Berliner Philharmoniker & Bernard Haitink Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Gerhaher, Elsner, 2016)

While in his song cycles Mahler picked up compositionally directly on Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin, he took up the mood of the Winterreise in his Lied von der Erde – an exceptional work that makes the finiteness of human existence its central theme, composed in a time in which the composer stood, in his own words, “vis-à-vis de rien”. Bernard Haitink, guest conductor of the Philharmonic since 1964 and one of the outstanding Mahler interpreters of our time, turns, after Schubert’s Unfinished, to Mahler’s work. It bids farewell to the world, and after the catastrophic climax of the last movements seems to fade away into infinity with an open ending: the text flows into the word “ewig” eternal, accented by gently floating tone lines; the music seems to gradually dissipate while the word is repeated a multitude of times. The tenor is Christian Elsner, while baritone Christian Gerhaher takes on the second solo, which is usually sung by an alto: as early a conductor as Bruno Walter at the first performance in Vienna