IV. Von der Schönheit

The poems that in 1908 inspired Mahler to Das Lied von der Erde had been printed a year earlier in Hans Bethge's Die chinesische Flöte ('The Chinese Flute'). But they had already before that travelled huge distances in both time and space. Hans Bethge's poems were in fact paraphrases of Hans Hellmann's 1905 collection Chinesische Lyrik, which itself was based on French translations of 8th century Tang dynasty poems. The Hongkong-based enthusiast Daniel Ng has, through untiring research, established the most likely sources of Bethge's poems, and prepared a Chinese Song of the Earth, replacing the German texts with the original Chinese poems.