Record Review Podcast

Musicologist Dr Flora Willson chooses her favourite recording of Mahler's orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde.Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, 'Song of the Earth', is a set of six songs for two voices and orchestra, but is it a song-cycle or a symphony? Mahler certainly intended for Das Lied von der Erde to reflect the world in co taining everything, the whole range of human emotions and earthly experience, but the work doesn't easily fall into either the category of song-cycles or truly symphonic works. Mahler drew his texts for Das Lied from a compendium called The Chinese Flute, a translation of Chinese poems by the German poet Hans Bethge.Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde in 1908-9 within a year of losing his beloved daughter Maria and receiving the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him in 1911. The work begins and ends with two of Mahler's most famous songs: Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrows) and Der Abscheid (The Farewell), a hauntingly beauti