Mahler's Tenth Symphony. 1: History and BackgroundAuthor(s): Deryck CookeSource: The Musical Times, Vol. 117, No. 1601 (Jul., 1976), pp. 563+565Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/958760Accessed: 28/07/2010 14:56

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Mahler's Tenth Symphony 1: History and background

Deryck Cooke

Deryck Cooke's performing version of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony has just been published by Faber Music and Associated Music Publishers, New York, the following article is based on his preface. The crowning artistic triumph of Mahler's life was the tremendously successful first performance of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, on 12 September 1910, under his own direction. It was the last of his works which he himself presented to the world from the concert platform, and of which he person- ally supervised the publication: on 18 May 1911 he died in Vienna at the age of 50, leaving behind him, in manuscript and as yet unperformed, the dark symphonic triptych of his last period, which had followed the completion of the exultant Eighth in 1907: Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, and the Tenth. By the end of 1912 Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth were published, and also per- formed, both under Bruno Walter: the former in Munich on 20 November 1911, the latter in Vienna on 26 June 1912. But there was no sign of the Tenth. Eventually it became known that Mahler had only got as far as making 'sketches' for the work, and had been unable to complete it. All hope was abandoned that one further, final masterpiece might be forthcoming. The Ninth, it seemed, was the end: the Tenth could hardly be said to exist at all.

At first, in the atmosphere of grief and confusion after Mahler's death, all became rumour and conflicting opinion. Paul Stefan, in the 1912 reprint of his 1910 study of Mahler, was guarded: 'The Tenth Symphony . . . the latest, unfinished work, is, it is said, gaiety, even exuberance. Mysterious super- scriptions hover between the notes. Perhaps- perhaps no-one will ever set eyes on it'. Stefan himself, obviously, had not set eyes on it; yet some- one (no doubt Mrs Mahler, to whom Mahler had played it over on the piano) had been correct in speaking of gaiety and exuberance, since these qualities certainly predominate in the orchestral score of the second movement. Schoenberg, on the other hand, seemed definite that there was nothing to be known about the work. That same year, 1912, on October 12, he gave a lecture on Mahler, a characteristically spirited and outspoken defence of the recently deceased composer against the con- tinuing attacks of his critics. This lecture contained the following passage:

Concerning the Tenth Symphony, for which, as in the case of Beethoven, sketches exist, we shall know as little about what it would have said as we know about Beethoven's, or Bruckner's. It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the here-

after. Perhaps the riddles of the world would be solved, if one of those who knew them were to write the Tenth. And that is probably not to take place.

These remarks, which are clearly not musical but mystical,1 have unfortunately been misinterpreted in certain quarters as a Schoenbergian ban on any attempt to make a performing version of Mahler's manuscript; but all they show is that Schoenberg, at that time, had not set eyes on the manuscript either, or at least had not examined it. If he had, he would have realized that there was far more to be known about what Mahler's Tenth would have said than about Beethoven's or Bruckner's. Bruckner, of course, left no sketches for a Tenth Symphony; Beethoven left only a few single-staff bars; but Mahler's manuscript, as it has come down to us, consists of 72 pages of full-score draft, and 93 pages of short-score draft, for a five-movement work of some 1945 bars.

The following year, indeed, a statement was forth- coming from one who knew something about the extent of the manuscript. Richard Specht, in his detailed study Gustav Mahler, wrote: 'Certainly Mahler conceived an eleventh symphonic creation, [he included Das Lied von der Erde] and wrote it down at full length in the short score'. Even so, Specht declared the work to be, if not unknowable, then unrealizable, and offered an unanswerable reason for letting the manuscript lie untouched:

But this work, which must now be called the Tenth Symphony, will never come to performance. Mahler asked that it should be burnt after his death. His widow could not resolve to do this ... but it must be considered quite impossible that anyone, however intimate with Mahler's spirit and essence, should draw up the full score from his mute symbols.

Clearly, if Mahler himself had asked for the manu- script to be destroyed after his death, there was no more to be said. But Specht could not quite bring himself to end on this note; and in view of the fascination which Mahler's manuscript has con- tinued to exert ever since, his final remarks are of particular interest:

It will lie at rest; and many a one will have a strange feeling that there exists, somewhere in the world, as though buried alive, completely prepared for life and yet condemned never to awaken, a fully matured work in Mahler's hand, in signs which may certainly be deciphered, but can no longer be transformed into living sound by anybody.

'Or superstitious; in any case, Schoenberg's allegorical remarks rest insecurely on Mahler's own superstition of the fatality of composing a ninth. Mahler regarded Das Lied von der Erde as his actual ninth symphony, and only because of his super- stition did he refuse to number it; when he was working on his next symphony, to be numbered 9, he told his wife, jokingly, that 'the danger was over'-the Ninth was 'really' the tenth. So the Tenth is 'really' the eleventh, which makes nonsense of the whole argument.

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Actually, as was to become clear later, Specht had by no means had a chance to study the manu- script in detail. Perhaps he too had not set eyes on it, but was merely reporting what Mrs Mahler had told him. It would seem so, for he continued, as if by hearsay:

It is said that, on these pages, strange and moving outcries are written between the notes-outcries which indicate a foreboding of premature death. And on one of the last pages is to be read the painful word of parting: 'Farewell, my lyre .. .'. And so, amid the continuing sense of shock and

grief caused by the premature loss of a great man and artist, the manuscript of the Tenth Symphony was indeed allowed to 'lie at rest . . . as though buried alive'.

*

The 1914-18 war intervened, and after the war came the new modernist movement and the anti- Romantic reaction. Yet Mahler's star was far from setting. There was the great Dutch Mahler festival in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, in 1920, under Willem Mengelberg; and it was felt by some that of all the composers of the late Romantic period Mahler had been one of the most prophetic.

It was no doubt owing to this new atmosphere, at the remove of nearly a whole generation from the distressful days of Mahler's death, that in 1924 Mrs Mahler felt able to ask the rising young composer Ernst Krenek if it were possible to complete and orchestrate the work. Krenek contented himself with making a fair copy of the orchestral score of the opening Adagio2 and a performing score of the third movement, 'Purgatorio'; it was on the basis of his scores that the first performances of the two movements took place-in Vienna on 14 October 1924 under Franz Schalk, and shortly afterwards in Prague under Alexander von Zemlinsky. At about the same time, in autumn 1924, the firm of Paul Zsolnay, Vienna, published a beautifully lifelike facsimile of Mahler's manuscript-or rather of the five main folders, plus the short score of the opening Adagio (less two pages) and a few of the preliminary sketch pages. For some reason the rest of the manu- script, including the important short score of the second movement, was excluded.

Both these moves were severely criticized at the time, on purist grounds, since neither movement could be claimed to represent a final, definitive full score by Mahler, and also on the human grounds that Mahler himself had asked for the manuscript to be destroyed after his death. Nevertheless the true Mahler enthusiast, eager to know all that could be known of Mahler's last musical testament, could only applaud Mrs Mahler for her attempt to have the uncompleted posthumous symphony brought to life, and her courageous setting aside of all personal considerations in having published the facsimile of a manuscript which contained personal messages to herself (some of the 'superscriptions' and 'outcries' referred to by Stefan and Specht), so 2This was checked by Alban Berg, whose acute criticisms have been preserved; for some reason his corrections did not find their way into Krenek's final score. Incidentally, this shows that Berg was willing to cooperate in a performing version of the Adagio; whereas the much-circulated statement that he (and Webern) were against a performing version of the whole MS had been backed by no evidence at all. Did Berg study the rest of the MS? Did Webern ever study any of it? No answer to these questions has been offered.

that it might be absolutely clear how far Mahler had got with his 'sketches' for the Tenth Symphony. In fact the manuscript turned out to be not 'sketches' but a comprehensive full-length draft.

How it all came about was made clear the follow- ing year. In 1925 Richard Specht took the oppor- tunity provided by the publication of the 17th edition of his study of Mahler to include, in a post- script, the following remarkable recantation of his previous remarks about the Tenth Symphony:

In my book on Gustav Mahler I wrote about his Tenth Symphony, and said it was the master's wish . . . that this work should be burnt after his death . . . Only much later did I learn (and Mrs Mahler confirmed this to me) that his wish ... had been expressed not to her but to his New York friend and doctor, Josef Frankl-and indeed that in the last weeks of his life he had spoken to her in a quite different sense, often of a work that he was hoping to complete, often of a task fully prepared in the sketch, with which she might do as she thought best . . . When I realized the true state of affairs, I was the first to implore Mrs Mahler to bring the manuscript to light again . . . She produced the draft of the five- movement symphony, and we . . . discovered, to our immeasurable surprise, that two move- ments of the work, an Adagio (representing the first movement) and an Intermezzo, were so completely prepared, with the instrumentation exactly specified, that they could be transferred from the sketch into full score without altering a note. This last statement is not exactly true, especially

with regard to the instrumentation of the Purgatorio, but the general sense of Specht's remarks is accurate enough. The result of his enterprise and Mrs Mahler's courage was that two movements of the symphony had, against all expectation, been brought to life. However, anyone who followed the performances with a copy of the facsimile of Mahler's manuscript might have noticed a number of dubious things. Several misreadings of the notation would have been evident, particularly in the Adagio, which must be attributed to Krenek: they were certainly excusable, since the establishing of a correct text of the movement, in many a roughly written passage, is a matter of unceasing checking and re-checking. Also a large number of unstylish and indeed un- necessary additions to the scoring of the Adagio could have been noticed, but these are not to be blamed on Krenek: he has since disowned them, and it seems certain that they must have been the work of Schalk or Zemlinsky or both.

In any case, interest in Mahler's music was not on the increase at the time, and performances of the movements were rare; then in 1933 came the Third Reich, which put a stop to performances of Mahler's music in Germany for 12 years and in Austria for nine. All that had really happened was the rebirth of a mere torso of the Tenth Symphony, dubiously restored and unstylishly retouched, which made no great general impression. Nevertheless, to the Mahler enthusiast, the great Adagio, even in this edition, stood out as one of Mahler's finest creations, even if the Purgatorio seemed almost meaningless out of the context of the whole symphony.

(to be continued) 565