Song of the Earth (ballet)

Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a symphonic work written by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler in 1908-1909 and scored for two voices and orchestra, has been used for ballets by several well-known choreographers. Among them are Antony Tudor (1908-1987), Kenneth Macmillan (1929-1992), Heinz Spoerli (born 1940), and John Neumeier (born 1942).

As staff choreographer with Ballet theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), Antony Tudor began creating a ballet set to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The six songs based on ancient Chinese poems, expressing the transience of human existence, had long interested him as a choreographic possibility. He explained their appeal: "Like the seasons, human experience is cyclical and has no sudden beginning or end." His ballet, entitled Shadow of the Wind, had its premiere on 14 April 1948 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Scenery, costumes, and lighting were designed by Jo Mielziner. The dancers were Igor Youskevitch, Hugh Laing, and Dimitri Romanoff (in "Six Idlers of the Bamboo Valley," set to song I); Alicia Alonso, John Kriza, and Mary Burr (in "The Abandoned Wife," set to song II); Ruth Ann Koesun and Crandall Diehl (in "My Lord Summons Me," set to song III); Diana Adams and Zachary Solov (in "The Lotus Gatherers," set to song IV); Hugh Laing (in "Conversation with Winepot and Bird," set to song V); and Nana Goldner, Hugh Laing, and Dimitri Romanoff (in "Poem for the Guitar," set to song VI). Photographs of the cast by Carl Van Vechten show elaborate costumes of flowing draperies in pseudo-Chinese style and the dancers in supposedly Oriental attitudes.

The ballet was not a success, receiving scarcely a positive word in the press. John Martin, writing in the New York Times, damned it with faint praise. "To this combination of ancient Chinese classic hedonism already screened through a process of Germanic Weltschmerz, Tudor has deliberately added the academic formation of the traditional ballet. The work had only three performances, the last of which played to a house that had dropped to 24 percent capacity.

In 1959, Kenneth MacMillan asked the directors of the Royal Opera House in London if he might use Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in a new commission for the Royal Ballet. He was refused because it was thought that such a major musical work was not suitable accompaniment for ballet. In 1965, however, MacMillan offered the idea to his friend John Cranko, director of the Stuttgart Ballet, who promptly accepted it. MacMillan summarized the scenario of his work in these words: "A man and a woman; death takes the man; they both return to her, and at the end of the ballet we find that in death there is the promise of renewal." With Marcia Haydée as Die Frau, Ray Barra as Der Mann, and Egon Madsen as Der Ewig (The Eternal One), it had its first performance on 7 November 1965 at the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart. Margarethe Bence, mezzo soprano, and James Harper, tenor, sang the six "songs of the Earth." In MacMillan's choreography, the young woman is a figure of loneliness, isolated from the movements of her friends, and the man, like others in his group, is blissfully unaware of his mortality. The Eternal One is not a figure of evil but a gentle, ever-present companion to all in the ensemble.

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