Hearing Yijing

Given that Mahler was inspired by Bethge’s paraphrase of Chinese Tang poetry in writing Das Lied, and that his work, as Lo Kii-ming hears, ‘sounds Chinese’, it is natural to wonder how far Mahler was familiar with ‘Chinese music’.Footnote ²⁶ Hu Haiping, while acknowledging in his 1991 dissertation that ‘no documented evidence of Mahler’s knowledge of Chinese music has yet emerged’, made the following claims:Footnote ²⁷ 1) Mahler might have heard Chinese music live at some Chinese restaurants in Hamburg in 1891–97,Footnote ²⁸ 2) Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, Mahler’s colleague at the Vienna Court Opera, possessed J. A. van Aalst’s Chinese Music (1884), which Mahler might have read to learn about the history, theory, and principles of Chinese music, 3) In the summer of 1908, the year in which he was working on Das Lied, Mahler received cylinder recordings of Chinese music from a family friend, Paul Hammerschlag, whose daughter, Elizabeth Duschnitz-Hammerschlag, told the historian Henry-Louis de La Grange about this.Footnote ²⁹

To this list we can add that Mahler might have heard East Asian musics (Chinese, Japanese, and Javanese) during his visit to the Paris Exhibition in 1900, as Stephen E. Hefling surmised in 2000, and, following Peter Revers’s work, that Mahler might have listened to records of Chinese music, among many other musics, in 1906 in the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Science, which Guido Adler, Mahler’s close friend, probably was in close contact with.Footnote ³⁰ De La Grange suggested that in April 1908, Mahler spoke with Friedrich Hirth, a sinologist at Columbia University who published The Ancient History of China to the End of the Chóu Dynasty in January that year, about Chinese history and literature.Footnote ³¹ We can also clarify Hu’s claim about cylinder recordings of Chinese music that Mahler might have heard: in de La Grange’s account of his conversation with Duschnitz-Hammerschlag, in the final weeks of summer 1908, Paul Hammerschlag heard from Mahler that he was interested in China and Chinese music, and Hammerschlag therefore went and bought ‘phonograph cylinders of Chinese music recorded in China’, which he gave Mahler as a gift.Footnote ³² Paul Banks has suggested that these cylinders were probably not recorded in China but in San Francisco, and were published by Edison Records in 1902.Footnote ³³ They are now publicly available in the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive.Footnote ³⁴

The grainy recordings represented a good variety of Chinese musics — songs, regional operas, comic recitations, and band music — and accordingly, they could have offered rich compositional resources to Mahler if he did listen to them, notably the ensemble of percussive sounds, with Chinese gong and wooden fish, and microtonal inflections in operatic voices and recitatives. It would be rather unfortunate to conclude, should this piece of historical evidence be authentic, that the only thing Mahler learned from these recordings was their use of pentatonicism, given that Mahler could just as well have learned that from, for example, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) or Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), or from reading various theoretical discussions on pentatonicism that were already available before 1908.Footnote ³⁵

Yet Hu sees the pentatonicism in Das Lied — perhaps the most salient trait of Mahler’s orientalism — as the most credible piece of material evidence demonstrating that Mahler had some knowledge of Chinese music.Footnote ³⁶ As he writes,

Indeed, most music-analytical efforts to understand Das Lied are aimed primarily at demonstrating how Mahler translated the essence of the poems into music through the means of pentatonicism, thus extracting from the poems an oriental flavour. In 1949, Hans Tischler claimed that the melodic material of the entire Lied is ‘based on the pentatonic scale’, which ‘unites the whole’ and ‘evokes the impression of a Chinese background[,] though there is no real attempt at imitating Far-Eastern music’.Footnote ³⁸ Some fifty years later, Hefling, more assertive than Tischler, saw pentatonic scales as ‘the most frequent modes of pitch organisation in Eastern music’, and associated the pentatonicism of the first movement of Das Lied, ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, with an exotic — both Chinese and Japanese — impression.Footnote ³⁹ Hefling identifies two kinds of pentatonic scales in the movement: the ‘Chinese’ anhemitonic pentatonic scales (five-note scales which do not contain semitones) and the ‘Japanese’ hemitonic pentatonic scales (five-note scales which contain semitones).Footnote ⁴⁰ Hefling also locates an appearance of the subset of the hirajoshi scale, 4-Z29. These pentatonic scales, Hefling argues, constitute the structural bedrock for the ‘basic motives’ in the movement. This is most prominently manifest in the refrain ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’, which rises a semitone (G–A♭–A) at each of its three appearances and is melodically constructed from the hirajoshi scale (C–D–E♭–G–A♭). Hefling argues for a twofold effect of these pentatonic procedures: first, these scales provide motivic coherence for the movement; second, pentatonicism diffuses the teleological feeling generated by functional harmony and counterpoint without displacing them, giving the music ‘a decidedly exotic touch’.Footnote ⁴¹

While Hefling’s analysis is grounded in a questionable assumption of pentatonicism as an expanded modality governing Das Lied, Donald Mitchell went so far as to claim that Mahler’s ‘orientalism’ not only resides in the music and the text, but also precedes them. Mahler’s pentatonicism, in Mitchell’s metonymic manoeuvre, is an outward expression of his spirit, which is, as Mitchell writes, ‘authentically Chinese’ and lies ‘beneath the layers of varnish and alien languages’.Footnote ⁴² Bethge’s texts merely ‘activated’ and ‘released’ Mahler’s Chinese sensibility, which ‘was already there’.Footnote ⁴³ As Mitchell explains:

Mitchell’s statements should not be misunderstood as flights of imagination. Unlike Tischler and Hefling, who undergird their claims with melody, motives, and modality, Mitchell grounds ‘the deepest levels of Mahler’s psyche’ and his ‘authentically Chinese spirit’ in the composer’s use of heterophony. Heterophony, as Mitchell points out, was part of the current thinking in Vienna in the early twentieth century, as evidenced by the publication of Guido Adler’s ‘Über Heterophonie’ in — not coincidentally — 1908.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, heterophonic thinking was widely discussed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards by musicologists such as Antoine Dechevrens, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and Otto Abraham, in both western and non-western musics.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mitchell takes full advantage of this piece of cultural-material evidence to justify his claims about Mahler’s orientalism — and, without much explanation, his ‘Chinese spirit’ — in his music. In particular, Mitchell describes at length his hearing of heterophony in ‘Der Abschied’, the finale of Das Lied, especially in the textural development beginning from the violin melody in bar 172, reproduced in Example 1(a).Footnote ⁴⁷ The melody assumes its principal significance when it is made vocal — ‘Ich sehe mich’ — in bar 198. The first violins play a countermelody to the principal melody, creating a two-part texture. The music arrives at the climax in bar 213, shown in Example 1(b), and ushers in a three-part texture, with the horns and cellos asserting linear-melodic independence yet bearing traces of the principal melody. This ‘simultaneous combination of differing forms of the same melody’, or what Theodor W. Adorno has called ‘blurred unison’ [unscharfes unisono] (‘identical voices diverge slightly through rhythm’), is the Chinese psyche to which Mitchell refers in his statements.Footnote ⁴⁸

Example 1(a). Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, ‘Der Abschied’, bars 172–82.

Example 1(b). Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, ‘Der Abschied’, bars 213–24.

Tischler’s, Hefling’s, and Mitchell’s attempts to associate a certain music-compositional technique or theory with a culture deserves to be called into question. Tse Chun Yan, for instance, has shown that not only is pentatonicism in Chinese musics a historically specific concept, but that Chinese musics have long adopted other scalar systems, such as the heptatonic scale and kuyin, a hemitonic, non-pentatonic scale commonly used in Guangdong province in southeast China that consists of, in equal temperament, a slightly raised $ \hat{4} $ and a slightly flattened $ \hat{7} $ , in addition to $ \hat{1} $ , $ \hat{2} $ , $ \hat{5} $ , and sometimes $ \hat{6} $ .Footnote ⁴⁹ As far as heterophony is concerned, Robert T. Mok pointed out in his discussion of melodic extemporization in Chinese instrumental ensembles, nineteen years before Mitchell’s publication, that what constitutes heterophony cannot be purely defined through musical elements but comes about through musicking processes.Footnote ⁵⁰

At least part of this controversy was not entirely unknown to writers in China in the 1990s. Mitchell’s 1985 monograph was cited in an article on the spiritual meaning of Mahler’s music which appeared in Chinese in the Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music in 1993, and writers in China engaged with both German and English sources on Das Lied from the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, following a series of academic articles published in the 1980s that were predominantly focused on the poetic origins of Das Lied, Chinese scholarly literature on its aesthetic value and historical import proliferated in the 1990s and early 2000s.Footnote ⁵² This phenomenon was paralleled by the resurgence in the 1980s in studies on Tang poetry and its historical context, aesthetics, literary significance, and political value,Footnote ⁵³ after a significant lull during the Cultural Revolution (1969–79), the sociopolitical movement launched by Mao that aimed at eradicating perceived bourgeois and capitalist influences in the country — including academic research on Tang poetry — in order to preserve communism and traditional Chinese values.Footnote ⁵⁴ More importantly, as mentioned, interpreting Das Lied evolved into a national endeavour from the 1990s after the high-ranking government official Li Lanqing expressed a keen interest in translational matters pertaining to it.

A scholarly exchange in a state-sponsored Chinese article published in 1999 neatly captures the polarized sentiments in the academic community towards Das Lied at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the article, the music critic Huang Yuan expressed his dissatisfaction with Das Lied’s explicit orientalism:

He let his irritation show in his next remarks:

Huang’s statement is well known in Chinese scholarly communities, but has never been translated into other languages. My English translation may have qualified Huang’s snidely sentimental writing and even, to some extent, muffled his voice. His expressions, such as ‘zoule yang de’ [‘distorted’], ‘Zhongguo qingjie’ [‘China complex’], and ‘xiangan wushi’ [‘at peace’], and his demonstratively excessive humility (‘I am not intelligent enough’), are cultural-linguistic signs of cultural protectionism. Between the lines, Huang accuses Mahler of cultural appropriation; he proposes sparing the composer if we paper over his alleged Chineseness and understand Das Lied ‘as a purely European work’.

What added complexity to the reception of Das Lied in China is that there exists simultaneously a staunch opposing, redemptive voice. At the end of Huang’s article, the editor of the journal incorporated a response from Guo Jianying, the youngest son of Guo Moruo, an eminent Chinese literary scholar and vice premier of the PRC from 1949 to 1954 (succeeded by Li Lanqing much later, in 1993).Footnote ⁵⁷ In response to Huang’s claim that ‘Das Lied should be understood as a purely European work, and we should leave behind our complex about China and forget about the heyday of the Han and Tang dynasties’, Guo writes that:

Guo then quotes examples of Chinese writers — from the poet Li He in the Tang dynasty to the novelist Cao Xueqin in the Qing dynasty — to demonstrate that ‘Chinese culture’ is more diverse than as caricatured by Huang. Guo contended, in words that can hardly be read today without a grin, that the main goal of Huang’s article was ‘not to assist Chinese audiences in understanding and absorbing Das Lied, but to demonize the work as a vacuous, desperate, morbid, dark, and crossbred monster’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Once we make allowances for the vehement tone of Guo’s denunciation, a notable feature of his attack on Huang is his use of the word yijing, a concept critical to the discussion of Das Lied in China. In Guo’s view, yijing mediates between the translation and the pentatonic representation in Das Lied: Mahler’s work, for Guo, is not merely a translation of the Chinese texts themselves, but also a translation of the yijing of the Chinese poetry into music. Yijing, which arguably originates from Tang Chinese aesthetics and resonates with the cosmological view found in Daoism, has been translated into English in multiple ways: ‘vision’, ‘essence’, ‘imagery’, ‘artistic conception’, ‘idea’, and so forth.Footnote ⁶⁰ None of these, unfortunately, captures its implication of ‘the transcendence of material and finite objects, phenomena, and events, and penetration into infinite space–time’.Footnote ⁶¹ The complexity of the philosophical foundation of the concept lies in its affective experience of freedom (daquan) untrammelled by physical laws. This affective experience is an intuition (zhijue) or mystic realization (miaowu) of a freedom with all worldly things, and this intuition or realization eradicates dichotomies of subject and object, self and other, and internal and external.Footnote ⁶² Yijing, in other words, is an immanent (neizai) state of mind (jingjie) that manifests itself in a transcendent affect of freedom. Yijing, now commonly used in Chinese communities, is a mysterious aesthetic quality in art that cannot be pinned down and carried across from one subject to another, but is intuited or felt.Footnote ⁶³

Yijing, long regarded as an ‘integral element of Chinese aesthetic consciousness’, has been a widely employed concept in the Chinese discourse on Das Lied, coinciding with the systemization of yijing studies in China since the 1980s.Footnote ⁶⁴ For instance, in line with Huang’s position, Yan Baoyu, a specialist in German literature and music, claims that ‘Bethge’s adaptations are mediocre and lack yijing; they taste like a glass of water […]. The seven poems […] do not reflect the originals’ meaning [neihan]; they are “misconstruals” [wudu] of the originals.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Yan argues that Mahler did not embody any Chineseness, but expressed a ‘fin-de-siècle sentiment’ — desperation, hopelessness, and decadence — which ‘naturally’ [ziran de] resonates with Chinese Tang poetry. In a thesis on Das Lied, Pei Chencheng, echoing Yan, writes that:

Yet while Guo attempted to salvage Mahler’s reputation from the bitter attacks by Huang and others, his response to Huang was as much an attack on Huang’s position as it was a critique of Das Lied. Isn’t Das Lied an attempt to ‘generalize the complex and diverse Chinese cultures’ via its pentatonicism? Can one see, hear, and feel in Mahler’s work the multifarious Chinese cultures diverging from the same yijing? If ‘it was not Mahler’s intent to be faithful to the original Tang poems’, then how did he ‘develop their yijing’? Even if we forget our ‘complex about China’, how should we understand Das Lied if it is ‘pseudo-Chinese music’? In Guo’s view, Huang, as a Chinese person, is expected to acknowledge cultural diversities within the plural ‘Chinese cultures’, while Mahler, as a westerner, can be absolved of guilt in the name of ‘lack of research’ and ‘cultural differences’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Let us pause here. A word is spoken in the original poem, is misunderstood by translators, is blurred again by the translation from French to German, and is misheard by Mahler, who adds to it sounds that refer back to some Chinese sounds or musics that he, too, only hears in mis-spoken forms. What seems to hold a fascination for writers in China throughout this game of almost-literal Chinese whispers is the concept of yijing. Footnote ⁶⁸ But why is yijing the organizing principle, if not the analytical goal? Why has the reliance on yijing not been questioned by any writers? While Huang provided no explanation whatsoever as to why he could not hear correlations between the yijing expressed by the music and the text in ‘Der Abschied’, Guo left the reader equally confused when he claimed that Mahler merely developed the yijing of the poetry in his music, without referring to any musical examples. While I concur with Guo that Huang made sweeping generalizations about Chinese cultures as if they were a monolithic entity, the two were in fact talking past each other.

But they probably wished to talk past each other. For what constitutes the yijing of the music and the poetry in Das Lied and what the yijing should sound like are, according to the Daoist philosophical foundation of the concept, symbolic sounds. Understood in relation to the Daoist concept of the Way (dao) from which everything is generated and to which everything returns, yijing cannot be apprehended by one’s hearing. It is, as philosopher Park So Jeong has put it, a ‘symbolic tone generated from within’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yijing, construed as such, is musically indeterminate. In this sense, both the coupling and the de-coupling of Mahler’s knowledge of Chinese music, or even his inherent Chinese sensibility and his ability to translate yijing into music, become purely authoritative assertions. Yijing’s musical indeterminacy is a convenient epistemic property that sustains fantastical claims about musical listening made in the interests of a distinct scholarly, personal, and political agenda. In the academic ‘telephone game’, yijing’s transformative magic can overcome any signal loss, but at the same time, it leads the argument to a dead end.

Translating Yijing

While yijing has had broad applications in discourses beyond Das Lied, it generated particular problems for Zheng as an artist, who took the lead in re-translating Mahler’s piece into Chinese. In an interview with the Beijing Morning Post of 25 July 2017, Zheng stated that one of the challenges of re-translating Das Lied was to ‘retrieve’ (zhaohui) the literary bond between Mahler’s yijing and the Tang poetry.Footnote ⁷⁰ In my score-study sessions with her, Zheng expressed without prevarication that she was translating the yijing of Mahler’s music and the Tang poetry into one that, she hoped, would resonate more meaningfully with the public.Footnote ⁷¹ In this section, I take an insider’s peek at Zheng’s sources and translational processes to create a substantive synthesis of her project and the layered cultural, political, and philosophical contexts in which her work was immersed. We will see how Zheng’s re-translations, echoing the neo-nationalistic ethos, were essentially concerned with establishing epistemic differences, where yijing served as an exclusive paradigm and contributed to building a nationwide capacity to refute western aesthetic frameworks. Before we get ahead of ourselves, an understanding of Zheng’s re-translations of Das Lied necessitates some knowledge firstly of her involvement in translating western musical works, especially operas, into Chinese, which directly inspired her Lied undertaking, and secondly of her sources, or, as I see it, excavated archives for the project.

According to Zheng, yangxizhongchang (Western Operas, Chinese Singing) dates back to the Chinese premiere of Verdi’s La traviata on 24 December 1956, under the baton of Li Guoquan at the Tianqiao Theatre in Beijing by the Zhongyang shiyan geju yuan (China National Experimental Opera, the predecessor to today’s China National Opera).Footnote ⁷² Directed by Gu Fung, the opera was translated, with the title Chahuanu, by Miao Lin and Liu Shirong, who consulted the Russian and English translations of the original Italian and collaborated on setting their translation to music.Footnote ⁷³ In a brief note dated 18 January 1957 in Renmin yinyue, a flagship musicological journal in China, Liu, going against the grain of the contemporaneous global ideological conflict, explained that Chahuanu had two purposes: on the one hand, it aimed to emulate European classical operas, and on the other, it served as a showcase of the artistic standards and training implemented by Valeria Dementieva, a soprano from the Soviet Union who had been sent to China to be the artistic director of the production.Footnote ⁷⁴ In an interview with the Beijing Daily of 16 July 2019, Li Guangxi, who played the character of Amang (Alfredo Germont) in the 1956 production, fondly reminisced that after the premiere, the entire artistic community was elated:

As the first western opera introduced into China, Chahuanu enjoyed phenomenal success until the Cultural Revolution. After a decade of cultural tumult, Zheng then carried the spirit of Chahuanu forwards in her translating of western operas into Chinese. In 1978, she was appointed chief conductor of the CNO and resumed rehearsals for a production of Chahuanu. Then, in 1979, she was notified that as part of a Franco-Chinese cultural exchange agreement, experts from France would be sent to the CNO to coach the rehearsals for the Chinese rendition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Footnote ⁷⁶ In the following year, Zheng collaborated with the translator Sun Huishuang in translating Bizet’s opera and setting it to music.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their efforts were further bolstered in 1981 when they joined forces with French director René Terrasson, conductor Jean Périsson, soprano Jacqueline Brumaire, and a team of seven or eight French experts specializing in costume design, choreography, and lighting. The Chinese translation, Zheng recalled, underwent six good rounds of edits.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Chinese Carmen was premiered at the Tianqiao Theatre in Beijing in 1982.

Not only did the experience of working on Chahuanu and the Chinese Carmen boost Zheng’s confidence and lay a firm foundation for her translation and text-setting techniques, but they also reinforced her belief in the value of performing western works in Chinese for audiences in China. It was these experiences, Zheng maintained, that prepared her, as someone who did not know German, to take on the formidable task of re-translating Das Lied and setting it to music. However, Zheng was not the first person in China to do so: Zhang Yi, from the translation-cum-text-setting department of the CNO, provided a Chinese translation and text-setting, based on an English translation of the original German, for a Chinese premiere on 4 July 1985 conducted by the Australian conductor and violinist Leonard Bertram Dommett with the China National Opera Symphony Orchestra (CNOSO), featuring tenor Ma Honghai and alto Wang Huiying.Footnote ⁷⁹ While preparing rehearsals for this premiere, which was based on Zhang’s translation, Zheng began her own re-translation, which she titled Chenshi zhi ge (Song of the Mundane World).Footnote ⁸⁰

On 3–4 March 1990, Zheng conducted the work with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with tenor Liu Weiwei and alto Liu Shan from the CNO. At that time, although Zheng had obtained musicologist Liao Fushu’s Chinese translation of the original German, she could only use a revised version of Zhang’s text-setting, because Liao’s translation had not been set to music. From 1990 to 2013, Zheng consulted Zhang’s text-setting and Liao’s translation, and worked with musicologists and performers to refine the translation and set it to Mahler’s music, a practice known as xiupei. On 7 June 2013, she led the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of an emended version of Chenshi, with tenor Zhu Yidong and alto Yang Guang at the Xiamen Hong Tai Concert Hall; this translation, dated 8 June 2013, was published in the CD booklet of the recording of Chenshi released by Dragon’s Music, a Hong Kong record label, in 2015.Footnote ⁸¹ On 18 July 2017, tenor Wang Feng and alto Yang Guang performed with the China National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra in Beijing under Zheng’s baton, and the end of her meticulously documented performance history of Chenshi was marked on her miniature orchestral score.Footnote ⁸²

Zheng worked with a variety of materials when re-translating Das Lied. For her rehearsals in 1985 and the Shanghai concert in March 1990, she relied on a German miniature orchestral score (MS), likely printed in China.Footnote ⁸³ Zheng employed an enlarged version of MS after March 1990, which I label ES (enlarged orchestral score); this incorporated select translations from MS, but also introduced several new ones.Footnote ⁸⁴ ES was not entirely identical to Zheng’s published translation, dated 8 June 2013, accompanying her CD (which I label TCD), although she claimed that she had used it for the concert held a day before. A piano reduction (PR) was also used for rehearsals for the same concert, but discrepancies between PR and ES abound.Footnote ⁸⁵

As far as Zheng’s re-translations are concerned, Zhang Yi’s Chinese translation and text-setting from an unknown English source (ZY) and Liao Fushu’s Chinese translation from the original German (LFS), on which TCD was based, were two major sources of reference.Footnote ⁸⁶ Two additional documents Zheng possessed include her undated study notes on ZY (SNZY) and her revision of ZY and LFS on another hard copy of ZY (R-ZYLFS), dated February 2013. SNZY contained her analyses of poetic form, musical commentary in broad strokes, notes on bar numbers and pentatonic occurrences, and paragraph-long exegeses of the music’s poetic meaning. The latter was a revision of the translations.Footnote ⁸⁷ That said, certain revisions made their way into ES and TCD.Footnote ⁸⁸ Materials in R-ZYLFS, accordingly, were selectively adapted into ES and TCD, and some of them represented Zheng’s personal thoughts that were not found in other practical uses in rehearsals and performances. Table 1(a) and (b) summarizes the scores and translations with which Zheng worked for the various performances of Chenshi.

The discursive thickness of Zheng’s sources invites a reading and hearing of her archives — stored in the cabinets directly behind her work desk — not only as history, but also, to use Ann Laura Stoler’s words, as ‘active, generative substances with histories’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The archives’ generativity is amplified by the difficulty in generalizing their characteristics and Zheng’s non-commitment to the papers. At many instances during our conversation, she unsettled the archival conceit by expressing her openness to potential changes, recounting on-the-spot adaptations during rehearsals and performances, regretting misremembrances, and performing such unwritten phenomena as voices and modes of listening. The following observations therefore flutter between the archival grain and my sense of its post-/decolonial pulse, the ethnographic history, and the broader cultural, historical, and epistemic agencies at play.Footnote ⁹⁰ In particular, I will examine how yijing served as an aesthetic and epistemic framework for Zheng’s re-translations, and more broadly, what the rhetorical modes and layered temporalities of these lived sources can tell us about the cultural operations of translation, musical knowledge and knowledge-making, and musicking experiences in China.Footnote ⁹¹

Before we look at an example, namely Zheng’s re-translation and text-setting of the refrain ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’ in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, we will first consider Mahler’s orchestration of the first appearance of this refrain, as shown in Example 2. Mahler’s decision to put a slur over the G to D in the first refrain (bars 81–86) was probably informed both by the syllabic articulation and by the syntactic construction (the third refrain, in bars 385–93, was not slurred): he assigned a pitch to each syllable and slurred the main clause, ‘Dunkel ist das Leben’. The elliptical clause ‘ist der Tod’ is not slurred and is marked ‘rit’. Naturally, the second ‘ist’ is metrically accented when it is performed as the beginning of a new phrase; it is also given more weight as the music slows down, and has a different colour, harmonized against a dominant-seventh chord in G minor (with a ♭6–5 suspension). Mahler also assigned the same B♭ to the ‘ist’ in both clauses to mark the parallelism. The slur thus functions as a musical inflection of the linguistic comma, coordinated with the orchestration. The horn player, for example, will breathe together with the tenor after ‘Leben’.

Example 2. Mahler, ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’, in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, Das Lied von der Erde, bars 81–90.

Shao Yan, a musicologist and Zheng’s former colleague at her Opera Centre, documented a discussion of this refrain between Zheng, alto Yang Guang, and tenor Zhu Yidong during rehearsals in May 2013, a month before the June concert in Xiamen.Footnote ⁹² The re-translation and its emendation are reproduced in Example 3. At first glance, they are similar to Mahler’s original: each character is assigned a pitch, and the slurring remains unchanged. However, the comma placement in the re-translation and the emendation brings about a tension between the linguistic syntax and the musical-phrasal articulation. While Mahler’s original slur is retained, the linguistic syntax is modified. The comma is important here. Unlike the comma in German, the Chinese comma functions to demarcate both clauses and sentences, control logical flow, and signal a breathing space. In written Chinese, the comma can be repeated almost indefinitely until an idea, however defined, is completely expressed. In both the re-translation and the emendation, the comma is placed after four characters, after the G. What comes before the comma is a sentence in the re-translation, and a clause in the emendation during the rehearsal; the former reads ‘rensheng ru meng 人生如梦’ [‘life is like a dream’], and the latter ‘heian bansui 黑暗伴随’ [‘darkness goes along’]. The linguistic pause thus rubs against the musical slur, creating some doubt as to where the performer should breathe. Yet these re-translations provide a music-theoretical re-interpretation of this phrase. According to these re-translations, the first four bars — a descending arpeggio of a G-minor triad — align with the first sentence or clause of the respective translations. There thus exists a superposition of music–text relations: the arpeggio corresponds to the first clause, while the slur creates a musical phrase that spans the first six notes.

Example 3. Zheng’s (1) Chinese re-translation and (2) emendation of the re-translation of Mahler’s ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’ in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ (bars 81–89) in May 2013.

Not only do the re-translation and the emendation re-fashion Mahler’s phraseology, but they also alter the textual meaning in Das Lied. As shown in Table 2, while Mahler’s text reads ‘Dark is life, is death’, the re-translation is ‘Life is like a dream; one dies in a twinkling of an eye’.Footnote ⁹³ One might wonder whether the re-translation is inspired by the original poetry; in Li Bai’s ‘Beige xing’ [‘Song of Sorrow’], ‘How sorrowful, how sorrowful’ is far from Mahler’s translation and the re-translation. The emendation might be a corrective to the re-translation. The topics of darkness, life, and death return, but rather than being life and death as written in Mahler’s text, in the emendation darkness goes along with life and death. Shao reported an anecdote behind the process of re-translation and emendation: after Yang claimed that a direct translation from German into Chinese ‘cannot be sung with aesthetic feeling’, Zheng re-translated the original into ‘Life is like a dream; one dies in a twinkling of an eye’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The emendation was then made on the spot according to the music’s direction and tenor Wang Feng’s vocal habits.

Zheng settled on the following translation, recorded in ES and possibly informed by LFS, for the June 2013 concert: ‘shengming yipian heian, siwang yiyang 生命一片黑暗,死亡一样’ [‘Life is a field of darkness, like death’], as reproduced in Example 4. The decision marks an abrupt but significant change. Unlike the drafts prepared a month prior to the concert, the adopted re-translation closely aligns with Mahler’s original in terms of its textual meaning and features a six-plus-four phrasal structure. This new version, though in line with Mahler’s slur in the first two refrains, modifies the penultimate dotted minim, adding an extra quaver to accommodate the last two characters. Not only does this version introduce a musical intervention into Mahler’s composition through the added musical note, but it also contradicts Zheng’s own music analysis. As evidenced by her orchestral markings in both MS and ES, she believed that the refrain exhibits a four-plus-four-plus-one structure, indicated by red vertical lines delineating the subphrases in all the refrains (which also explains why the first clause in Example 3 comprises four characters).Footnote ⁹⁵

Example 4. Zheng’s re-translation of Mahler’s ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’ in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ (bars 81–89) in ES, PR, and TCD. Transcription of Zheng’s recording with the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra (Dragon’s Music, 2015), beginning at 1:35.

The re-translation that was ultimately adopted departed in three main respects from the material Zheng was working with: from Mahler’s music, her own phrasal segmentation, and the original Tang poetry.Footnote ⁹⁶ In retrospect, the alterations made in May 2013 were experimental. For it was through the process of trial and error, listening, performing, and feeling the language (as Yang articulated) that a collectively intuited yijing within the creative team, despite the difficulty of pinning it down or outlining a definitive contour, could potentially be staged as part of a resonant design for Chinese audiences.Footnote ⁹⁷ As a collective subjectivity, yijing took precedence over everything else as a guiding aesthetic framework to justify any quirks in the re-translation process and every change of decision. All other considerations — translational accuracy, phrasing, and so on — while crucial, were a concerted means to an end. Providing Chenshi with an interpretive paradigm, yijing could thus effectively iron out the ostensible contradictions, inconsistencies, and disharmonies between Mahler’s music and text, the original Tang poetry, and Zheng’s re-translations, and could grant the creators an epistemic immunity from potential critiques. In this way, yijing promotes solidarity by enacting a mechanism of control, in that any potential dissidents would be denied entry into the epistemic sovereignty.

To consider further how Zheng’s approach to re-translation realized her vision of retrieving the literary bond between Mahler’s yijing and the Tang poetry, we may take a closer look at ZY and LFS, both of which Zheng used to inform her re-translations. ZY, it will be remembered, is a translation of an unknown English source, while LFS directly translates Mahler’s original German into Chinese. Generally speaking, Zheng leaned towards the liberal ZY rather than the literal LFS as the foundation of her work (Example 4 being an exception). For instance, in the finale, Mahler’s ‘Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute’ [‘I wander up and down with my lute’] is more or less literally translated into Chinese in LFS. ZY, on the other hand, paints a vividly different, richly textured, picture. It specifies that ‘I’ is ‘sorrow’, Sinicizes Mahler’s characteristic use of mandolin that precedes the text by detailing that ‘I’ embraces a pipa (a generic Chinese lute), and expands the entire imaginary space into infinity by placing ‘I’ in ‘everywhere’ [daochu]. Rather than limn a to-and-fro movement, ZY evokes a quixotic yearning for someone by enacting a dynamic and coherently Chinese soundscape mapped onto a surreal spatiality through speech and instrument. In re-constructing the scene [jing] and re-curating the affective experience [yi] on stage, Zheng attempted to liberate the conditions under which yijing can be intuited or felt despite the impossibility of dictating what it is. Indeed, as the Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Zong Baihua has theorized, yijing is the transcendence of ‘a projected crystallization of affect and scene’ [‘qing yu jing de jiejingpin’] from one’s heart and mind.Footnote ⁹⁸ Zheng, in re-creating the jing and yi on stage for her audiences, removed those in Mahler and provided a new basis — in a way, a new art — for potentialities of transcendence and crystallization to take place in their hearts and minds. In embracing ZY and discarding LFS in this and many other instances, Zheng saw a shared vision between herself and ZY in reshaping the order for the ineffable as a mode of translation.

A good example of this process of removal and re-enactment is shown in the first movement. ‘Dein Keller birgt die Fülle des goldenen Weins!’ [‘Your cellar contains the abundance of golden wine’] was first translated literally in MS (informed by LFS), but was then translated in ES as ‘zai ni de xuejiao li na jinhuang de meijiu ru haiyang 在你的血窖里那金黄的美酒如海洋’ [‘in the cellar of your bloodstream, that golden wine is like an ocean’]. ZY’s translation was radical: ‘zai ni de xueguan li jinhuang de qiongjiang zai liutang 在你的血管里金黄的琼浆在流淌’ [‘the golden nectar flows within your blood vessels’]. ZY was eventually selected, published, and performed. Zheng gave a surprisingly simple response to my naive consternation at so drastic a departure from the original: the re-translation, she said, was more ‘dynamic’ [shengdong], and the audiences could therefore comprehend the yijing better. A direct correlation between the characteristic of the scene and yijing was made, but the conversation moved elsewhere as we shared a knowing grin, as if touching on a sore point. Hanging in the air was a tacit agreement not to undermine the indeterminacy of yijing but to celebrate the remoulding of the entire sensorium — the scent, the sound, the affect, the visuals — that the re-translation enabled as a new foundation for cultural solidarity in the decolonial pursuit of retrieval.Footnote ⁹⁹

With its overarching aesthetic and epistemic framework of yijing, Zheng emphasized that Chenshi embodies a specific mode of interculturality, reversing the historical dynamics of zhongweiyangyong (Chinese Cultures, Western Use) to yangweizhongyong (Western Cultures, Chinese Use), the latter being a widely chanted slogan in 1950s Maoist propaganda.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The Chinese verb yong, meaning to use, carries the historical connotation of governance.Footnote ¹⁰¹ To use Homi K. Bhabha’s idea, in disrupting the language and music in Das Lied and providing it with a new interpretive paradigm, the ‘denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority — its rules of recognition’.Footnote ¹⁰² Zheng’s self-alleged re-translation of yijing — her attempts to mark it as an interpretive sovereignty, circulate it as a design, generate new potentialities of affect through removing the old and setting up the new, and expand the audiences’ sensory experiences — registered precisely such novel terms of recognition. Amid the archives’ discursiveness, the post-/decolonial pulse which I sensed is therefore concerned not only with the lack of faithfulness to Mahler’s text and music and to the original poetry per se, but also with the political potential of the legitimization and installation of an exclusive epistemic space that energized and authorized the re-translations and interpretations. Chenshi, in this way, emerged as a re-conquered epistemic protectorate.

Emily Apter describes this epistemic territory as a performative sovereignty of translation, a musical-linguistic agitation that marks epistemic borders in ‘translation zones’.Footnote ¹⁰³ This agitation, Richa Nagar elaborates, ‘narrates people, stories, events, and dreams through collectively owned journeys not in a hope to reach perfection, but in a hope to disorder the dominant languages and paradigms through which we often encounter knowledges and knowledge makers’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The ‘we’ that Nagar pens here is of course situational; in our case, the re-translations of German into Chinese signal an imaginary space of sinophone solidarity rooted in China. This hunger for translation, Nagar notes, arises from an unjust linguistic-epistemic landscape of exclusion, which paradoxically aspires to connect, in the form of control, those who suffer within it. Zheng articulated the reversal of this paradox through her re-translations: ‘We [the Chinese people] must shed the hubris and pretence of understanding Das Lied […] and reunite through a Chinese understanding of it.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For Zheng, re-translating Das Lied was an enterprise that aimed to de-naturalize a long-standing western-driven paradigm of solidarity in China deriving from an uncritical reverence of and a feigned fascination for western musical works. Audiences and critics in China, Zheng elaborated, enjoyed Das Lied not despite but because of their unfamiliarity with it, because at that time enthusiastic admiration of western culture put them on the right side of history, as signifying their commitment to Chinese modernization. Her project re-invigorated the aspiration of the New Left in the 1990s by capitalizing on translation as a tool of gathering, community-building, and cohering/co-hearing. Echoing Maoist ideology, Zheng, a party member herself, also acknowledged that her effort was in line with the party’s strategies of cultural reform and the values of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the previous decade, where three principles of ‘staying close’ were upheld: staying close to practicality, to life, and to the people.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is through re-translating western works into Chinese that the people can displace the western ideologies they have adopted — and, as Zheng underlined, their own resulting hubris — to appreciate these works from a China-centred perspective. More crucially, her project sought to build a nationwide cultural, political, and epistemic capacity to refuse and refute values, ideas, frameworks, and institutions imposed from outside, and to enact a resonating order within China that enables the potential shaping of a domestic and global politics of control and authority in music and knowledge-making. Rather than animate cultural crossings, re-translations as such serve to construct and defend nationhood, identities, and borders.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Epilogue

For Mandarin-speaking audiences, listening to Chenshi can be a transfixingly joyful experience: every single word can be comprehended clearly despite the text-setting challenges presented by Mandarin.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Surely this was no easy task for a tonal language where pitch changes semantics; pairing the four tones in Mandarin with a predetermined melody was a challenge strategically overcome. Shao explained how laborious the process of ensuring that every melodic tone matches the speech tone was:

As one hears Chenshi unfold, its comprehensibility can be easily taken for granted as part of Zheng’s thirty-year-long project. But it should not be. I wish to end this article with a provocative turn to the Cantonese Lied produced in Hong Kong by the late entrepreneur and Mahler aficionado Daniel Ng Yat-chiu, which sheds another cultural light on the prism of Chenshi for future refractions, and to underline, in contrastive terms, the issue of comprehensibility and the epistemic complexities among post-/decolonial responses to a western musical work within a nation. The choice of language for Ng’s Lied is critical: Cantonese, now primarily spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, and other regions in southeastern China, is often claimed to be one of the languages closer to the Middle Chinese spoken during the Tang dynasty, while Mandarin emerged much later, in the Ming dynasty (although both are often conveniently categorized as ‘Chinese’).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Therefore, while to the best of my knowledge there is no direct evidence that the Cantonese Lied was intended to address Vice Premier Li’s concerns, a neo-nationalistic sentiment did shine through in its explicit choice of language, and, as we will see, its orientation towards the original Tang poetry. A Cantonese Lied is, as it were, more authentically Tang; it stages an aesthetic conceit to allow the Chinese masses to hear how Tang poetry should have sounded in a much-revered western musical work.

Ng produced a Cantonese chamber ensemble version of Das Lied, which was premiered in 2004 in collaboration with Glen Cortese at the British Library in London with the Chamber Orchestra Anglia under the baton of Sharon Andrea Choa.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 2007, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra recorded the Cantonese Lied based on Ng’s work with the conductor Shui Lan, mezzo-soprano Liang Ning, and tenor Warren Mok; Universal Edition published Ng’s score a year later.Footnote ¹¹² The work was later performed in Hong Kong in 2016 at the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre with Philharmonia APA conducted by Choa, with Liang and tenor Justin Lavender.Footnote ¹¹³

Ng’s Cantonese setting of Tang poetry in Das Lied was aimed at preserving the textual integrity of the Tang poetry. Ng made minor alterations to the poetry and expanded it when necessary, primarily for musical reasons. For instance, in the case of the refrain ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’, which we examined in Zheng’s re-translations, Ng preserves the cry ‘bei loi fu 悲來乎’ [‘how sorrowful’, in Cantonese] from Li Bai’s ‘Beige xing’ [‘Song of Sorrow’] (see Table 2). It is repeated three times, instead of twice as in the poem, to match nine Chinese characters with the nine musical pitches of the refrain. Ng’s work was more an endeavour in text-setting than in translation; indeed, it could be heard as a resistance against translation.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Yet Ng’s Lied is virtually incomprehensible to native Cantonese speakers. To be sure, compared to the four tones in Mandarin, Cantonese has a more complex system of nine tones, which makes text-setting considerably more challenging than for a Mandarin text. But no effort whatsoever seems to have been made to meet this challenge. The vocal entry (bars 16–18) in the first movement of Ng’s Lied, reproduced in Example 5, will suffice to elucidate this point: it recalls Li Bai’s poem verbatim, ‘zyujan jau zau 主人有酒’ [‘the master has wine’]. In theory, the first two characters, zyujan 主人, are optimally comprehensible when the melody falls, instead of rises, in accordance with the speech tones. Janjau 人有 should be mapped onto an ascending minor third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, minor sixth, minor seventh, or perfect octave, while jauzau有酒 would best match an ascending major second or major third.Footnote ¹¹⁵ None of this is followed, and these tone–melody mismatches persist through the rest of the work as an audible red thread. Zheng’s Chenshi and Ng’s Cantonese Lied therefore sit at the opposite ends of a spectrum: the former is impressively comprehensible, the latter frustratingly unintelligible.

Example 5. Daniel Ng Yat-chiu’s Cantonese Das Lied von der Erde, bars 16–18.

What does this alien soundscape do? For Cantonese speakers, the work displaces Mahler’s music; it is a violence against music. While Zheng’s Mandarin re-translations install a new epistemic paradigm through yijing, the Cantonese Lied makes audible the incongruence between the temporality, logic, and language of a Chinese culture and western art music. The latter reveals that the operation of translating Mahler’s Lied not only renders ‘invisible’ but also inaudible ‘everything that does not fit in the “parameters of legibility” of its epistemic territory’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Cantonese Lied reveals an ugly musical truth, one that exposes Das Lied’s erasure through translation, buried underneath the music’s epistemic territory as a romantic, border-crossing reality. Ng’s Lied, in liberating the Chinese poetry from the German translation that ‘captures and transforms people, cultures, and meanings into what is legible and controllable for those in power’, shows that the authentically Chinese, the untranslated, is in fact incomprehensible in Mahler’s music.Footnote ¹¹⁷

This alienation speaks differently to non-Cantonese speakers. For those who do not speak the language, Ng’s Lied is a sound object to be misheard as authentically Chinese. As Frankie Perry has commented, Ng ‘fosters a productive alienation of Germanophone or Germanophile listeners’, and to this we can add, of all non-Cantonese-speaking listeners, ‘for whom the text will (more than likely) no longer be comprehensible’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ His work, Perry continues, demonstrates ‘an interest in a very specific type of “authenticity”, wherein allegiance lies not so much with the source score and the authority of the composer, but with the cultural archaeology of a work’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Unlike Zheng’s Chenshi, which celebrates yijing as a guiding epistemic principle, Ng’s Lied presents an alien soundscape to listeners — both native and non-Cantonese speakers — an audible unknowability where the struggle to understand licenses a new way of listening and knowing.

I shall set aside the discussion on Ng’s Lied, an intriguing artistic and political statement indeed, for future conversations, but I wish to conclude this article by reflecting on the ramifications of what we have discussed from a broader point of view. In western art music, the epistemic asymmetry between translation and original not only stems from the well-worn original–translation dichotomy, but also from the very difference that the translation promises.Footnote ¹²⁰ As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has reminded us, the colonial model of epistemic production is characterized by deviation from the ideal, produced by the colonizer or the elite.Footnote ¹²¹ Once differences are registered, they can be signalled, evaluated, compared (or rendered incomparable), judged, marked, and figured as the Other. Against the context of western art music, translation, as a difference-making apparatus par excellence, often operates in an epistemic regime conditioned by a colonial structure of comparativism, where the original accedes itself to the position of the knowledge producer, while the translation, not least in a non-western language, is relegated as the unmarked receiver.Footnote ¹²²

When the original lies outside of the music–text fabric, the governance of the epistemic regime can be displaced. An illustrative example is the well-documented efforts in China since the 1990s to Sinicize Puccini’s Turandot, which features a mythical story of a Chinese princess and which has been widely criticized as orientalist.Footnote ¹²³ Several renditions, some radical, have been made to ensure, as a postcolonial critique, that the opera could be performed with a Chinese artistic understanding. We have seen how Zheng and Ng realized the same aspiration with different strategies: rather than simply localize the original, Zheng proposed a musical economy deploying a common linguistic and philosophical currency to sponsor her re-translations, enacting an exclusive epistemic sovereignty to discipline domestic, and potentially global, music-knowledge making. On the other hand, Ng, through resisting translation, celebrated incomprehensibility to demonstrate how western coloniality of language and knowledge must be heard to be believed. For Ng, any re-translation of Das Lied, be it Chinese, Russian, or Czech, would be inauthentic.Footnote ¹²⁴ Despite strategic differences, the efforts share a common goal with the New Left in the 1990s: to enlighten people in China about their national interest and identity, liberate them from their self-imposed perception of being a colonized populace, and unite them within a post-/decolonial consciousness against colonial forces. The lessons drawn from the tales of Zheng and Ng are valuable: if translation serves as a decolonial praxis, Zheng and Ng have laid bare its discursive capacity to enact systems of power, exclusion, and control, and its ability, through music, to resist in its absence.Footnote ¹²⁵ Their works invite us to recognize music as a critical site where interactions with colonial legacies — ethnography, music-making, analysis, translation, performance, listening, and much more — can challenge us to be critical of logics of coloniality in decolonial efforts and the stakes of building a decolonial coalition, in theory and in practice, against ‘the West’ without tending to the forms and temporalities of domination, marginalization, and reaction across postcolonial consciousnesses.Footnote ¹²⁶

Reception stories surrounding Das Lied in China do not end here. In 2002, the Hong Kong Dance Company produced a modern dance rendition of Das Lied choreographed by Chiang Ching and performed with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra Chamber Ensemble conducted by Kerstin Nerbe. The production featured the Chinese poet Zheng Chouyu’s Mandarin re-translation of Das Lied, which gave a colloquial spin to the German original, and was sung by mezzo-soprano Ulrika Tenstam and tenor Warren Mok.Footnote ¹²⁷ In 2004, the Chinese composer Ye Xiaogang completed his piece The Song of the Earth, using the poems that inspired the composition of Das Lied. More interpretations can be expected. Das Lied has become a chimera too layered, too polysemic, its chronotopes too heavy. Discursive translations cluster thickly around Das Lied, and their political overtones ring loud in the ecosystem. This should not strike us as surprising once we appreciate the fact that Das Lied in China is as much an issue of cultural translation as it is of nation-building.Footnote ¹²⁸ These tales remind us that we should be wary of reading translation merely as a quixotically intercultural tool of modernization and progress, or as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonization.Footnote ¹²⁹ As listeners, we can hear translations and the resistance to them in interlingual and intermusical transactions, and in the intercultural reciprocity of meaning-value and its denial, as arbiters of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.