Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, and: Mahler's Fourth Symphony (review)

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. By Stephen E. Hefling. (Cambridge Music Handbooks.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xiv, 159 p. ISBN 0-521-47534-1 (cloth); 0-521-47558-9 (pbk.). $42.95 (cloth); $15.95 (pbk.).]

Mahler's Fourth Symphony. By James L. Zychowicz. (Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xiii, 191 p. ISBN 0-19-816206-5. $65.]

The differences between these two books, published by rival university presses, are more striking than their commonalities, so I will attempt to demonstrate the few parallels between them and then consider each on its own merits.

Both are devoted to one work of Gustav Mahler. The differences of approach to that task are partially influenced by editorial policy rather than authorial preference. The Cambridge series has adopted a format comprising historical background, critical reception, study of the sources, and analysis of the finished work. Volumes in the Oxford series, however, make no reference to reception history and cite historical background and analysis only when relevant to the study of source materials. Thus, the former makes the study of sources part of a multifaceted whole, whereas the latter accords it the central position, outweighing historical background and reception, if not analysis, of the finished work.

In the case of Stephen Hefling's book, I assume that his intention was to contribute to our knowledge of Das Lied von der Erde in ways that go beyond previous research, notably by Paul Bekker and Josef von Wöss in Mahler's generation, and Hermann Danuser, Henry-Louis de la Grange, and Donald Mitchell in our own time. The question in my mind as I read this book was, what is Hefling's attitude to the work of his predecessors? He cites earlier studies where appropriate in the text, notes, and bibliography, but clearly seeks to offer insights they did not. That is a tall order, especially when one compares this book with Mitchell's exhaustive coverage of the same work in his Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Doubtless realizing that he could not equal the length and detail of Mitchell's essay, Hefling chose a self- contained format that readers are likely to favor over Mitchell's idiosyncratic dialectic.

Hefling's best work is in chapter 4 ("The Music"), centering on analysis of the musical form and the relationship between music and text. Chapter 2 ("Genesis"), which deals with biographical background, the problem of the Chinese-German derivation of the texts, and the manuscript sources of the composition, is also a well-planned microcosm of the book as a whole. The inclusion of Mahler's piano-vocal version of Das Lied, which Hefling edited for the critical edition of the International Gustav Mahler Society (Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, suppl., vol. 2 [Vienna: Universal Edition, 1989]), is crucial to an understanding of the compositional process. The two pages Hefling devotes to this source represent a summary of his notes in that edition and his article "Das Lied von der Erde: Mahler's Symphony for Voices and Orchestra--or Piano" (Journal of Musicology 10 [1992]: 293- 340). He negotiates shaky ground in discussing the hybrid nature of the compositional process for this work, which began as a group of songs and was finished as a "symphony with voices," rightly emphasizing that the piano-vocal version characteristic of Mahler's song compositions is not, in this case, an equivalent for the pre-orchestral short score in the symphonies. Both such sources survive for this work, but the short score is fragmentary, whereas the piano- vocal score is complete, albeit with many differences from the orchestral version.

Table 2 (pp. 47-48), which lists the surviving manuscript sources, is primarily organized movement by movement. This works in the cases of manuscripts that survive only partially, but not in the case of...