Completing Mahler's Piano Quartet: a Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology Volume 14 | Issue 1 Article 5 Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities Isabella Spinelli Northwestern University Recommended Citation Spinelli, Isabella. “Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities.” Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology 14, no. 1 (2021): 115-178. https://doi.org/10.5206/notabene.v14i1.13410. Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities Abstract Performers and scholars have argued for generations over what should be done with musical works that have been left incomplete by their composers. Though many attempts have been made to bring such works to completion, some scholars feel that these fragments should remain untouched because the pieces in question were left incomplete during the composer’s own career. With this debate in mind, I undertook a study and completion of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, a piece for which Mahler composed a complete first movement, Nicht zu schnell, and twenty-four bars of a second movement, Scherzo, when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. I began by analyzing Nicht zu schnell in order to understand Mahler’s treatment of motives, form, and harmony. In addition, I studied contemporary works by Schumann and Brahms. Based on my analyses, I then composed a completion of the Scherzo in a style that is, in my opinion, idiomatic of Mahler. After a performance of my completion, seventy percent of the audience responded with five on a scale of zero to six when asked in a survey how closely my Scherzo aligned with Nicht zu schnell. One hundred percent of the listeners ethically approved of the task of completing unfinished music. Adding to the discourse on musical completion, this paper addresses the musicological debate surrounding unfinished music, discusses my process of completing Mahler’s quartet, and assesses public reactions to the ethical issues, such as hubris, that often arise when an alternate composer completes an unfinished work. Keywords Gustav Mahler, authenticity, completion, unfinished music, piano quartet, ethics Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet NB Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities Isabella Spinelli Year IV – Northwestern University What should be done with a musical work that has been left in an incomplete state? Scholars and musicians have debated this question for generations, particularly with regard to notable incomplete works such as Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished” Eighth Symphony and J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, among others. Over the years, many musicians have attempted to bring such works to completion so that concert-goers may enjoy the pieces and scholars may reap the benefits of the intense study required for the task of completion. However, there are also those who demur to such an endeavour, either for pragmatic or ethical reasons. These objections are in part due to the fact that many of the pieces in question were left incomplete by the composers themselves at the height of their careers; if a composer had wanted to complete a piece, they would likely have done so. An attempt to complete an unfinished work from a composer’s juvenilia may circumvent at least some of these arguments, while 115 Nota Bene also presenting different challenges. In this paper, I shall discuss some of these obstacles in the realms of completion and musicology by describing my own study and completion of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, which Mahler left incomplete in 1876. While attending the Vienna Conservatory, Gustav Mahler composed a piano quartet for which he completed one full movement, Nicht zu schnell, and twenty-four bars of a second movement, Scherzo. Although Mahler almost certainly composed a great deal at this time for both his studies and his own enjoyment, only the aforementioned quartet and fragments of two songs survive from this pivotal period in the composer’s development.1 Despite the lack of scholarship detailing Mahler’s conservatory years, records show that the young composer had a rather successful first year of study; on July 1, 1876, he was awarded first prize for a first movement of a Piano Quintet at his conservatory’s composition competition.2 However, there is a significant amount of both biographic and primary source evidence that leads to confusion surrounding this quintet. Musicologist Donald Mitchell asserts that this award-winning work is in fact the Piano Quartet in A minor, claiming that this theory is supported by the fact that Mahler and his conservatory friends played a concert, whose program included a piano quartet by Mahler, in the composer’s hometown of Jihlava on September 1 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler: Volume I (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 33-35; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Mahler, Gustav,” by Peter Franklin, accessed July 19, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40696. 2 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 34. 116 Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet 12, 1876. It would be most natural, Mitchell argues, for Mahler to play for his friends and family the work that had recently won him a prize.3 Mitchell is not alone in this claim: musicologists Hans Holländer and Hans Redlich both also cite the first movement of the Piano Quartet in A minor as having a close connection with the prize-winning quintet.4 Furthermore, though Vienna Conservatory records detail a piano quintet composed by Mahler, they fail to list the performers’ names or the instrumentation; these are striking omissions for a prize-winning work, implying that this quintet was perhaps not the work which won the competition.5 Such omissions, as a result, bring into question the reliability of these records. Although it is possible that the quartet and quintet are entirely separate pieces with no relation, the evidence provided by scholars, including those mentioned above, makes a compelling case for a relationship between these pieces and thus the A minor quartet’s importance to Mahler. There are two possible scenarios that explain the connection between the quartet performed by Mahler and his friends in Jihlava and the mysterious, award- winning quintet. The first possibility is that these works are, in fact, the same piece, meaning that there never was a quintet. In this scenario, the Piano Quartet in A minor won the composition competition in 1876 and was performed in Jihlava that September. Alternatively, Mahler may have composed two different orchestrations for the same piece; he may have composed the work first as a quartet, later expanding it into a 3 Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, 35. 4 Ibid. 5 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell, trans. basil Creighton (London: Viking Press, 1946), 6. 117 Nota Bene quintet, or vice versa. Today, the manuscript of the Piano Quartet in A minor—along with the fragmentary Scherzo—is located in the Pierpont Morgan Library at the bequest of Ali Rosé, who was the niece of Gustav and Alma Mahler by marriage.6 This manuscript of the fragmentary Scherzo was written almost entirely in pencil, with the exception of a couple of ink splatters and markings. While the seemingly sloppy, doodle-like markings on the manuscript may at first glance indicate that Mahler was careless in composing this movement, the placement of these markings, situated very specifically, instead proves otherwise. For example, a marking at measure 15 is placed in such a way as to indicate that only the piano part should begin an ascending crescendo line in a transition from the original thematic iteration of measure 14. After the seventeenth bar, Mahler forgoes sketching for the full piano quartet instrumentation, and instead writes his last seven bars only for piano. There are nine more bars which were deemed illegible by transcribers7; upon close study of the manuscript, I was able to decipher that Mahler uses these bars to begin developing, through a harmonic sequence, the theme that he introduced at the beginning of the movement (Figure 1). These indications are significant because they suggest that the young Mahler expended detailed thought and planning when working on this movement, 6 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Rosé [Rosenblum], Arnold,” by Carmen Ottner, accessed August 23, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.23827; “Arnold Josef Rosé,” Mahler Foundation, last modified January 5, 2015, https://mahlerfoundation.org/gt-member/arnold-josef-rose/. 7 Gustav Mahler, “Piano Quartet in A minor,” autograph manuscript, 1876, 115204, Department of Music Manuscripts and Books, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY, United States. 118 Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet making it unlikely that he initially intended on discarding the work. Figure 1: The autograph manuscript of the Scherzo from Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor. Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum. Given that Mahler destroyed nearly all of his other student works, his choice to preserve the manuscripts for both Nicht zu schnell and Scherzo suggests that he had further plans for these movements, or at least that he felt a certain amount of pride in 119 Nota Bene them.8 However, Mahler’s potential intentions for this piece’s completion do not negate its current unperformable state, given that the Scherzo ends after only twenty-four bars. This state begs the question of what should be done with the fragment. Given the deficit of information on Mahler’s juvenilia, it would be negligent to discount this sketch, no matter how fragmentary its condition; it is for this reason that I chose to study and compose a completion of this work.

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