Some Notes on Mahler's Tenth SymphonyAuthor(s): Donald MitchellSource: The Musical Times, Vol. 96, No. 1354 (Dec., 1955), pp. 656-657Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/937831Accessed: 28/07/2010 14:57

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mtpl.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheMusical Times.

http://www.jstor.org

THE MUSICAL TIMES

Some Notes on Mahler's Tenth Symphony By DONALD MITCHELL

THE history of Mahler's unfinished tenth symphony is a curious one. The work was sketched in the summer of 1910, the last summer of Mahler's life.

He was, very literally, under sentence of death and also deeply disturbed in his relationship to his wife, Alma (he consulted Freud in August, who seemed able to help him). The sketches for the last symphony, which vary greatly in their degree of completeness, were published in facsimile in 1924 by Mahler's widow. For long it was believed that Mahler had expressed the wish that, upon his death, the sketches should be destroyed, but this was not the case. It seems that he was, in fact, optimistic about the progress of the work during the last weeks of his life and told his wife that, should he not complete the work, she had his permission to do with the sketches what she thought best.

It is more than likely, however, that Mahler's attitude to his sketches was ambivalent. Altogether, he treated his last works in a very odd fashion. To put it crudely but concisely, he sat on them. He did nothing to promote a performance (or publication) of 'Das Lied von der Erde' (completed in 1909), and took no steps to give the ninth symphony (completed in 1910) a hearing; it was three years before the eighth symphony (completed in 1907) received its premiere under the ailing composer's direction. It is very much open to doubt, in these circumstances, whether Mahler would have welcomed the publication of his tenth symphony's sketches in facsimile and in toto-as distinct from re- constructions where possible of nearly completed movements.

In the event, the tenth symphony has come down to us in both versions-as sketches and as edited scores of two of the symphony's projected five movements. The first score of the (Andante-)Adagio and ' Purgatorio' was prepared by Ernst Krenek, with the advice of Franz Schalk and Alban Berg, and performed on 14 October 1924. The occasion was a Mahler concert given at the Vienna State Opera during the Vienna Festival, when Schalk conducted the Vienna Phil- harmonic Orchestra. This 'performing' edition has not, I believe, been published. (Krenek, incidentally, has implied that the contribution of Schalk and Berg to the editing was slight.) In 1951, Associated Music Publishers, New York, issued a pocket score of the two movements edited by Mr. Otto Jokl, a pupil of Berg's, who bases his edition on Krenek's reconstruc- tions but incorporates the results of his own researches into the facsimiles. A defect of this otherwise valuable first publication is that editorial emendations are not distinguished from Mahler's own text.

The first English performance of the Adagio was a broadcast given on 20 November 1948 (and repeated on the 21st) by the B.B.C. Orchestra under Scherchen. The first English public performance had to wait until 30 November 1955, when the Adagio and' Purgatorio ' were played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Richard Austin at the Festival Hall. The performance of the' Purgatorio ' was, I fancy, the first of any kind in England. To conclude these bibliographical data, it should be said that it was hoped originally that more than two of the five movements might be salvaged, but

ul4

TI I-

' I '.: i ,ti

THE MUSICAL TIMES

this scheme was abandoned by the sketches' first investi- gators. Attempts, however, have been made to recon- struct the remaining three movements, by Mr. Frederick Block in America, and by Mr. Joe Wheeler in England, whose work is still in progress.

There can be no doubt whatever that publication of the tenth symphony's sketches-whether justified or not-revealed with terrible clarity the mental stress and strain under which Mahler was working. The manu- scripts are littered with wounded cries and incoherent exclamations. It is-from this kind of exposure that I think a fastidious mind must recoil. Some private agonies should be left private and the sketches, I feel, while they should not have been hidden or suppressed, might well have been left on deposit at a library where those with an interest deeper than mere curiosity might have freely consulted them. The third movement of the work is titled ' Purgatorio or Inferno'; and though Mahler afterwards crossed through 'Inferno', and would doubtless have eliminated 'Purgatorio' had the work reached a final stage, the title is indeed appro- priate. The state of mind in which the tenth symphony was composed must have approximated very closely to a private hell.

Strangely enough the ' Purgatorio ' movement itself is less infernal than some of its colleagues. The clue to its rather ironically reserved character lies in its prominent revival of a weary accompanimental figure from 'Das irdische Leben' ('Earthly Life'), a song, from the 'Knaben Wunderhorn' collection, which Mahler composed in the 1890s. It is the purgatory of dull drudgery on earth which Mahler seemed to have in mind, not an apocalyptic vision of inferno. Hence the movement is quite undramatic. 'Purgatorio ', moreover, is the shortest symphonic movement Mahler wrote. The indecisive impression it leaves would seem to suggest that it is incomplete or that Mahler would have radically recomposed it. The possibility cannot, of course, be ruled out. But the short score, from which the performing edition was constructed, gives a very clear indication of Mahler's intentions, and he rarely- if ever-changed the basic shape of the structures of his movements once they had reached even this prelim- inary stage of definitiveness. That Mahler had started off on the instrumentation of this movement is further proof that the outline of the movement was fixed. (It is a curious twist that while Mahler never meddled with the forms of his works, he could never stop tinkering with their instrumentation, with which he was rarely satisfied; yet it is Mahler's unique instrumentation which is universally admired.)

If 'Purgatorio' sounds inconclusive, as I think it does, then we must seek for reasons outside the move- ment itself. The solution to the problem is to be found, in my view, in the disposition of the five movements. We cannot be certain that Mahler would have stuck to the order disclosed by the sketches-the order had been subjected to many variations-but what seems to have been his last arrangement is convincing:

I (Andante-)Adagio I Scherzo

III' Purgatorio' IV Scherzo V Finale

The tri-partite outline of the work is reminiscent of the fifth symphony* but more especially of the seventh, where two vast outer movements frame two nocturnes which themselves enclose a brief, but vivid, scherzo. In

* More generally, the tenth symphony obviously adheres to the type of Mahler's middle-period instrumental symphonies. There is nothing in the sketches to suggest the use of vocal resources at any point. After the early symphonies, with their mixture of vocal and instrumental movements, Mahler composed either exclusively instrumental works or works exclusively vocal, e.g. in their different ways, the eighth symphony and 'Das Lied'. The tenth maintains the strict division.

the tenth the two outer movements frame two large scale scherzos which enclose the ' Purgatorio'. It is obvious, I think, that this third movement will depend, for its effect, very much on its context, that it will not sound ' right ' when torn out of it. In addition, certain movements of the tenth show extensive inter- movement relationships-there are precedents in earlier symphonies-and it happens that the ' Purgatorio' is further developed in the finale. Thus heard as part of the whole symphony, the movement would gain in immediate and retrospective significance; its integration is, as it were, actively demonstrated by its context and the r6le it plays elsewhere in the symphony.

That the great Adagio is placed first is evidence again of Mahler's continual experiments in the sphere of symphonic form. The two adagios with which this slow movement shares something in common may be found in Mahler's third and ninth symphonies; in both works the slow movements function as finales. The tenth exactly reverses that position, and the Adagio is placed first. But the movement is more than just a slow movement appearing, so to speaks ' out of order '. It bears, it is true, an intimate relationship to the Adagio of the ninth symphony, but it is also partly based on the highly original model of the first movement, the Andante comodo, of the ninth symphony. We meet the same subtle combination of sonata and rondo and the same subtle combination of tempi, though the principal, ' walkingspace', tempo of the ninth's first movement (the Andante) is the subsidiary tempo of the tenth's Adagio; nevertheless, the dualism is there and the Andante contrasts with, and relieves, an otherwise strictly Adagio character, just as the allegro tempi of the ninth help to preserve the first-movement atmosphere of the Andante. In other words, this striking Adagio in the tenth symphony, though predominantly a slow move- ment, offers something of what we customarily expect of a first movement. The symphony's finale attempts a complex synthesis to round off the whole work; its conclusion recalls the Adagio.

There is not space here to comment in detail upon the Adagio's style and content, though since it is the movement which Mahler left most nearly complete there is most to discuss and the least need to reserve judg- ment. The Adagio never falls below Mahler's best level of inspiration, often transcends it, and most clearly and poignantly exposes both his love for a past tradition of romantic beauty and his quite extraordinary willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of newer concepts. This dual loyalty often emerges in his music as a fascinating conflict; but in the Adagio of the tenth, Mahler seems to achieve a balance-albeit a precarious one-between two opposing worlds. Throughout the movement we find even the most traditional gestures fertilized by new ideas. We find it in his treatment of the big Adagio tune, which appears straight, inverted and in both versions simultaneously combined; in the excep- tional freedom of the part-writing, and in the move- ment's high degree of harmonic emancipation, especi- ally in the disillusioned A flat minor passage which piles up immense harmonic tension and disrupts, indeed shatters, the recapitulation, a blow which, sig- nificantly, falls again in the finale.

Created under intolerable pressure, this slow move- ment represents one of Mahler's profoundest excursions into the territory of the twentieth century. He was, after all, something of a paradoxical composer, and it is only fitting, perhaps, that he should have succeeded in writing an almost painfully nostalgic movement in an idiom very much in touch with a musical future which he did not live to see.

The Kingsway Choral Society (Donald Cashmore) will give a Christmas concert in the Kingsway Hall on 10 December at 7.0 The programme will include carols for choir and audience and Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols.

657 December 1955

Article Contentsp. 656p. 657

Issue Table of ContentsThe Musical Times, Vol. 96, No. 1354 (Dec., 1955), pp. 621-648+1-4+649-676Front Matter [pp. 621-632]Editor's Notes [pp. 633-634]The Achievement of Maurice Greene [pp. 634-635]Shaw as Music Critic [pp. 636-637]The Italian Method and the English Singer [pp. 637-638]The Musician's BookshelfReview: untitled [pp. 638-639]Review: untitled [pp. 639-640]Books Received [p. 640]

Review: The Musician's Gramophone [pp. 640-642]Review: Radio Notes [pp. 642-643]Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians: Corrections [pp. 643-651]Church and Organ MusicRoyal College of Organists [p. 652]Miscellaneous [pp. 652-654]Selected Recitals [p. 654]

Letters to the EditorLanguage [p. 654]Average Age of Choirmen [p. 654]The Mouth-Organ in Education [pp. 654-655]A Visit to Beethoven [p. 655]'Appreciating' Contemporary Music [p. 655]

The Amateurs' Exchange [p. 655]Some Notes on Mahler's Tenth Symphony [pp. 656-657]Opera and Concerts in London [pp. 658-660]Notes from Abroad [pp. 660-662]MusicMay the Grace of Christ [pp. 1-4]

Back Matter [pp. 663-676]