The Farewell That Will Not End – on Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), who composed Das Lied von der Erde in the summers of 1908–09. Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Ewig… ewig… ewig. The word returns again and again, and the music thins until only an unresolved chord hangs in the air. In his latest essay, artistic director Vegard Nilsen reads Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde as a farewell that will not end — a symphony that refuses to be numbered, a cadence that refuses to close, a leave-taking that stretches past its own ending. Written in the ruins of 1907, it is Mahler’s most direct confrontation with mortality. For the conductor, Nilsen writes, the work is not to be narrated but inhabited: six songs, each with its own time, and a last chord left ringing into silence.