'The language of the originals is so beautiful': Xiaogang Ye's Song of the Earth

When Xiaogang Ye announced in 2005 that he was going to set the same poems Mahler had in Das Lied von der Erde, his wife's reaction was 'how dare you'! 'I accepted,' he says, 'because the translations Mahler used are not good.' They were anyway not taken directly from the Chinese into German but via French. 'The language of the originals is so beautiful. In the German the poems come out as long sentences but in Chinese the lines are only five words long with five syllables.'

Ye was born in 1955 and, as well as studying in Beijing, also went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he was a student of Alexander Goehr. Over the last 40 years he has become one of China's best known composers, among other things writing music for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Now the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Long Yu, has put Mahler's and Ye's versions together in a 2 disc set for Deutsche Grammophon (483 7542) and the contrast is both clear and rewarding. Ye says he is 'very grateful to Long Yu, because to conduct them well you really have to understand what Mahler did.' Long Yu spent many years in Germany, 'and what the original poems meant in Chinese. The Western sense of the poems is very different,' as was Ye's from Mahler although they were much the same age when they approached them, with Ye being a year or two older.

'Our point of departure was very different. Mahler was sad and worried about his life, while I was in the middle of mine, happy and optimistic. In the poems Li Bai was expressing disdain for the world, not weariness of it. For example, Mahler's Abschied is a farewell to the world whereas mine is closer to Wang Wei's. It is fatalistic but stoic. He is saying everything's OK, the while clouds are still there, so while the singer finishes quietly the music is still strong, the percussion fierce.'

The poetry dates from the 8th to 10th centuries by Li Bai, Qian Qi, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei, all of whom had complex relationships with the Imperial Court and its bureaucracy. 'Li Bai never cared what the emperors thought,' says Ye, 'but somehow he always wanted to keep in with them and always failed. In the Tang dynasty the greatest writers tried to avoid the political and reality, and describe the landscape instead.'

Ye uses roughly the same orchestra as Mahler, 'though I didn't check. I used the orchestra I usually do. There are no Chinese instruments, though in the third song I imitate the bamboo flute by making the piccolo play with no vibrato, but I do try to capture the feeling of Chinese music. This was a new direction for me.' Since then Ye has found that the experience of setting these poems has inspired him to write much more for voice and orchestra, 'four or five more' symphonic song cycles.

Now he is turning his attention to a massive project, a three night resetting of The Peony Pavillion, a play with Kun music written in 1598 by Shakespeare's contemporary Tang Xiangzu (they died in the same year) during the Ming dynasty and probably the best known drama from the period. 'It's like my Ring cycle,' he says, 'a love story with a big social sense, contrasting political struggle at court with the life of ordinary Chinese people. It's going to be a huge work and I've only finished half of the first evening. We will do a sort of trailer at the opera in Beijing but I think it will take me many years to complete. I'm doing it my way because the play is such an expression of humanity.' He is not the first modern composer to tackle the work. New York based Tan Dun, two years younger than Ye, wrote a single evening version in 1998.

Ye has positioned the music beautifully so that in his hands The Song Of The Earth has its own sense of Chinese culture while retaining echoes of the Mahler in the orchestral writing and the vocal line (though he uses a baritone rather than a tenor). For Long Yu and Ye the intention has always been to cross both the hundred year gap between the two works and the widening one between contemporary China and the West, which he regrets. Ye says the interpretation Long Yu brings to it has matured too. 'It was very different when he first conducted it, a lot of energy. He's much cooler now, more considered.' Xiaogang Ye approves and is clearly proud of the result.