiz - a poet much admired
by Goethe.  Indeed the image of resignation to life's bitterness with a
glass of wine is a classical image found both in Middle and Far Eastern
poetry.  The connection between Li-Po and Mahler comes through the
philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.  Of course Mahler, whose idea of
something soothing for Alma Mahler as she went into labour was read her
some Kant (!), had read Schopenhauer whose metaphysic of music was a
powerful influence in the musical culture of the times.

Das Lied asks the fundamental question asked by Schopenhauer:

 From 'Der Trunkene im Fuehling'

  Wenn nur ein Traum das Leben ist,
  warum denn Mueh' und Plag?

  If life is but a dream,
  then why then so much toil and misery?

Compare this to a passage from Book I of Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung of Schopenhauer, and you will see
that Mahler has chosen his texts carefully:

   ...das Leben ist so voller Plagen und Huderleien dass man entweder,
   mittelst berichtiger Gedanken, darueber hinaussetzen, oder es
   verlassen muss.

   ..life is so full of misery and annoyances that one must either
   confront it through rightful thought or one must depart it.

It is in short just what Albert Camus says in a nutshell in
the opening of the Myth of Sisyphus:

   There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that
   is suicide. Judging whether life is or not worth living amounts
   to answering the fundamental problem of philosophy.

It is just this dark and probing question that the first movement of Das
Lied asks, setting the mood of the whole work as it erupts in an anguish
little short of hysterical.  I am reminded of Munch's painting The Scream
at the point the howling of the ape is mentioned:

   Du aber Mensch wie langst du?
   Nicht hundert Jahre darfst du dich ergoetzen
   an all den morschen Tande dieser Erde!
   ..Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod!

   But thou, O man, how long dost thou live?
   Not a hundred years canst thou enjoy
   all the rotting baubles of this earth!
   ..Dark is life, dark is death.

Of course much of Das Lied involves momentary escapism into fleeting
delight in drunken enjoyment of Chinoiserie and pentatonic tone-painting
before the final confrontation demanded by Schopenhauer occurs in the
finale.  Whether one agrees with Schopenhauer or not it is the idea of his
resignation from all Hope as the thing that inflames the strivings of the
Blind Will that the finale presents.  Before Mahler's own words enter the
original poem ends with suggestions of a Schopenhauerian bitter resignation
to death:

My heart is still and awaits its hour!

There Mahler draws consolation by a Nature Mysticism, the philosophical
meaning of which could be interpreted in any number of ways.  The final
answer remains fundamentally abstract, and that is the beauty of the work.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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