Listening to the Earth? In the post-human future imagined by Philippe Quesne in Farm Fatale, birdsong is available only as an audio track. For Das Lied von der Erde, a new staging here in its world premiere, the French stage director and set designer expounds his thoughts on the Anthropocene. Through Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song cycle, Philippe Quesne allows us to grasp the future of the planet. A powerful visual staging updates the melancholy descriptions of nature. Originally written by Mahler in a mountain village in South Tyrol in 1908, the six-movement composition is inspired by ancient Chinese poetry. ‘What do I hear on waking? Hark! A bird sings in the tree.’ The renowned Klangforum Wien is to perform The Song of the Earth in the chamber orchestra version by Arnold Schönberg and Rainer Riehn. The musical reduction underscores the explosive force of the climaxes in Mahler’s score and transforms dissonances into forms of resistance against extinction. In Quesne’s production, the theme of leave-taking in the dominant final movement becomes the starting point for new utopias …