When Sigmund Freud met Gustav Mahler in 1910, he suggested that, following a childhood trauma, “the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was inextricably fixed in Mahler’s mind”. Freud was famously uninterested in music, but had he known Das Klagende Lied, he would have found ample supporting evidence for his diagnosis. Composed in Mahler’s late teens and fusing opera, symphony, oratorio, lieder, part-song and even church music, the cantata collides comedy and tragedy at every turn – most remarkably towards the end, when the offstage wind band continues cheerfully as a wedding goes disastrously wrong with the revelation that the bridegroom won his bride by murdering his younger brother.
Mahler withdrew the first movement, Waldmärchen, and its manuscript remained unavailable until 1969. Performing all three movements but incorporating Mahler’s later revisions, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under former chief conductor Donald Runnicles made a strong case for the original tripartite structure.
