Search - Gustav Mahler, Halle Orchestra and Choir, Kent Nagano :: Das Klagende Lied

The earliest Mahler, in the best available performance.

Bob Zeidler | Charlton, MA United States | 05/03/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Gustav Mahler called "Das klagende Lied" his Opus 1, and with good reason. Written while he was a teenage student at the Vienna Conservatory, it - in its original version as performed here - was submitted by him for the annual (and required) students' Beethoven Competition.



The history of this work would have been far different had Mahler won that competition. (The record shows that he lost to Robert Fuchs, who went on to become, as an adult, the teacher of Franz Schmidt, apparently Fuchs' only other claim to fame.) Because Mahler did not win, there was no opportunity for him to provide a concert presentation of the work at that time. Subsequent (and youthful) efforts to get others (including Franz Liszt) to consider performing the original version bore no fruit, so Mahler went about editing and rewriting the work to eliminate the "theoretical" weakness which, he was advised, led to the original rejection: The fact that part of the narrative story appears in both the first part ("Waldmärchen" or Forest Legend) and in the second part ("Der Spielmann" or The Minstrel).



To remove this objection to what was in fact not much more than a "theoretical" tautology, Mahler, some dozen years after initially conceiving the work, eliminated "Waldmärchen" entirely, and recast both music and lyrics to eliminate inconsistencies which resulted from the "Waldmärchen" elimination and to restore some - but far from all - of the vital elements which had been in "Waldmärchen." It was this two-movement version, first completed in 1893 (but dated as "1899" and later revised in 1902), which was the first realized performance of "Das klagende Lied." The 1899 two-movement version restores the off-stage village band in the true original (now referred to as the 1880 version) which had been eliminated in the 1893 version.



There are recorded performances of both the 1899 version and a "hybrid" version which restores the "Waldmärchen" movement to its rightful place before the two movements of the 1899 version. This latter hybrid version is flawed because it restores the first movement as Mahler wrote it but does not restore the second and third movements to their pre-1893 content, which presents an entirely different tautology, which Mahler would certainly not have allowed, much less committed himself. Nevertheless, there are three quite recent recordings (by Michael Tilson Thomas, Riccardo Chailly and Richard Hickox) which utilize this hybrid. They are all fine, but...



Kent Nagano, in this performance under review, fully and faithfully restores the original "urtext" that Mahler had written as a student and which had been buried in personal archives for decades before being uncovered in 1969, virtually 90 years after being first written. And it is a revelation in terms of what it reveals of Mahler the composer who had in front of him a further 30 years of works yet to be written.



That the young Mahler "wrote what he heard in his head" goes without question; one need only listen to his 1st Symphony to get this sense. That he had this acumen, and the craft, to write such a sui generis work as "Das klagende Lied" while still a teenager is quite mind-boggling. This work looks both backward, to the Wagner of "Meistersinger," and forward, to the later Mahler, of course. What is particularly tantalizing, to this Mahlerite, about Nagano's performance, is that Nagano makes it quite clear (without exaggerating for sake of example) that the Mahler of 1880 has, in a brief passage in "Waldmärchen," something of the likes that the equally young Richard Strauss would write fully eight years later, in his "Don Juan." It is almost as if Mahler "wrote it, said `That's nice,' and then moved on, fully past the Strauss yet to come, to become `Mahler, not Strauss'."



Even more revelatory, revealed in the "urtext" version, are the polytonal and polyrythmic effects created by the off-stage village band heard in "Der Spielmann." One of the very best examples of "writing what he heard in his head," to be duplicated not so many years in the future by that great American iconoclast Charles Ives. That these two sui generis composers had almost identical instincts in terms of "sonic realizations of the external world" is surprise enough; there was no reason, and no real chronological opportunity, for either to have been aware of the other. But, many years later, when Mahler was returning to Vienna from New York near the end of his life, he carried with him one of the two or three original hand-written scores for Ives' 3rd Symphony. He never lived to perform it, but it's my guess that he recognized that Ives, in some way, was cut from the same bolt of cloth.



You'll not find a better-performed "Das klagende Lied." And you'll not find another performance (at least not yet) of what Mahler wrote as a teenager and then retrospetively denoted as his "Opus 1." A "must have" for anyone who is a Mahlerite.



A parting comment to readers: I have been known to recommend an album on the basis of the perfection of just a single track. But never, in my wildest imagination, did the thought cross my mind that an album be recommended for purchase on the basis of the quality of its booklet notes alone. But the notes for this album are special indeed, and include the filling in of a good part of heretofore-unknown history about Mahler's conservatory days by Herta Blaukopf (the co-author, with Kurt Blaukopf, of the wonderfully readable "Mahler: His Life, Work and Word" [available elsewhere at Amazon.com]), a very detailed essay by Reinhold Kubik on the history and various versions of the work, and an equally detailed explanation about the work, by Donald Mitchell.



Bob Zeidler"

Best perfomance of "Das klagende Lied" I ever heard.

Bob Zeidler | 10/01/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Kent Nagano is the first one to conduct the original version of "Das klagende Lied". Others like Pierre Boulez -- who also did an exceptionally good job -- combined the first part (later deleted by Mahler) with the revised version of the second and third part. Thus, there are inconsistencies in the lyrics and in the development of the musical ideas. These inconsistencies are gone on this CD. The music is more powerful, more genuine and shows the young Gustav Mahler being already a master of orchestration and musical invention. From now on there are only two valid versions of "Das klagende Lied" for me. Either the Mahler-revised two-part version or the original one presented by Kent Nagano on this CD."

Of scholarly and musical interest - worthwhile!

MartinP | Nijmegen, The Netherlands | 08/15/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"First of all, no matter which recording or version you choose, no lover of Mahler's music should be without this piece. Far from being a precocious effort that demands attention for purely documentary reasons, it is a captivating and beautiful piece of music in its own right, that sounds as truly Mahlerian as anything that came after it. In fact, several ideas went more or less unalterered into the First Symphony; e.g., the music heard at the fall of the kings castle returns at the main point of crisis in the finale of the symphony.

Das Klagende Lied recounts a bitter, Grimm-like fairy tale, and envelops the listener in a haunting, darkly Romantic and highly theatrical soundworld. The opening of Part II puts you straight in the middle of a nocturnal forest and is chilling to the bone - it also has an interesting parallel almost at the diametrically opposite end of Mahler's career, in the phrase 'Es wehet kühl' from Das Lied von der Erde. Only the cumbersome transitions, the fragmented way in which brief passages are strung together, betray that the 19 year old composer was learing the trade as he went along; but melodies are instantly memorable and the orchestration is lively and daring, even in the Ur-version recorded here by Nagano and his team. In fact, though the orchestration of the revised edition is clearly more balanced and effective, it also appears to be more conservative than the original.

Das Klagende Lied started out consisting of three parts. In 1893 Mahler, who remained fond of the piece, set about revising the score to iron out its more glaring immaturities. He revised all three sections, but eventually decided to drop the first, Waldmärchen, altogether. As a consequence, three versions of the piece now exist in several recordings: the official, two-part revised edition; the original three-part version; and a hybrid that adds the revised version of Waldmärchen to the two-part revised edition.

If it is Mahler's original thoughts that you're after, this recording is for you. And if you already own the later version of the piece, this disc makes for some fascinating comparative listening that allows deep insight into Mahler's development as a composer. Differences are plenty and obvious. For instance, in the Ur-version the Fernorchester makes an appearance in the second part, which is as startling as it is brief: it is, in fact, fully bitonal, and must have been deeply shocking to the judges of the competition in which Mahler entered his work. Ives is the only comparison that springs to mind to describe the effect. In the third part, the Fernorchester is more extensively present, too. And the opening of this 'Hochzeitsstück' sports an almost Varèse-like use of the tam-tam, not heard in the revised edition. In the earlier version, melodic gestures (as well as the text, for that matter) tend to be more florid, the role of the chorus is somewhat smaller, and solo's are given to different voices than in the final version. Thirteen years of added compositional, and, probably more importantly, conductorial experience, have also made the composer less obsessed with thematic unity. In the initial version, just before the final catastrophy, the soprano sings: 'Am boden liegt des Königs Gemahl', set, incongruously, to the Spielmnann's lusty marching tune. In the later version, this was changed into the tenor's brilliantly matter of fact statement 'Am boden liegt die Köningin', which retains no more than the vaguest outline of that tune, making it simpler, yet more meaningful as well. This probably best exemplifies the general difference between the versions: the later one is less cumbersome, less forced, less deliberately clever, too. It is also less inclined to linger, more successful in retaining forward momentum. It's the difference between the confident, mature composer, and the student a little overeager to prove he is the most gifted of his class.

There is no real competition for Nagano's disc, but he has to contend with some formidable recordings of the later edition - notably Chailly's, which really leaves nothing at all to be desired (well, except a less shockingly hideous design for its cover). If you only need one recording of the piece, that is the one to have. However, even in such company, the Erato recording stands up very well. Compared to Chailly it is softer grained, less biting, and has less detail; the chorus and soloists are perhaps a tad too distant, and the Fernorchester most certainly is. Yet its more relaxed approach is persuasive in its own right. The sound is warm and pleasing, and the playing and singing are excellent throughout - the performance of the two Wiener Sängerknaben soloists, in particular, is stunning."