Inner and Outer Landscape in Gustav Mahler's The Song of the Earth

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In "The Song of the Earth," his great song symphony in six sections, Mahler presents landscape as an abidingly available resource to adjust one's vision of the self, of the earth, and of the infinite. Mahler always incorporates nature's face into his consideration of themes concerning the self, but never so clearly, tellingly, and deliberatively as in "The Song of the Earth." The focus of my analysis is a series of enigmatic textual and musical devices that Mahler uses with the effect of blurring a clean distinction between physical nature (the outer landscape) and the human self, with its inner landscape. In particular, I interpret the meeting between the two "friends" (Part six) and the upright, then inverted Chinese pagoda (Part three) as emblems of transition and intercourse between nature and self, inner and outer, life and death, and a series of other binary oppositions one could rehearse. Musical inversions and other mirroring effects abound to support, to underscore, and to punctuate Mahler's narrative enigmas. Mahler's use of "oriental" (Chinese) texts and musical practice, as with Alexander Zemlinsky's later "Lyric Symphony" (which used Tagore's poetry and imitated Mahler's "Das Lied") may provide fertile and intellectually dangerous ground for the study of musical and ethnic dichotomizing. Yet the oriental effects mainly function a a distancing mechanism within Mahler's Western musical structure.

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