Discovering Masterpieces – Das Lied von der Erde

Discovering Masterpieces – Das Lied von der Erde

Watch the series ‘Discovering Masterpieces’! Your audio-visual concert guide to the great masterpieces of classical music. The series brings you 20 half-hour documentaries on 20 classical masterpieces: acclaimed experts, famous soloists and outstanding conductors take you on a journey back to the time and place of composition. In today’s documentary, Gustav Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. No composer before Mahler had ever devoted himself exclusively to two genres so apparently incompatible as the intimate lied and the grandiose symphony. In ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, Mahler fascinatingly combines, at this late stage of his career, these two seemingly opposed genres in a 'symphony of lieder' for two solo voices and orchestra. Habakuk Traber presents this exceptional work of which Mahler himself wrote that "I think it is probably the most personal composition I have created thus far”.