Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

A performing version of Mahler’s draft, prepared by Deryck Cooke (1919–1976) in collaboration with Berthold Goldschmidt, Colin Matthews and David Matthews.

1. Adagio
2. Scherzo (Schnelle Vierteln [Fast crotchets] – Gemächliches [leisurely] Ländler-tempo)
3. Purgatorio (Allegretto moderato)
4. [Scherzo] Allegro pesante. Nicht zu schnell [Not too fast] –
5. Finale (Langsam [Slow] – Allegro moderato – Andante [tempo of the beginning of the Symphony] – Adagio)

This music is now widely accepted as, in effect, Mahler’s eleventh symphony. A devoted labour of love by English musicologist Deryck Cooke and his associates has established a very convincing performing version of Mahler’s draft of a symphony in five movements, left unfinished at his death.

At first it seemed this music would never be heard. Mahler was said to have wished it destroyed. Arnold Schoenberg observed, relating Mahler to Beethoven and Bruckner: ‘It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away.’ Actually Mahler had already overcome that superstitious belief he shared – he regarded his song cycle The Song of the Earth (1908) as his ninth symphony, so that the symphony numbered 9 was in his own mind his tenth. The ‘Ninth’ Symphony can now be seen as part of a triptych with The Song of the Earth and Symphony No.10, of which the draft was ‘fully prepared in the sketch’.

The orchestral draft of the first movement was taken so far by Mahler that it can in fact be performed exactly as it stands. Realising this, Alma Mahler in 1924 asked her son-in-law, the young composer Ernst Krenek, to see if it was possible to complete and orchestrate the symphony. Krenek made a fair copy of the first movement, and a performing version of the short third movement, Purgatorio, and these movements were performed in Vienna and Prague soon after. The Adagio was greeted as one of Mahler’s finest creations, and has often been played on its own.

It was generally accepted at that time that it was neither possible nor respectful to go further with Mahler’s draft. Alma Mahler changed her mind several times about this, inviting first Shostakovich then Schoenberg to attempt a completion – both declined. It was the performance in 1960 of Cooke’s partial reconstruction which eventually persuaded her to agree to the performance in 1964 of his first version of the whole symphony.

The facsimile of Mahler’s draft, published in 1924, revealed the anxious personal messages to his wife written over parts of the score: ‘farewell, my lyre’; and over the end of the last movement: ‘to live for you, to die for you’. In July 1910, while he was composing the Tenth Symphony, Mahler by accident discovered his wife’s passionate affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. Many biographers concluded this was the last straw for the composer. It came on top of his resignation from the direction of the Vienna Opera in 1907, the death of his eldest daughter, and the diagnosis of his heart disease.

But Mahler’s reaction to the discovery of his wife’s unfaithfulness was affirmative – a new commitment to support Alma emotionally, and a trip to Holland for a consultation with Sigmund Freud to explore the causes of what may have been a temporary impotence, or at least a lack of interest in sex. He had optimistic plans for his future seasons with the New York Philharmonic, and the September 1910 Munich premiere of his Eighth Symphony was the greatest public success of his life.

New York was soon to unravel in opposition between Mahler and the board of the New York Philharmonic, where according to Alma he had ‘ten women ordering him about like a puppet’. The recurrence of a throat ailment in February 1911 forced the cancellation of his remaining concerts of the season, and developed into a serious infection which killed him soon after his return to Europe, on 18 May 1911.

In spite of the despairing imprecations Mahler wrote above places in the score, the music revealed a new and even positive mood. If The Song of the Earth celebrated ‘life’s feeble pleasures’, and Symphony No.9 was a journey through the Valley of Death, No.10 seemed to express a calm acceptance of the Divine Will. His nearly completed Tenth Symphony confirms that Mahler’s music was entering a new phase, prophetic of the atonal freedom of the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. The Adagio, where we can get closest to Mahler’s definitive intentions, embraces a rich complexity, as the ‘shadowy’ melody for violas alone which opens it and recurs later unfolds into a rich, broad, almost Brucknerian melody and harmony. This is achieved with an often daringly sparse and widely spread orchestral texture, which characterises all the movements of the symphony.

The publication of the score of Deryck Cooke’s version shows what is Mahler’s and what has been added. Cooke never claimed to have ‘completed’ or ‘reconstructed’ it – the task he set himself was to guess at Mahler’s intentions, where the composer had not indicated them, as to orchestration, tempo and dynamics. Cooke recognised that Mahler would have revised the draft, but aimed to present a performable version of Mahler’s continuous draft at the stage it had reached when he died. He believed ‘the leading thematic line throughout, and something like 90 per cent of the counterpoint and harmony, are pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that.’

The long elegy of the first movement is a dialogue between two themes, the first chromatic and of indefinite tonality, the second, using related thematic material, hymn-like, in F sharp major. Mainly restrained in dynamics, this Adagio moves to one overpowering outburst for the full orchestra, where a searing dissonant chord is pierced by a high note for trumpet, before the music subsides in a reflective, drawn-out coda.

The second movement is a very lively Scherzo in F sharp minor, whose dance measures contain elements of pain and of Mahler’s habitual irony. Several ideas continue to develop throughout the movement, in which the main contrast comes from a nostalgic ländler, thematically related to the symphony’s opening.

Mahler originally headed the third movement ‘Purgatorio or Inferno’. It uses the ostinato accompaniment from his song Das irdische Leben (The Earthly Life) about a child who dies from starvation. Is this movement, blending light, almost trivial ideas with brash, schmaltzy ones, a kind of nightmare, with a rude awakening in the outburst near the end? A nightmare of meaninglessness, related to Mahler’s marital crisis? It provides a short but vital contrast at the symphony’s centre, and important themes.

Another scherzo follows, on the score of which Mahler wrote: ‘The devil dances in me, madness takes hold of me, cursed one. Annihilate me!’ This music is savage, demonic at times. One of the trios turns a theme from the Purgatorio into a slow waltz, and there is a quotation of the music for the drinker’s words in The Song of the Earth: ‘Joy and singing wither and die.’

The long Finale is in three sections, slow – fast – slow. It begins with the stroke of a muffled drum which closes the preceding movement. (Some conductors elide the two strokes.) Mahler told Alma: ‘Only you know what it means,’ referring to a funeral cortège for a fireman who had died heroically, which he witnessed from his hotel window, high above a New York street, in the winter of 1907–08. ‘A brief roll of muffled drums was the only music.’ The solemn mood, with drum strokes continuing, and a tuba leading a slow version of the Purgatorio dance, is replaced by intimations of hope, first in a flute solo, then a sweeping, yearning song. But the funeral music and the drum return. The fast middle section is a development of melodic forms from the Purgatorio movement. At the climax, the dissonant chord from the Adagio returns, then the music continues with the viola theme from the symphony’s beginning, now in the horns. The conclusion is either ‘a great song of life and love, the most fervently intense ending to any Mahler symphony’ (Michael Kennedy) or beautiful, moving, but bitter. We can now hear the music, and make up our own minds.

David Garrett © 2004

The Adagio from the symphony was first performed in Australia by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at a concert in Sydney in June 1960. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was the first Australian orchestra to perform Deryck Cooke’s realisation of the entire symphony, in a Town Hall Proms concert on 7 February 1970, conducted by John Hopkins, programming it again in 2004 (with conductor Markus Stenz) and 2018 (with Donald Runnicles).