In the evening I went with Ian [Parsons] to a Courtauld concert.  Bruno Walther conducted Beeth. symphony no 1, the scherzo superbly played, and then Mahler's Lied von der Erde.  An interminably dreary soup, mawkish and morbid at once.  The last movement was the only one I have listened to, and by the time it came I was too weary to notice anything except a passage of much worked downward phrases just before the contralto came in with her unsupprted bit about the stirrup-cup.  When she had said Euring for the sixth time Ian and I laid our heads on each other's shoulders.