小册子英文文字内容

MAHLER
SYMPHONY NO. 10


Mahler was, throughout his life, and in his music, obsessed with death, and this preoccupation has led many to believe that the events of the year 1907 - his resignation from the Vienna Opera, the death of his elder daughter, and the diagnosis of his (eventually) fatal heart disease - crushed him, and that he lived the remaining few years of his life under the shadow of imminent death. This is far from the truth: Mahler had already planned his career in the USA before leaving Vienna, and he threw himself into his new post with characteristic energy. Before the end of what was to be his last season in New York, 1910-1911, he was making plans for the following year in the USA, and looking forward to spending more time in Europe.

Nor should it be forgotten that the summer of 1910, when the Tenth Symphony was composed, saw the greatest success of Mahler's artistic life - the triumphant first performance of the Eighth Symphony. Indeed it is hard to believe that, during the summer, and the arduous preparations for the eighth, Mahler could have had any time left for composing. His emotional life too was in turmoil: he discovered that his wife Alma was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius, and in the hope of saving his marriage he took time off to consult Sigmund Freud in Holland. It is likely that he was only able to work during those few weeks he completed the blueprint for the whole symphony.

Mahler's usual practice was to work during the winter on the score of the symphony he had sketched the previous summer; but in the winter of 1910-11, instead of working on the Tenth, he made a further revision of the already completed Ninth Symphony. So the Tenth remained a skeleton, although he himself spoke of it as "a work fully prepared in the sketch".

What does this mean? No two composers work in exactly the same way, and for Mahler the process of elaborating the sketch was quite a complex process. Even at the stage of orchestrating a work, he was capable of making radical changes to the structure. Although the sketches present a continuous musical argument, without a missing bar, the Tenth Symphony would clearly have been substantially reworked and revised. It is this that has led many critics to maintain not only that it is impossible to "complete" the Symphony, but that such a completion is unethical.

Yet the alternative is to leave the music unheard, and available only to musicologists; furthermore, it is a misunderstanding of what Deryck Cooke's Performing Version of the sketches attempts to do. Cooke never claimed that he was completing the Symphony, for the simple reason that only Mahler could do that. His stated reason for making the unfinished music performable was that "Mahler's music, even in its unperfected and unelaborated state, has such significance, strength and beauty, that it dwarfs into insignificance any uncertainties".

When the first (incomplete) realisation of the Tenth was broadcast in 1960, Alma Mahler was persuaded to prohibit any further performance. Yet a few years later, shortly before her death in 1964, she heard the music for the first time, and was so moved by it that she removed her ban. For all her famed unreliability, this was one judgement that was surely sound.

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From the evidence of the sketches, it is clear that it was not until Mahler had composed all five movements of the Symphony that he made a definitive decision about their order. Although the firth movement is unequivocally labelled "Finale", at one stage both the second and fourth movements had that title. The fourth movement began life as a potential first movement: but that place clearly belongs to the F sharp major Adagio, which is the most comprehensively worked out of all five.

But the sketches show that even that movement originally began without the shadowy viola melody that plays such a role in the music, and that the central climax was almost an afterthought. As it is, the broad and eloquent melody of the Adagio seems to be moving inevitably towards the extraordinary organ-like outburst and the screamingly dissonant chord that follows it. The music loses all passion after this, and gently subsides in a long reflective coda.

Mahler began to put the second movement, the first of two scherzos, into full score, but more as a means of clarifying a very chaotic sketch than with any thought of finality, since this is in many ways the least complete movement. But the opening ideas are full of fresh vitality, there is wistful beauty in the dance-like laendler sections, and an animated final dash recalls the Fifth Symphony's scherzo.

The restless Purgatorio (the reference is almost certainly to a poem about betrayal by his friend Siegfried Lipiner, rather than to Dante) is deceptively brief: more than an interlude, it contains the germ of much of the next two movements.

Both the title page and the last sketch page of the second scherzo are covered with scrawled exclamations. At the beginning Mahler wrote "The Devil dances it with me...", and the impassioned main theme and limping waltz-like trios conjure up the mood appropriately. Over the final bass drum stroke he wrote, to Alma, "You alone know what it means", a reference to a funeral that they both witnessed in New York.

The finale carries on from the drum stroke in sombre colouring, from which arises an unearthly flute melody. It is that melody which, after a disturbing central Allegro and the return of the first movement's dissonant chord, brings the work to a moving and gentle close. Over the great concluding sigh of the Symphony are written words of love to his wife - "To live for you, to die for you!".

by Colin Matthews, 2000