PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo a Symphony Brought to Life Gustav

PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo

A Symphony Brought to Life

Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony exists for us to hear today because of a remarkable rescue effort that spanned some half a century. At the time of his death, in May 1911, Mahler left just the symphony’s first movement, a great soaring Adagio, in anything like a finished state. He had completed the remainder of the work in a bare-bones draft, with melodic lines written but harmonies incompletely sketched and instrumentation only partially indicated.

In the mid-1920s, Mahler’s widow asked the composer Ernst Krenek to work these drafts into a performable state. Krenek managed to produce only the first movement, which was already complete in most essentials, and the brief intermezzo that Mahler titled Purgatorio. Several other composers, including Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, subsequently declined requests to attempt what Krenek had failed to complete.

Other musicians, however, eventually took up the challenge. Among them have been the Russian conductor Rudolph Barshai; two Americans, Clinton Carpenter and Remo Mazzetti; and the English music scholar Deryck Cooke. Cooke, who began his effort in 1960, emphasized that he did not hope to complete the Tenth Symphony as Mahler would have done. Nevertheless, he felt his labor worthwhile. In a lengthy preface to the score, he observed that

“Mahler himself, in bringing it to its final form, would have revised the draft — elaborated, refined and perfected it in a thousand details; he would also, no doubt, have expanded, contracted, redisposed, added, or canceled a passage here and there. ...

“On the other hand, it would be wrong to say that the present score cannot claim to represent Mahler’s Tenth Symphony in any sense whatsoever. ... The only realistic question is this: in the absence of his own final definitive work, does his comprehensive draft, even filled out and put into score by other hands, provide a Mahlerian experience of value? I believe that it does, for one simple reason: Mahler’s music, even in its unperfected and unelaborated state, has such significance, strength and beauty that it dwarfs into insignificance the momentary uncertainties about notation and the occasional pastische-composing ... . After all, the thematic line throughout, and something like 90% of the counterpoint and harmony, are pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that.”

For both its scrupulous adherence to Mahler’s sketches and its skill in realizing them in more finished form, Cooke’s version remains the preferred form for presenting this symphony, and it is his completion that Seattle Symphony performs this week.

GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp minor Born: July 7, 1860, in Kalište, Bohemia Died: May 18, 1911, in Vienna realized by Deryck Cooke Born: September 14, 1919, in Leicester, England Died: October 26, 1976, in Croydon, England Work composed: 1910–11 Posthumously completed: 1960–75 World premiere: First complete performance on August 13, 1964, in London. Berthold Goldschmidt conducted the London Symphony Orchestra.

Mahler began composing his Tenth Symphony in the summer of 1910, during his annual sojourn in the Austrian mountains. Two circumstances conspired to throw his spirit into a state of turmoil at this time. One was the disintegration of his marriage. Having supported the composer through various trials, and having endured his enormous egotism for nearly a decade, Alma Mahler had by now reached the proverbial end of her rope. “The wear and tear of having been driven on without respite by a spirit so intense as [Mahler’s] had brought me to a complete breakdown,” she wrote in her memoirs. Exhausted and depressed, she entered a sanatorium at the resort town of Toblach for a medically ordained rest. While there, she attracted the attention of the young architect Walter Gropius, who fell desperately in love with her. Although Frau Mahler evidently did not respond to her new-found admirer’s advances, her husband’s discovery of Gropius’ affection provoked a crisis. Alma Mahler asserted in her memoirs that

“he [Mahler] was now jealous of everything and everybody, although he had always shown a wounding indifference to such feelings before ... He was often lying on the floor [of his studio] weeping in his dread that he might lose me, had lost me perhaps already ... We spoke to each other as we had never spoken before. But the whole truth could not be spoken ... I knew that my marriage was no marriage, and that my own life was utterly unfulfilled. I concealed all this from him, and although he knew it as well as I did, we played out the comedy to the end, to spare his feelings.”

Were the unraveling of his marriage not enough, Mahler was, at this time, deeply concerned over his health. Three years earlier, doctors had diagnosed in him a serious cardiac condition. Mahler correctly understood that he was living under a death sentence, and this, no less than the feared loss of his wife, colored the music of the Tenth Symphony. As he sketched the score, Mahler inscribed desperate exclamations in the margins. “Have mercy, O Lord!,” reads one of them. “Why has thou forsaken me?” In a reference to Alma, he wrote at another point: “Farewell my lyre, farewell, farewell.”

Mahler died in the spring of 1911, a streptococcal infection delivering the fatal blow to his weakened heart. For more than a dozen years, his widow withheld the unfinished score of the Tenth Symphony from scrutiny and may even have originated the statement, reported by one of the composer’s early biographers, that Mahler requested the work’s destruction. Eventually, however, Alma Mahler decided that the Tenth Symphony deserved to be heard. In 1924 she approached Ernst Krenek about completing the piece, thus initiating a round of unsuccessful attempts to bring it to a performable state.

In the late 1950s, the BBC began planning a series of programs on Mahler and his music to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. As part of this effort, the broadcast network engaged Deryck Cooke, a respected authority on late-Romantic music, to write some commentary about the composer. This assignment prompted Cooke to examine Mahler’s manuscript of the Tenth Symphony, which a Viennese publisher had brought forth in a facsimile edition. As he immersed himself in the work, Cooke became convinced that a performable version of the entire symphony was possible, and he set about creating this by fleshing out the suggestions for instrumentation and other matters Mahler had left in his sketches. The result was a now historic radio broadcast of portions of the composition, in December 1960.

Over the next 15 years, Cooke continued to refine his “performing edition” of the Tenth Symphony. In 1964 he received from Alma Mahler’s daughter an additional 44 pages of sketches that had not been published. He also revised certain details of the orchestration after hearing the music performed, and he consulted Mahler authorities for suggestions about filling out various passages that required speculative addition of harmonies, counter-melodies and other material. He concluded his work in 1975, a year before his death.

The five movements of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony present a symmetrical design: a pair of weighty slow movements framing two scherzos and a brief intermezzo at the center of the work. The Adagio first movement opens with a recitative-like passage for violas. Their music will recur twice in this movement and again during the finale. This prefatory passage leads directly to the main theme of the Adagio, a yearning melody that runs in various transfigurations throughout the movement. Mahler leads his ideas to an apocalyptic climax in the form of a massive, harmonically dense organ-like chord. This sonority seems to shatter the strength of the music, which now subsides gradually to silence. The first of the symphony’s two scherzos conveys what can only be called Mahlerian energy. The composer develops the motifs of its initial theme amid contrapuntal echoes. Together with irregular rhythmic patterns unprecedented in Mahler’s music, these give an impression of tremendous exuberance. The central portion of the movement brings music in the style of a Ländler, the relaxed, rustic cousin of the waltz. The central portion of the composition seems enigmatic on several accounts. Alone among symphony’s five movements, it carries a descriptive title. But what did Mahler mean to say in calling this music Purgatorio? Moreover, its lean textures and brevity make this movement an anomaly in the composer’s symphonic output.

The fourth movement begins in an anguished vein that hardly typifies the kind of music usually found in a scherzo. Here straining dissonance, intimating torment and struggle, vies with a limpid waltz subject. At times Mahler’s penchant for piling motif upon motif in quick succession produces a dizzying sonic tumult, but the final pages bring eerily spare textures, and the waltz takes on a spectral aspect. A bass drum closes the movement with a deadly hammer blow.

Fearful bass drum strokes continue during the outset of the fifth movement, punctuating what seem mournful utterances from the bass tuba and other low-pitched instruments. Mahler counters with a more consolatory idea, an ethereally beautiful melody for solo flute against a cushion of harmonies provided by violas and cellos. Soon violins join in extending this theme, and the music assumes the character of a blissful dream. But given Mahler’s frame of mind when he conceived this symphony, we cannot expect such a dream to last. Sure enough, the bass drum resumes its ominous tolling, and the music suddenly shifts to a quick tempo.

Here we encounter the surreal Mahler, complete with shrill woodwind trills and a pronounced air of grotesquerie, though the composer also offers passages intimating sincere ardor. We also hear references to the scherzo theme of the second movement. The great climax to which the music builds brings a return of the tremendous chord that formed the apex of the first movement. At once the viola theme from the outset of the symphony returns in the voice of the horn section. From their statement emerges a reprise of the serene melody begun by the flute during the first part of the finale. Traversing wide tonal terrain, this melody conveys an air of great tenderness. Once more there is an exquisite fading towards silence, the music taking on a soft glimmer. Over the final melodic leap of the strings, Mahler inscribed in his short score the name by which he called his wife: “Almschi.”

What to Listen For The unaccompanied melodic line for violas that opens the symphony merits attention, for it sounds twice more over the course of the initial movement and again in the finale. The first movement’s climax is one of the most shattering in the orchestral literature: a massive sustained chord with organ-like resonance. The ensuing scherzo juxtaposes boisterous tumult, suggesting a peasant celebration as painted by Breugel, with a decorous country waltz. Near the end of the movement, these two musics alternate more and more quickly and finally combine in the ecstatic closing moments.

Mahler’s scoring is rarely so imaginative as in the opening of the third movement. Here, his muting of the violins and violas, silencing of the low strings and judicious use of woodwinds create remarkably delicate and transparent sonorities. Following a more robust central passage, this initial music returns at the close and seems on the verge of evaporating when a sudden interruption by muted trombone provokes an arcing harp glissando and a final echo from the basses.

In the fourth movement, Mahler’s penchant for piling motif upon motif in quick succession produces a dizzying clamor, but the final pages bring eerily spare textures that lend the music a ghostly character. The extraordinarily rich tapestry of ideas constituting the finale includes recollections of themes heard earlier in the symphony.

Scored for 4 flutes, the fourth doubling on piccolo; 4 oboes, the fourth doubling on English horn; 4 clarinets, the fourth doubling on E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet; 4 bassoons, the third and fourth doubling on contrabassoon; 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and tuba; 2 timpani and percussion; harp and strings.