Martin West on Mahler & Song of the Earth

Insight from the Music Director

By: Martin West

Gustav Mahler’s music doesn’t often get played for ballet, so it’s especially exciting to have his masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde, added to San Francisco Ballet’s musical repertoire for the 2024 Repertory Season in Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth. Having performed one of Mahler’s earliest works last year (Totenfeier, for Jamar Roberts’ next@90 premiere) we now get to immerse ourselves in one of his final works. It’s rare that one can look forward to performing a piece such as this and have the opportunity to explore its depth multiple times in one week.

Mahler’s famous quote that a symphony should “contain the whole world” is especially apt for this monumental work, a song cycle that, in every other respect, is a symphony. It would have been named so, had Mahler not been so superstitious about completing nine symphonies (the magic number that Beethoven and others reached, but did not surpass). By this stage in his composing career, his harmonic language had begun to evolve, pushing the boundaries of tonal music almost to its limits, anticipating the total breakdown of tonality that Arnold Schoenberg championed a few years later. And yet, despite the complexity, Mahler managed to incorporate the simplicity of the five-note pentatonic scales that Chinese music is so well known for, which in turn reflect the lyrics of the 8th-century Chinese poems that inspired the German text. Sometimes this is overt and at other times more subtle, serving as an example of how Mahler could encapsulate the most innocent and most complex in his work.

But for me, the real beauty of this project is, as it is in the greatest works of dance, that the choreography enhances the entire experience of the music. MacMillan was able to illuminate further the full range of emotions that Mahler set out to convey, bringing us along on the journey through life.

I first saw this ballet in the early 2000s at the Royal Ballet. It was a life-changing moment. How lucky am I to be entrusted with helping to bring this extraordinary work of art to our San Francisco audiences?

See SF Ballet’s premiere of Song of the Earth this season as part of British Icons.

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