Bringing the Legend of ‘Das Lied’ to Life

Sentimental legends about Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” the big symphony for orchestra and two singers with which the Los Angeles Philharmonic began its new year at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday night, abound. And most are grim.

He supposedly wrote it in 1907 in response to the death sentence his doctors pronounced on him because of an infected heart. It is also said that he wrote it after completing his ecstatic, massive Eighth Symphony, and made it a song cycle in order to forestall music’s own death sentence on composers who try to produce more than the nine symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. And we are regularly reminded that he wrote it after a lifetime of death obsessions that began in boyhood when he conjoined a polka with a funeral march for his first composition.

“Das Lied,” then, is said to represent in music the point at which Mahler made that most profound leap in human consciousness, the moment when one understands mortality. Mahler had coped with death his whole life, due to a harsh, unrelenting succession of deaths in his family. But “Das Lied” has long been thought to represent his first grappling with his own mortality.

That, however, is a lot of baggage to put on a piece of music. And a new, clear-headed approach to Mahler, found in the conducting of Pierre Boulez and expounded in an exciting new journalistic biography of the composer by Jonathan Carr, shows, instead, a Mahler who pushed ahead with each new piece into unknown territory with creative gusto.

Carr suggests that Mahler’s initial depression over his prognosis came from the doctors’ orders to cut down exercise. He depended upon vigorous hikes in nature for inspiring his most far-reaching ideas and the courage with which to express them. Mahler didn’t stop those walks, and one interesting way to listen to “Das Lied” is as an irrepressible visionary simply not willing to be impeded.

That is the “Das Lied” that Esa-Pekka Salonen presents in a strong, visceral and fascinating performance. Although he has made a specialty of Mahler’s early symphonies, and particularly the Third and Fourth, we have not heard him in late Mahler, and the control he revealed of “Das Lied” demonstrates his continual maturity as Mahlerian.

Like Boulez, Salonen emphasizes that Mahler at the beginning of the century was a true modernist. “Das Lied” is exotic music. And Thursday’s was a performance in which the wondrously strange details of the score spoke.

Like many of the early moderns, and especially Debussy, Mahler found in Asia a source for new ideas in Western music. The poetry of the six songs, divided between tenor and mezzo-soprano is Chinese (in German translation). And he had early recordings of Chinese music on hand when he composed “Das Lied.” But Salonen, through his careful highlighting of harmonic and coloristic details in the score, is the first conductor I have ever heard actually bring out that quality in the music.

And with one of the singers, Canadian heldentenor Ben Heppner, making his Los Angeles debut, Salonen had the perfect partner. Heppner has the glorious voice of those heroic Wagnerian tenors of yore, which is a rare commodity today. But he also has something many of them didn’t have--brains. “Das Lied” begins with a striking assault, in a drinking song of both wild abandon and heavenly visions. It is easy to get a little silly and sloppy here, but Heppner, aggressively underscored by Salonen, exposed it as bold foresight into a scary new century.

With Greek mezzo-soprano Markella Hatziano, who had appeared over the summer at the Hollywood Bowl in the “Damnation of Faust,” Salonen did not have such luck. Finding a mezzo voice in a large enough size to complement Heppner’s is no small feat, and Hatziano has that. It is epic and very rich, but with annoying vibrato. She is a stolid singer and in the all-important final song of the cycle, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), she would have done well to listen to David Weiss’ oboe or Janet Ferguson’s flute to get an idea of the nuance in this music.

Salonen began with a Haydn symphony, No. 48 (“Maria Theresia”). The performance was resoundingly vigorous in the first movement, a little less so in later movements, but never disappointing. The horns had a field day.

* This week’s Los Angeles Philharmonic program repeats Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $8-$63, (213) 850-2000.