Mahler 10 Refusniks

[Bryn]

Splendidly prepared performance by Runnicles tonight. Plenty of ear tickling timbres, an almost Tennstedtian warmth in the strings and the now taken for granted excellence in the Scottish winds.

Perhaps Bryn can remind me of the authenticity or otherwise of the second movement coda capping cymbal clash. I prefer without.

Sorry Alison, I have not had access to the Cooke score for several years now. Even if I did, what would "authenticity" mean in the context of a performing version of Mahler's sketches? The drum stroke v. drum roll/flourish in the transition from second scherzo to finale is a different matter. The allusion is held to be to a fireman's funeral procession in New York which Mahler witnessed.

[Petrushka]

Splendidly prepared performance by Runnicles tonight. Plenty of ear tickling timbres, an almost Tennstedtian warmth in the strings and the now taken for granted excellence in the Scottish winds.

Perhaps Bryn can remind me of the authenticity or otherwise of the second movement coda capping cymbal clash. I prefer without.

One of the few moments we don't agree, Alison! It makes for a great pay-off to the movement and I always hear the cymbal clash in my head when it's not there.

[Alison]

I half remember reading somewhere that Mahler had pretty much scored the whole of the second movement and that the cymbal was definitely an add on from someone.

[Bryn]

One of Cooke's (and Mahler's) main problems was to make the finale as convincing as the first movement and In this both succeeded magnificently. The contrast with the Bruckner 9 completion could hardly be starker. The 'finale' sounds utterly unconvincing and nowhere near on the same level of achievement as the rest. To my ears it sounds more like music composed much earlier in his career. I've vowed never to listen to it again. All my opinion, of course.

This surely is based on an assumption that Mahler finished the opening Adagio. Why on Earth should such an assumption be given any credence? Given the extent to which the 9th was transformed during the process of its composition, surely the Adagio of the 10th can only be regarded as itself a sketch, not at all a finished article? Re. the Bruckner 9th finale, as has already been mentioned here, only the coda really counts as being composed other than by Bruckner, and given how Bruckner had treated his 8th, surely the three 'completed' movements are very likely to have been subjected to revision had the composer lived a few more years?

[Alison]

Our relationship will survive Pet! I wager Gustav wouldn't have included it - and the justly famous Mark Wigglesworth BBC account doesn't!

[Petrushka]

I half remember reading somewhere that Mahler had pretty much scored the whole of the second movement and that the cymbal was definitely an add on from someone.

I think it may have been one of Rattle's additions, Alison.

[Petrushka]

Our relationship will survive Pet!

Phew! That's good to know. What's the odd disagreement among friends?

[Bryn]

Our relationship will survive Pet! I wager Gustav wouldn't have included it - and the justly famous Mark Wigglesworth BBC account doesn't!

David Gutman's Gramophone piece has some info. re. this, and other conductor re-touches.

[ahinton]

No, it's not a matter of scale at all. It's whether or not a tradition existed or didn't exist.

You seem to be arguing with me when we're actually saying pretty much the same thing. It is a matter of scale, to the extent that one "performing tradition" is more established than another in this instance.

If you peruse the concert programmes from say, the 1930s over the next 70 or so years, you'll find a massive amount of performances of Bruckner 9 in its three movement form. From Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Knappertsbutsch, et al, through Karajan, Giulini, Barenboim, Clibidache to current day musicians like Nezet-Seguin the list is almost endless.

Then peruse the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, EMI, Sony etc catalogues - The list of recordings down the years is enormous. I have over twenty recordings of the the three movement original on my shelves.

It's inarguable that the tradition of performing the symphony this way exists and that the performance or recording of the four movement would have to contend with this. Whether or not it has any significant effect is the discussion point.

Yes. Indeed. That's what I agree with. And it's far more than the numbers of performance of Mahler 10/1 pre-Cooke. That the former might be regarded as a "tradition", however, is what calls to my mind Busoni's attitude towards what was and to some extent still is regarded as "tradition" with all the negative aspects that this can embrace...

The same perusing of Mahler 10 performance programmes and recording company catalogues, demonstrates that there is no single movement tradition - in fact it hasn't been performed one way or another, or recorded anywhere near as much as the other Mahler symphonies.

You surely admit that all of its performances pre-Cooke were of movement 1 only, don't you - far fewer than Bruckner 9 1-3 though those were?...

These are the facts. Whether it is relevant, is up for discussion.

As I said, I do not know why the Brucker 9 complete has yet to catch on whereas only a handful of conductors still refuse to perform the Cooke Mahler 10.

All that can be hoped for is that Bruckner 9's time will come and I'm sure that it will, especially if even more of it in the composer's hand is found.

[ahinton]

In my personal case, I had about a 20 year experience of hearing both Mahler 10 and Bruckner 9 in their respective 1 and 3 movement torsos before ever hearing the rest of the corpi to which they are attached.
It took me a few years to get used to the idea of the "full monty" Mahler, but I'm not sure what to make of that, because earlier in my life when I first encounterd GMs
music several of the works took me more than a couple of years to absorb (the 5th, 7th, and 8th--and once absorbed, they have been 3 of the most frequently listened to pieces of music in these parts). Perhaps I had some intellectual resistance to the rest of #10 but it may have been more of the same for me in my reactions to Mahler's music. Gradually I have come to enjoy the rest of the work, and now listening to just I sounds incomplete.
With Bruckner, I have remained stubbornly resistant to any completion of the 9th. I think primarily this is because the 9th was the first of his Symphonies that I grew to love, and for me the ending of the Adagio is a very special moment. I just don't want to hear anything after those final mystical chords, particularly when for decades that is what I am accustomed to doing. I also think that AB habitually wrote finales that were the weakest part of his Symphonic canvasses, and I have been known to switch off the CD player before the finales of 7 and 8. In concerts featuring those works, I just have to endure them. I haven't really given the finale of 9 a fir listen, and while I probably will one day, my stubborn prejudice against it for now is prevailing.

But don't you find the end of the slow movement of 8 at least as special a moment? What surely matters in this is that Bruckner's intention was, comme d'habitude, to compose a four movement symphony...

[ahinton]

We do tend to get our knickers in a twist on this forum, regarding things like this.

Some might but, speaking as a composer (if I may), genuine attempts to realise the composer's intentions ought to be recognised and respected as such; wouldn't you agree?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... the authenticity or otherwise of the second movement coda capping cymbal clash. I prefer without.

The Cooke/Goldschmidt/Matthews & Matthews score has no cymbal crash, as none is indicated in any of the sketch or draft material. Rattle (perhaps remembering the end of the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, which has many similarities to that of 10,II) added one. The manuscript of the full orchestra draft is very spare in these last bars - essentially the rising unison Horn line, the contrary motion descending Violin line that goes with it, and a bottom F# in the last bar. The F# major final chord is taken from one of the short score drafts.

(There are three sources for this movement: two short score drafts [in which the Music is put down onto four staves of manuscript paper, with orchestration - and sometimes counterpoint - noted in words] and a draft full score - which Mahler had at one point thought might be used as the Finale of a two-movement work [with the opening Adagio] if he'd not completed the other movements. Details are missing from the last pages of this full score draft, but these can be taken from the short score versions. No cymbal crash suggested in any of the material, but no great crime to presume that such a detail might have been added as a later thought by the composer.)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Reading the Gramophone article Bryn provides, I should add that I'm working from my 1976 edition of the Faber score - Rattle having had the encouragement of Goldschmidt, the cymbal crash is now in the published score (presumably in the smaller noteheads used throughout to denote editorial decisions). It's still and ongoing work-in-progress - in an article in the Musical Times about ten years ago, David Matthews pointed out four alterations from the published versions that arose from closer reading of Mahler's hurried (for obvious reasons) handwriting - two metronome mark additions to the first movement, and a couple of accidentals corrected. Mr Runnicles' slightly faster (than Rattle) speed for the Adagio reflected at least the first of these.

[Bryn]

The Cooke/Goldschmidt/Matthews & Matthews score has no cymbal crash, as none is indicated in any of the sketch or draft material. Rattle (perhaps remembering the end of the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, which has many similarities to that of 10,II) added one. The manuscript of the full orchestra draft is very spare in these last bars - essentially the rising unison Horn line, the contrary motion descending Violin line that goes with it, and a bottom F# in the last bar. The F# major final chord is taken from one of the short score drafts.

(There are three sources for this movement: two short score drafts [in which the Music is put down onto four staves of manuscript paper, with orchestration - and sometimes counterpoint - noted in words] and a draft full score - which Mahler had at one point thought might be used as the Finale of a two-movement work [with the opening Adagio] if he'd not completed the other movements. Details are missing from the last pages of this full score draft, but these can be taken from the short score versions. No cymbal crash suggested in any of the material, but no great crime to presume that such a detail might have been added as a later thought by the composer.)

Did the cymbal clash not get included in the 1989 score? David Gutman, in his Gramophone piece linked to earlier, claimed it did.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Did the cymbal clash not get included in the 1989 score? David Gutman, in his Gramophone piece linked to earlier, claimed it did.

Cross-posting: my score is the 1976 version that I bought with my very first salary payment in February, 1983! (I 'phoned Faber Music direct and got to speak to "Donald Mitchell's telephone"(!) - I used to have the Invoice slip as a bookmark to remind me how much I paid, but it seems to have vanished.)