From ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ (‘The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow’), first song of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde
The heavens are ever blue and the Earth
shall stand sure, and blossom in the spring.
But you O man, what long life have you?
Not a hundred years may you delight
in all the rotten baubles of this earth.
The long months of the pandemic have felt very much like the end of an era. What lies before us is still something of a mystery. I only hope the future does not replicate the insane turn of events that heralded the last great epochal transition in world history in the 1910s. This is much in my mind as I return to a cluster of paradisical valleys in the South Tyrol, which in 1909 inspired the composer Gustav Mahler to sketch some of his most eloquent and transcendental music. In his little composing cabin on the lower slopes above Toblach (Dobbiaco), Mahler wrote the scores for Das Lied von der Erde, as well as his 9th Symphony. The alpine panorama evoked a sublime but transient humanism in his last great completed works. In little more than a year, the great artist had passed away, leaving the cabin to posterity – today an improbable appendage to a small zoo. Mahler conjures up a pre-mechanised age, an enchanted world in which man is principally challenged by a magisterial nature. Five years after Mahler’s passing, his world was eviscerated. A quintessential alpine Austrian valley was to become Italian. Total warfare engulfed these mountains leaving a mixture of monuments. The archaeology of this new era is a subliminal footnote to one of the most successful UNESCO World Heritage sites, the Tre Cime, a place where one can both metaphorically hear the echo of Mahler’s grandiloquent voice, and reflect, close to paradise, about the future that awaits us.
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