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Winner of a 2008 GRAMMY® Award nomination for “Best Small Ensemble Performance”

Three life-altering events struck Gustav Mahler during the middle months of 1907. His tenure as director of the Vienna Court Opera, long marked by tension, finally came to an end; his elder daughter, not yet five, died of a combination of scarlet fever and diptheria; and he himself was diagnosed with post-rheumatic heart disease. It was while Mahler was wrestling with these enormous issues that he was given the volume of paraphrase poems recently published by Hans Bethge as Die chinesische Flöte (“The Chinese Flute”). Fifteen of the eighty-three poems in Bethge’s anthology are by Li-Po, the great eighth-century T’ang poet whose work Bethge characterized as “turning into poetry the world’s mercurial, wind-swept, unutterable beauty, the eternal pain and the eternal sadness and enigma of all being. In his breast took root all the gloomy melancholy of the world, and even in moments of greatest joy he cannot shake off the shadows of the earth. His feelings constantly admonish us to recall the transitoriness of existence.” Mahler chose seven of Bethge’s translations and began to set the texts individually for voice and piano: only gradually did the symphonic scope of the project emerge. Das Lied von der Erde thus is a fascinating amalgam of the two seemingly opposed genres in which Mahler worked almost exclusively: the intimate Lied and the opulent symphony.

                                                                            —from Kenneth Slowik’s liner notes