A mystique has developed around Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 because it was left incomplete. The fact that both Beethoven and Bruckner each left posterity nine numbered symphonies could be interpreted superstitiously as a confirmation that “the Ninth is a limit,” as the numerology-obsessed Arnold Schoenberg put it in a lecture delivered in a lecture not long after Gustav Mahler’s death in 1911. “He who wants to go beyond it must pass away…. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the hereafter.”

To be sure, Mahler did die before he could complete what would be officially designated as his Symphony No. 10. But the matter is not so clear-cut. Following the Symphony No. 8, he composed Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), an orchestral song cycle that is a symphony in all but name. Mahler hoped to “cheat” fate by not calling it a symphony. In other words, his Symphony No. 9 is really No. 10—and already shows the composer surviving the “curse of the Ninth.”

During his last summer, in 1910, which he spent at his getaway in the southern Tyrolean Alps, Mahler managed to compose the continuous short score for a five-movement work and even developed some of this material into an orchestral draft—the source for the completed Symphony No. 10. This was an especially busy period, since Mahler was preparing for the world premiere of his Eighth Symphony, which took place in Munich in September and marked his greatest triumph as a composer.

This was also a time of crushing emotional distress: Mahler discovered that the love of his life, his wife Alma Schindler, was having a relationship with the architect Walter Gropius. Alma decided to stay with Mahler, though after his death she would go on to marry Gropius. But the infidelity provoked a crisis that resulted in the composer paying a visit to Sigmund Freud. 

As if its genesis were not sufficiently convoluted, the nature of this unfinished symphony quickly became enshrouded in a host of contradictory myths following Mahler’s death in 1911. There were reports that he had ordered the manuscript to be burned. The mysterious score was said to convey “foreboding of premature death” on the one hand and, on the other, a kind of “gaiety, even exuberance.”

At last, in 1924, light began to be shed on the actual status of the Tenth. Alma decided to allow the bulk of the manuscript to be published in facsimile, including Mahler’s soul-baring inscriptions to her in the score. She also enlisted the Austro-Czech composer Ernst Krenek—at the time married to the Mahlers’ surviving daughter, Anna—to prepare a performable version.

Krenek did so for the two movements closest to completion: the opening Adagio, for which Mahler had already written out a full orchestral draft, and the brief third movement, titled “Purgatorio.” These were first performed by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1924. But the “Purgatorio” was obviously not in its intended original context and sounded like a strange add-on.

Another dormant period ensued and lasted several decades. During these years, two of Mahler’s most fervent admirers, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, were separately approached and asked to make a complete edition from the rest of the manuscript. Both declined, but several other figures took up the challenge. By general consensus, the most successful of these was the British musicologist Deryck Cooke, who began work on this project with the hope of having it ready for the Mahler centenary in 1960. 

Alma initially expressed opposition to performance of the completed score. But, as Cooke reports in an essay on the history of the Tenth, she was “moved to tears” when she finally heard what had been accomplished, realizing “how much Mahler there was in it.” Not long before her own death in 1964, Alma gave official permission for performances of what she termed Cooke’s “authoritative score,” which received its world premiere in London in August 1964.

Cooke, a painstaking perfectionist, continued to refine his work in several subsequent editions, collaborating with a team that included Berthold Goldschmidt (who conducted the premiere) and the brothers Colin and David Matthews. At these concerts, the Nashville Symphony performs the second version made by Cooke, which was published in 1976.

Although Alma was at last persuaded to give her blessing, the matter of performing the Tenth as a complete, five-movement work remains controversial. Conductors have historically been firmly split into camps. Some perform the Tenth as a full-scale, five-movement work—whether in the Cooke version or, in a few cases, using editions completed by a number of alternate contenders. Others, such as Leonard Bernstein, have considered the opening Adagio alone sufficiently representative. In fact, there is a third camp that rejects any attempt to perform music from the Tenth as a kind of artistic grave-digging.

Yet it seems counterproductive to make blanket judgments about how to treat “unfinished” artworks, since the circumstances surrounding each particular instance vary so dramatically. Cooke’s version of the Mahler Tenth is entirely different in kind from the posthumously “completed” Mozart Requiem, which has long held its place in the repertoire. 

As Cooke emphasized, his goal was not a pretense to “completing” or “reconstructing” Mahler’s thoughts. It was to prepare “a practical performing version” from Mahler’s extensive draft for the Tenth Symphony. From his perspective as a musicologist, he had less need than a composer would have shown to suppress his artistic ego. “Mahler’s actual music,” wrote Cooke, “even in its unperfected and unelaborated state, has such significance, strength, and beauty, that it dwarfs into insignificance the momentary uncertainties about notation and the occasional subsidiary pastiche-composing…. After all, the thematic line throughout, and something like 90% of the counterpoint and harmony, are pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that.”

Among the revelations this music provides is a correction to the image of Mahler’s final statements as a resigned farewell to life, fading into motionless silence. While both the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde conclude with music of profound resignation and leave-taking, his final symphony shows that Mahler still had a good deal of vital experience left to explore. The Tenth adds significantly to our understanding of what Cooke calls “the dark symphonic triptych of [Mahler’s] last period.”

Even more, the highly restrained approach of Cooke’s “conjectural orchestration”—another sign of the great humility with which he undertook his task—makes it impossible to ignore the ghostly shadow of incompleteness. It is as if we are allowed a rarely intimate glimpse into the creative mind still in the throes of inspiration. One of the paradoxes of this edition of the Mahler Tenth is the sense of fragmentation that coexists with its epic scale.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Mahler considered some alternate sequences before arriving at his arch-like design of five movements. The first and last mirror each other in length and frame the work with slow music; similarly, the second and fourth movements are high-energy scherzos nearly identical in dimension (each about half as long as the outer movements), pivoting around an enigmatically brief movement at the center. The best-known music is of course the nearly half-hour-long slow first movement, which actually begins with a seemingly meterless, searching Andante melody in the violas. At last it settles on the (momentarily) reassuring balm of the main part of the movement, the Adagio. This is territory we recognize from the ending of the Ninth: a searing, deeply felt leave-taking. But the larger context of the Tenth shows Mahler moving in reverse, away from the spirit of resignation and back to reengagement with the anxiety and anguish of life.

This first movement unfolds as an alternation between the meandering monologue of the opening and the Adagio music, as Mahler introduces ever-more-intricate counterpoint, heightening the inner tension. One after another, a series of increasingly restless waves at last crests in a nightmarish, fiercely dissonant way that smothers the trumpet’s shrieking high A.

The music at last sinks back into blissful serenity. But how different the effect is when this movement is encountered as a beginning rather than a final destination. The first Scherzo is immediately striking for its metrical complexity, with constant changes of time signature that require virtuosic conducting and execution. It underscores the contrasting stability of the leisurely middle section, which has an upward-thrusting theme that contains echoes of the
Adagio melody. 

While this first Scherzo pushes off into various fragmentary directions, the “Purgatorio” movement is a tightly compressed universe. It presents a series of themes that are then allowed room for development in the final two movements. The scurrying, kaleidoscopic flashes of the opening recall the idiom of Mahler’s early symphonies. Despite the title (which was originally “Purgatorio or Inferno”), Colin Matthews points out that the reference is likely not to Dante’s epic work but “almost certainly to a poem about betrayal” that Mahler’s friend Siegfried Lipiner had penned.

The second Scherzo is far more sardonic and sinister than its counterpart. Wickedly satirical in parts (“the Devil dances it with me,” as Mahler inscribed into his draft score), it also expresses a seemingly renewed zest for life. But “Purgatorio” ends with a dreadful reminder of death: a menacing deep stroke from a muted military drum. “You alone know what this means,” Mahler writes here in his short score. According to Alma (whose testimony must always be taken with skepticism), this referred to the funeral procession for a fallen fireman that they had observed from their hotel overlooking Central Park, when Mahler was working as a guest conductor in New York. 

The fourth movement leads without pause into the finale, which begins in D minor and integrates ideas heard earlier in the work. A dark tuba scale and brief fanfare from the “Purgatorio” are followed by a consoling, lone melody floated by the flute. The tempo speeds to Allegro in the middle, with more tempestuous episodes and hints of death. This reaches a climax mirroring the nightmare chord from the first movement, with the trumpet shriek again piercing through the poisonous cloud of dissonance. 

The viola melody from the opening (now played by horns) restores calm, and the work comes to a close in a moving Adagio contemplation of the earlier flute melody. As the music attains the peaceful F-sharp major with which the first Adagio ended, Mahler writes an intimate note to Alma: “To live for you! To die for you!”

Scored for 4 flutes (4th doubling piccolo); 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn); 4 clarinets (4th doubling E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, 4 bassoons (3rd and 4th doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, 2 timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.

Featured on Mahler's Monumental Opus — May 16 to 18, 2024

Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor 

Return to Program Notes