MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde- Fritz Wunderlich, tenor/ Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, bar./ Vienna Sym./Josef Krips – DGG

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde – Fritz Wunderlich, tenor/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone/Vienna Symphony Orchestra/Josef Krips – DGG 477 8986, 62:37 [Distr. By Universal] *****:
The unearthing of the performance 14 June 1964 of Mahler’s vocal-symphony The Song of the Earth under the baton of conductor Josef Krips (1902-1974) from Vienna’s Musikverein, the Grand Hall, becomes at once a major event in the centennial of Mahler’s passing, featuring two of the greatest exponents of the German lied in modern times, tenor Fritz Wunderlich (1930-1966) and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1925). A conductor who valued the singing line in music beyond all other considerations, Josef Krips remained a distinguished Mahler interpreter, having performed Das Lied von der Erde for the first time in Karlsruhe in 1928 and for the final time in Vienna in 1972. This collaboration from 1964 represents Krips’s only exploration of the  score with two male voices. The conductor’s association with Viennese music organizations again became solidified after WW II, when he revived the Vienna Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his political record having been found without any taint of fascist sympathies.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau himself has called the present document “the finest performance of Das Lied von der Erde,” and collectors will argue that the potent unity of ensemble rivals or surpasses the classic version with Julius Patzak, Kathleen Ferrier, and Bruno Walter.  The sheer girth and authenticity of Wunderlich’s opening Drinking Song of Earth’s Woe captures the emotional dysfunction between Li-Tai-Po’s grimly detached musing on mortality and the hysteria of the composer’s horror at the implacability of Fate. Fischer-Dieskau laments the bitterness and loneliness of life, his “Der suesse Duft Blumen ist overflowed” intoned with restrained misery. The flute sings over his “Mein Herz ist muede” with a bemused irony. Krips injects a particular anguish into the VSO strings and harp in the course of the first two songs, the colors from the woodwinds bleakly overcast, especially at the word “Einsamkeiten,” in Autumn’s solitude.
The middle song, Von Der Jugend (“Of Youth”) reminds us of the lyric joy Wunderlich projected with equal vocal accuracy in his EMI recording with Otto Klemperer, with Christa Ludwig. Three friends chat and drink, oblivious to the “tiger’s back” of the bridge of jade, the pool’s inverting the images of the revelers, and the moon “like a half moon, its arc upside down,” a suggestion that life’s cup drains unnoticed by their hopeful eyes. Another movement of aesthetic consolation follows, with Fischer-Dieskau’s singing “Of Beauty,” in which a horse’s hooves “heedlessly trample the fallen blossoms,” yet once more a soft prodigy of the inevitable passionate cycle of life and death in lovers’ flirtations. The music becomes more hectic, tempestuous, only to relent in the golden sunlight that no less reveals “the darkness of their passionate glance.” The nodding recognition of Folly in the singer’s voice perfectly conveys the aesthetic distance in the poet’s forgiveness of human vanity.
Mahler’s persistent fascination with drink and song returns, the “truth in wine.”  Wunderlich realizes in The Drunkard in Spring the bitter irony in self-deception when it comes to mortal thoughts, when Nature seems to mock us as ephemera. The singer’s heave into “Der Lenz ist da” can only make us weep for this vocalist’s all-too-brief sojourn on our planet, given that Wunderlich’s voice was the most delicate vase of them all. The final movement, Der Abschied, offers a thirty-minute farewell to “weary mortal thoughts.” Yet, the movement itself is no less a dream, an inscape of images external and internal of wanderings and existential doubt. The brief cello solos grip one’s heart, and the pentatonic scales soon become not exotic flowers but labyrinths in the soul’s torment. The flute itself becomes the Veil of Maya, often torn away to bring disillusion’s barren landscape. Few can outdo the critical reaction of Karl Loebl of Der Express: “Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau brought. . .the greatest possible emotion, perfect intonation, and an intensity of expression that turned the ending. . .into a shattering personal confession that died away into nothingness.” We must concur that this recorded concert remains “something extraordinary for all concerned.”
–Gary Lemco