Musical memories

There are more recordings (at least 15) of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in my CD collection than of any other single work (even his Second Symphony !). I've often asked myself why that is. I'm going to try to figure it out now. The first recording of it that I heard was an LP with Richard Lewis and  Maureen Forrester . I remember not understanding the liner notes: How did Mahler take a German translation of Chinese poems and then change them to fit his purposes? Why did he do that? The pieces don't have much in the way of Chinese tonalities, and the texts fit into the dark Romantic German landscape as well as Caspar David Friedrich's paintings .  The lines that stuck with me after the first few hearings were "Dunkel ist das Leben, dunkel ist der Tod" and "...ein Aff' ist's" and, of course, the final "...ewig, ewig...". I was into Nietzsche and Hesse at that point in my life - as is the wont of many 20 year-olds - a...

There are few other pieces of music which move me as much as Mahler's Second Symphony does. I imagine I first heard it at the end of 1983 after Tom Field introduced me to Mahler in preparation for a recital given by Maureen Forrester at our college. But I don't remember really falling in love with the piece until the following year when I was in Europe. I had bought a tape of Bruno Walter's recording with the N.Y. Philharmonic and listened to it hundreds of times throughout 1984-85. The first time I heard it live was in summer 1986. My Austrian girlfriend was visiting me that summer, while I was living at a friend's apartment near DC and working with my college roommate in his record stores in Northern Virginia. I somehow found out that Maureen Forrester would be singing the alto solo part with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Riverbend Music Center on the Ohio River, a good 10 hours from DC. My old VW Rabbit was on its last legs, so if I was going to make it o...