Das Lied In Chinese - Das Lied Von Der Erde

"If Mahler and the four Chinese poets from Das Lied von der Erde were somehow to meet for a drink they would certainly have a good time," claims the Hong Kong-born businessmann and self-styled 'music entrepeneur' Daniel Ng. "They might even write a song cycle. The only thing we can probably be sure of, however, is that the results would in no way resemble Das Lied von der Erde."

Listeners may likewise sense a certain cultural displacement in this version of Mahler's symphonic song cycle, which substitutes the original German paraphrases of Tang Dynasty poetry with the actual Chinese texts of Li Bai, Qian Qi, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei. The feeling, in fact, is probably rather akin to Ng's initial reaction to Das Lied, which he discovered relatively late in life, and his resulting efforts to reconcile its Germanic sensibility with the original Tang Dynasty poetry he studied in his youth.

Much has been made of Orientalism, particularly the view that any appropriation that enriches Western culture must by definition diminish another. Considerably less ink, however, has been spilled over Occidentalism ' in this case, China's appropriations from the West. If we merely remove the magnifying glass from late 19th-century Europe and instead trace the original sources of Das Lied, we can see how freely the cultural tides flow back and forth.

The Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), long regarded in the East and West alike as the high point in Chinese civilization, was marked by a stable if limited central government and an unprecedented (and, until our own time, unequaled) exchange of trade, technologies and cultural practices. Buddhism from India replaced the native Confucianism as the dominant ideology, foreign musical instruments passed through the Silk Road into Chinese consciousness (witness the oud's transformation into the pipa), and the country's military wielded a decidedly imperial arm toward Korea and Japan. Such was the level of cultural interaction in China at the time that, as far as one's nationality was concerned, ethnicity need not be a deciding factor. All one had to do to be Chinese was, first, to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Emperor, and second, to read and write the language.

Thus we discover that China's most famous literary figure, hailing from the most poetic age in the nation's history, was not, in fact, ethnically Chinese. Li Bai (701-762) was born in Turkistan, and the few details of his life that have been reliably documented, such as his passion for drink and his eventual exile in China's Western Region, have occasionally led to his being portrayed as nomadic, drunken barbarian. (More sober scholars have since pointed out that drunkenness was hardly considered barbaric at the time: Rather like the ancient Greeks, the Tang Chinese considered it a way of opening the mind to divine inspiration.) If Li Bai's foreign background set him apart from the Han mainstream, it was in his compulsion both to challenge the Confucian social order and, despite his obvious Taoist sympathies, to oppose the natural world around him.

If Li Bai nonetheless reigns as China's Taoist immortal, his exact contemporary Wang Wei remains its Buddhist recluse. Famous for his quiet pastoral scenes in images as well as prose, his reputation stands apart from Li Bai mostly by having had a successful career in the civil service. Unlike Li Bai, who fell afoul of the ruling regime by siding with a rebel faction, Wang Wei served the insurgents during the An Lushan Rebellion only under duress. The poems documenting his displeasure most likely saved his life when the old imperial order was restored.

Although historians are uncertain whether or not Li Bai and Wang Wei ever met, we do know that they had a mutual friend in Meng Haoran (689-740), who shared both Wang Wei's love of landscape and Li Bai's misfortunes in public office. Having resigned from his sole public position after less than a year, he is remembered today mostly for the poems he wrote to Wang after their separation, reflecting a common practice among the literati of the time.

How these ancient Chinese poems wound up inspiring Mahler's finest masterpiece makes for an epic tale of cultural transformation, both willful and inadvertent. Having long maintained that a symphony must be like the world, containing everything, Mahler near the end of his life fashioned from his favorite genres ' symphony and song ' a seamless blend of the two.

This new musical form was perhaps the only vessel deep enough to contain his cumulative grief from the previous year: By the time Mahler began writing Das Lied in early 1908 he had already lost, in turn, his favorite daughter, his job at the Vienna State Opera, and his health, having been diagnosed with a chronic heart condition. Chancing upon a copy of Hans Bethge's Die chinesische Fl'te ('The Chinese Flute'), Mahler found what he took to be an ancient reflection of his own angst. In reality, it was a paraphrase of Hans Hellmann's 1905 collection Chinesische Lyrik, itself based on two very different French translations by the distinguished sinologist Le Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys and the dilettante Judith Gautier. As a result, Bethge's collection resembled his own original poetry much more that his Tang Dynasty sources.

Mahler then put those sources through yet another level of remove. Partly because the composer set his texts for high-voiced male and low-voiced female, one could make the case that the songs follow the Chinese concept of yin and yang. Mahler's emotional world, though, is more calibrated to fit traditional Western dualities like spring and autumn, life and death, abandon and restraint. The tenor's Dionysian revelries in No. 1 (Drinking Song) quickly shift with the alto's Apollonian reflection in No. 2 (The Lonely Man in Autumn). This process takes place again toward the end, with No. 5 (The Drunk in Springtime) fading away entirely in No. 6 (The Farewell), in which Mahler takes two consecutive poems in Bethge's collection ' Meng Haoran's 'In Expectation of a Friend' and Wang Wei's 'Departure of Friend,' the poets writing to each other ' and fashions them into a haunting inner monologue where the singer engages Death itself.

Great art often comes as a result of miscommunication. The philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno actually claimed the 'inauthenticity' of Das Lied as the very source of its eloquence. But with Mahler's artistic dialogue with China's distinguished poets being understandably one-sided, Daniel Ng has fashioned this linguistic alternative. Reintroducing the Chinese language raises several issues, not least of which is the mismatch between polysyllabic German and monosyllabic Chinese. Occasionally, words or phrases are repeated to fit Mahler's melodies. Other times, new Chinese texts have been added, as in No. 4 (Lotus-Picking Song), which now includes Li Bai's 'Lyrics for the Girls of Yue.' Likewise, No. 6 adds two complementary poems by Meng entitled 'In Dreamland' and 'Goodbye to Wang Wei.' Although the primary goal in this edition was for the Chinese lyrics to elicit similar responses from the listener as the German texts, the last four lines of the piece (which were written by Mahler) defy a Chinese translation that is both musical and poetic.

Tracking the original Chinese source of No. 2 has proven to be both an aesthetic and scholarly challenge, since Gautier in particular translated her texts so freely that not even Mahler's most prominent biographers, Henri-Louis de la Grange and Donald Mitchell, have agreed over the original poem. Further complicating the picture is that competing Western transliterations of the poet's name ('Zhang Ji' vs. 'Qian Qi,' for example) correspond with several possible combinations of Chinese characters. Following the methodology of scholar Fusako Hamao, who made a careful study not only of the sources available to Gautier but also her systematic mistakes in translation, this Chinese edition accepts Hamao's case for Qian Qi's poem 'An Autumn Night' as the inspiration for Mahler's second text.

A final note regarding the spoken Chinese language: although the northern Mandarin dialect is today's most common spoken tongue, the poets of Tang Dynasty wrote with much different sounds in the ear. Precise pronunciations are lost to us today, but their vestiges still thrive in southern China, thus explaining this edition's choice of dialect: When spoken in Cantonese, the lines of the original poetry still rhyme.