According to Teng Long Chew,(Performing Versions of theTenth Symphony) Mahler's Tenth Symphony was written at Toblach,(now Dobbiaco in the Italian Dolomites with its via Gustav Mahler) in the summer of 1910. It was a chaotic, but full length script of a five movement symphony.
He was a man who had lost one of daughters, had lost his job, knew he was dying and had become aware of his wife's infidelity with the architect Walter Gropius.This crisis brought about a formidable masterpiece. He put the five folders aside aside to complete his Ninth Symphony, yet they were to lie unheard and barely seen for fifteen years and unperformed for fifty four.
Mahler's Last Music Emerges From Silence
In the view of Michael Steinberg, (Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler) Mahler's widow, Alma Mahler, must have read the music herself, for she soon contacted friends to consider reconstructing it. Alma's daughter Anna married the composer Ernst Krenek in 1924 and she asked her new son-in-law to complete it.
Instead Krenek produced a clear copy of the Adagio which Mahler intended to be his first movement and completed the orchestration of the third movement., which Mahler inscribed Purgatorio oder Inferno, crossing out the last word. Unfortunately, when these movements were performed in Vienna on the fourteenth of October, the conductor Franz Schalk and the composer, Alexander von Zemlinski retouched Krenek's published scholarship.
The conductor Mengelberg produced his own version prolonging the faults.The resultant two movement "Tenth" was never regarded as satisfactory, despite some remarkable passages. The publisher Paul Szolnay published the entire manuscript the same year perpetuating the errors that Berg had unsuccessfully tried to correct.
Mahler Crosses the Atlantic
Again following Teng Long Chew, the story moved eventually to America. The Viennese musicologist and composer Friedrich Block published an article in "Chord and Discord "in 1941. Block had a performing version of the second, fourth and fifth movements of the symphony for four-hand piano.Inspired by Block’s article, the Mahler authority, Jack Diether, wrote to Dmitri Shostakovich in Leningrad in 1942, inviting the Russian composer to undertake the project. Shostakovich wrote back in 1943 as follows:
"In spite of my love for this composer, I cannot take upon myself this huge task. This calls for deep penetration into the spiritual world of the composer, as well as his creative and individual style. For me this would be impossible."
Benjamin Britten also turned down the task. The American composer. Clinton Carpenter had also finished his complete score on July 21,1949. In 1955, the English musicologist. Joseph Wheeler completed his version of the full score. Some of these efforts were prevented from being performed by friends of Mahler, inspired by the conductor, Bruno Walter.
In his broadcast, Mahler's Unfinished Tenth Symphony, the English musicologist, Deryck Cooke, tells us he looked at the complete manuscript while writing a brochure for the BBC Mahler centenary in 1960. He decided to copy out the manuscript by hand and found a complete musical whole despite there eventually being only 72 pages of full score, 50 pages of short score in continuous draft (2 pages are missing), and a further 44 pages of preliminary drafts, sketches, and inserts. The symphony consists of
- Andante – Adagio: 275 bars drafted in orchestral and short score
- Scherzo: 522 bars drafted in orchestral and short score
- Purgatorio. Allegro moderato: 170 bars drafted in short score, the first 30 bars of which were also drafted in orchestral score
- [Scherzo. Nicht zu schnell]: about 579 bars drafted in short score
- Finale. Langsam, schwer: 400 bars drafted in short score.
In the same BBC broadcast of December 1960, Cooke gave detailed reasons for his orchestral reconstruction. In particular he showed the work's structural harmonic consistency from F sharp major to B major with a high A on the trumpet, back to F sharp major into B flat minor ( using a theme from his early song The Earthly Life), then into D minor and back to F sharp major. He also pointed out the mirroring of the the first two movements in the last two reflected in the middle movement on the dominance of the interval of a third. For this reason his version (which went through three different editions during his life time, helped by the conductor Goldschmidt and the experts, Colin and David Matthews, has proved the most enduring. It was first performed in the Royal Albert Hall in August 1964. Cooke also overcame the last opponents of its reconstruction, including Alma Mahler.
Mahler Goes on Composing
Since then according to other competing versions have come to light including one by the conductor Rudolf Barshai.(2010 Brilliant Classics).The deeply moving and carthartic beauty of the music has given this symphony a tremendous following. Not least because it constantly re-emerges at the hands of new musicologists. On his one hundredth and fiftieth birthday, Mahler is still composing his greatest reassurances to the world he loved.
References:
Cooke, Deryck (1976). A Performing Version for the Draft of the Tenth Symphony. Associated Music Publishers. ISBN 0-571-51094-9.
Discography:gustavmahler.net.free.fr/us.html
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
