The following movements take us back to both happier and more conflicted times before the fourth and fifth movements sees the hero responding to a call from God and, in the finale, facing the Day of Judgement. A truly spiritual experience.
In none of his nine completed symphonies did Mahler come closer to filling that prescription than in the Third, premiered five years previously. In movements two and three flowers sway elegantly in the meadows, and birds and beasts disport themselves in the forest. In first place is Mahler Symphony No. This is a glorious apotheosis and a brave new dawn. Despite its expansive timescale of around 85 minutes, much of this music feels as though it is sustained under superheated compression.
There are times when Mahler takes us to the brink of atonality as the four movements progress unconventionally from D major to C major to A minor to D flat major for the Adagio finale. Yet it all feels intuitive, natural and logical.
Saving his best till last, the finale hovers on an emotional knife-edge between a serene acceptance and the bitter resignation of a man, still only 50, suffering from a congenital heart condition, and destined to bow out after a completed Ninth.
No Question! The 10th: Cooke points out in his notes to the score that the entire symphony - start to finish - is there, often threadbare to be sure.
The music thought is complete, though. He only had to add supporting harmony, some counterpoint, and of course the orchestration. In any case, Mahler finished two movements - and we give Schubert credit for his 8th and that's all he finished - two movements. What's amazing about the Mahler is that no matter which of the many completions you hear, they all sound like Mahler. The material is so strong.
To be really accurate, Mahler didn't really complete the Adagio. There were lots of pages with many blank staves, especially in the winds. Zemlinsky and others filled it in to make it performable. There are many works that someone completed for another composer and we don' quibble about it: Puccini's Turandot, Bartok's 3rd piano concerto for example.
Others are more tainted because the person doing the completion had so much to do with so little to go on: Elgar's 3rd symphony, Tchaikovsky's 7th symphony and 3rd piano concerto, Mozart's Requiem. Completing the Mahler was no small task just reading his manuscript is a monumental chore but at least the musical thread is there all the way to the end.
I also prefer the Bruckner 9th in a completed form. A lot of the finale is Bruckner's own work. It's the ending that's the problem, with few sketches to go on. I have several of them, and I've played Carragan's third version.
Admittedly none of them are what Bruckner would have written, and some don't exactly sound like Bruckner, but they're all thrilling. So Bruckner wrote 11, too! I'm rambling. So, we have the symphonies 1 - 9. And the "10th" is acceptable to me as a symphony by Mahler; that's Another objection, made by conductors of all ages, was that the Cooke score at some points simply did not sound like Mahler.
In the preface to his score Cooke had explained that it was "in no sense intended as a 'completion' or 'reconstruction' of the work. Thus it makes perfect sense that the absence of the contrapuntal writing that Mahler alone could have provided -- those "counter-themes and inner voices" mentioned by Specht -- might leave the Cooke score sounding too simple and bare to be genuine Mahler.
The excellent Mahler conductor Michael Tilson Thomas once told me that he found Cooke's score "very empty-sounding. Lacking the ears and the training of a conductor, I hear no emptiness in the Cooke score. Anyhow, Mahler's textures in his earlier, completed works are often quite bare. More important, the sheer power and beauty of the music, as captured in Cooke's performing version, easily overwhelm whatever force these objections may possess.
It is no wonder that over the past twenty years an increasing number of conductors have found Cooke's score very much worth performing and recording. At either end stands a vast and complex movement twenty to twenty-four minutes in length, depending on the conductor. Next in from each end is a Scherzo, twelve to fourteen minutes in length. At the center sits the marvelous, enigmatic little "Purgatorio," which lasts barely four minutes.
Resting complacently at the center of Mahler's long and often turbulent work, it reminds one of the secret in Robert Frost's two-line poem, "The Secret Sits":.
Though the music of the longer movements is sometimes anguished, the Tenth Symphony is by no means as dark a work as either Das Lied von der Erde or the Ninth. Pliant, consoling dance rhythms keep breaking in upon the high drama of the first movement, reasserting the presence of the everyday world.
The movement ends calmly and quietly. The two Scherzos are energetic, insistent, even at times menacing, but each one has two gracious, seductive trio sections. The magnificent finale begins very dramatically, with a slow introduction punctuated by repeated strokes on a muffled drum -- Mahler's memory of a heroic fireman's funeral procession that he and Alma watched from their New York hotel window in February of But the music gradually turns warm and serene.
A vigorous Allegro follows, in which the battles of the other movements are fought once again: motifs from the "Purgatorio" recur in phrases that recall the first Scherzo, and the introduction to the first movement, there heard softly in the violas, is blared forth by the horns.
But the earlier serenity gradually returns, and a three-note motif from the "Purgatorio" is transformed into what sounds like a remembered snatch of a touching folk song or lullaby.
This gradually fragments and then -- after one brief, ecstatic outburst -- dies away, giving the ending a wry and gentle benedictory air. It was this ending, so different from the deep sadness with which both Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony end, that first attracted critical attention to the Tenth. In a essay, "The Facts Concerning Mahler's Tenth Symphony," Cooke spoke of the work's structure as presenting "an emotional and psychological statement as intelligible as those of Mahler's other symphonies"; he took "the 'message' of the symphony" to be "the final resolution of Mahler's lifelong spiritual conflict.
He spoke of Cooke as having "completely altered the emotional interpretation of Mahler's last year" and as having demonstrated "that it is wrong to regard Mahler as having died in a mood of valediction, defeated or resigned to the inevitable.
This seems to me to go too far: we have left the realm of music criticism and entered that of soap opera. It is perfectly appropriate to think of the ending of a symphony as exerting a special force in shaping our interpretation of the whole work, and hence to regard symphonies, especially perhaps Romantic symphonies, as having a sort of rough narrative form.
But it seems wrong to string together a composer's symphonies -- even the symphonies of so autobiographical a composer as Mahler -- to form a larger narrative that is then assumed to be a blow-by-blow account of his emotional life.
It is surely right to say that the serene and consolatory ending of the Tenth is different from the endings of Mahler's two other late symphonic works.
But to say that the Tenth thereby invalidates the popular image of Mahler as an egocentric, death-obsessed neurotic is to accord that image more attention than it deserves. For it has been transmitted to us not through Mahler's works but rather through Alma's memoirs. As even Kennedy argues, this image never did stand up well against the evidence of Mahler's letters, of other people's memories of him, or of his busy and highly successful conducting career.
By then, his personal life had changed utterly. Her account of their relationship in her memoirs has been questioned. By the beginning of , Mahler was conducting in New York. His performances there were generally successful, but he resigned the following year to take up a post with the New York Philharmonic. Mahler died having completed two movements of the Tenth and made extensive drafts for the other three. A number of completions of the whole work have been made from these drafts, of which that by the British musicologist Deryck Cooke has proved the most convincing and widely performed.
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