h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is a truly first class entry - h2g2 should be proud to have it submitted here. It is an in-depth, yet balanced and immensely readable article on a unique giant of 20th century music. I have no doubt that I shall be referring back to it regularly in the future.

My heartiest congratulations

I do have a question though, '...strongly resembles the ape call (?) at the start of Mahler's symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde'.

h5ringer

Ah ... the 'ape call' is the horn solo at the beginning of Das Lied von der Erde - it's the theme that signifies death in the symphonic cycle, which uses Chinese poetry. I think that the ape represents death for Chinese culture - in any case, given the time when Mahler wrote it (a couple of years before he died) it's hardly surprising that it has this obsession with death; something which seemed to resonate for Shostakovich as well (Das Lied von der Erde was his favourite Mahler piece).

Oh, I nearly forgot - there's an excerpt from Das Lied von der Erde illustrating the similarity between that theme and the ELMIRA code in Shostakovich's 10th symphony in the Discovering Music programme on the latter piece.

BTW, thanks for the compliment.

Your comment on the 'ape' theme has set me thinking over the last couple of days, and I wonder whether there isn't something hidden here.

Midway through the third stanza of the first song (Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde - Drinking song of Earth's sorrows)in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is the line that begins , which of course is a poetic contraction of . The German word translates in English to monkey or ape.

But - Mahler was fond of puns; his letters contain numerous examples of them. I wonder whether this could this be another of them. In colloquial German is equivalent to the English phrase 'having one over the eight' or 'having a skin-full'. Das Trinklied is, as it says, a drinking song, hence the pun.

I am not aware of this having been noted previously elsewhere, but if it has, then I apologise to the writer(s).

h5ringer

It could well be an appropriate pun for the drinking song ... and something Shostakovich would well have appreciated (he had a healthy sense of humour, after all!).

However, the ELMIRA theme in the third movement of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony isn't really used in as lively a manner as the 'ape call' in Das Lied von der Erde ... from the article on 'The Heart of the Tenth Symphony' linked to the article on Shostakovich, the two themes are ultimately tragic - Mahler's depicting death, Shostakovich's depicting doomed love. However, it appears that the similarity of the themes was probably accidental, although Shostakovich thought it would be "interesting food for musicological research".

This is partly why I'm so fascinated with Shostakovich and his music - you can't always tell why he used particular themes for e.g. his symphonies, even if there are seemingly clear explanations (on either side of the revisionist/anti-revisionist divide).

Great article. Thanks.