Das klagende Lied

    Das klagende Lied was the first work in which I became
    "Mahler".

    In my innocence I was bolder - in the use of an offstage orchestra,
    and in everything else specifically "Mahlerian" - than I have ever
    been since.

    Mahler, to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, during rehearsals for the 1901
    premiere.

This cantata, a tale of love, betrayal and fratricide is the earliest extant work by
Mahler of any significance. It was composed in 1879-80, to text of the
composer's own devising, based on a story from an anthology of german
folk-tales compiled by Ludwig Bechstein, with additional plot elements
inspired by The Singing Bone a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

Mahler submitted Das klagende Lied for the 1881 Beethoven Prize; the jury,
which consisted of Brahms, Hans Richter, Karl Goldmark, Joseph
Hellmesberg (director of the Vienna Conservatory), Franz Krenn (Mahler's
composition teacher), conductor Wilhelm Gericke, and conductor and teacher
J. N. Fuchs, awarded the prize to Robert Fuchs, one of Mahler's former
professors and brother of J.N. Fuchs.

As originally written the work comprised three parts, but, in the first of several
revisions, Mahler decide to drop the first part Waldmaerchen in 1888 or
thereabouts. (Most currently available recordings, however, reinstate this)

During his years in Hamburg Mahler revised the work, rewriting the passage of
the final part in which an off-stage wind band plays a significant role.
Presumably deciding that this was an impracticable demand, he incorporated
the music into the main orchestra, but in 1898-9, while preparing the work for
publication, he decided that "the change was not for the better."

The revised, two-part version was first performed in Vienna on February 17,
1901. The first performances of Waldmaerchen were given in two Radio Brno
(Czechoslovakia) broadcasts in 1934. The first complete performance of the
three-part work was given on Vienna Radio in 1935.

Das klagende Lied is a work which could have come from no other hand than
Mahler's, and while certainly far from being a masterpiece, contains much to
admire. (One might note, parenthetically, that Harold Truscott, in his unusually
perceptive article on Mahler, in The Symphony, edited by Robert Simpson and
published by Penguin Books, makes a case for Das klagende Lied's being a
more successful work than the First Symphony)

Especially dramatic is the close: the evil brother, on day of his wedding to the
queen, plays the flute which has been fashioned from the bones of his dead
brother,the flute's song accuses him of his brother's murder, the castle crashes
to the ground, in a moment of cataclysm which is pure Mahler, and which, in
some ways, anticipates the close of the Sixth Symphony. This is a work which
no self-respecting Mahlerian should be without.

Recommendable recordings of Das Klagende Lied include those by Rattle
(EMI) and Boulez (Sony).