GUSTAV MAHLER

ADAGIO FROM SYMPHONY NO. 10

DAS KLAGENDE LIED (SONG OF LAMENT),CANTATA FOR SOLOISTS, MIXED CHORUS, AND LARGE ORCHESTRA

GUSTAV MAHLER was born in Kalischt (Kalištĕ), near Humpolec, Bohemia, on July 7, 1860 and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. Although some of the ideas for his Symphony No. 10 go back to 1908, Mahler did most of the work on this unfinished score in the summer of 1910. The first attempt at preparing a practical full score was undertaken by the composer Ernst Krenek in 1924. He presented the first and third movements only, and these sections were performed on October 14, 1924 by Franz Schalk and the Vienna Philharmonic. These two movements were introduced in the United States in Krenek’s edition on December 6, 1949 by the Erie (Pennsylvania) Philharmonic under Fritz Mahler (no relation). In 1959, an English musician and writer, Deryck Cooke, began work on what he called a “performing version” of all five movements in connection with the impending Mahler centenary. On August 13, 1964, Berthold Goldschmidt and the London Symphony Orchestra gave the first complete performance of Cooke’s score. Josef Krips conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performances in April 1967. In April and May 1975, Jean Martinon conducted the Adagio only, in the critical Mahler edition of 1964 (the version used in the present performances), and Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the most recent performances of this version in September 1996. One who was not satisfied with the Cooke version of the complete score was Cooke himself. His “finally revised full-length performing version,” generally known as Cooke II, was introduced in London on October 15, 1972 by Wyn Morris and the New Philharmonia Orchestra. In January 1976, Niklaus Wyss conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first American performances of all five movements of Cooke II. This is the edition that has so far enjoyed the widest circulation. There are also editions by Joe Wheeler, Clinton Carpenter, and Hans Wollschläger. In 1994, an edition by an American musician, Remo Mazzetti, Jr., began to achieve circulation, and this version was performed by the Orchestra, under Leonard Slatkin’s direction, on March 29 and April 1,5, 1995. The score for the Adagio calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, harp, and strings.

Having written his own text, which he completed on March 18, 1878, Mahler promptly began the composition of Das klagende Lied, completing the score at the end of October 1880. In 1892-93 he revised the score, his most radical amendment being to cut Waldmärchen (Forest Legend), the first of the three sections and amounting to a good two-fifths of the work. Some further changes were made in 1898-99. The abbreviated two-part version was performed in Vienna on February 17, 1901, by which time Mahler was about to begin work on his Symphony No. 5. He conducted the Vienna Singakademie and the Vienna Philharmonic, and the soloists were Elise Elizza, Anna von Mildenburg, Edyth Walker, and Fritz Schrödter. The first performance of the three-movement version of Das klagende Lied, sung in Czech, was given as a broadcast over Radio Brno, Czechoslovakia, on November 28, 1934; the conductor was Mahler’s nephew, Alfred Rosé. The first American (and third ever) performance of the complete work was given on January 13, 1970 at a concert of the New Haven Symphony, Frank Brieff conducting, with Veronica Tyler, Janet Baker, Blake Stern, and Richard McKee, and the New Haven Chorale. The performances that Edo de Waart led with the San Francisco Symphony in May 1978, with Patricia Wells, Florence Quivar, Kenneth Riegel, and the SFS Chorus, were of the two-part version; the complete work was first performed here in May 1996, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and with soloists Marina Shaguch, Michelle DeYoung, Thomas Moser, and Sergei Leiferkus, and the SFS Chorus. The score calls for a mixed chorus (sometimes elaborately divided); soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone soloists; and an orchestra consisting of two flutes and piccolo (doubling third flute), two oboes and English horn (doubling third oboe), two clarinets and bass clarinet (doubling third clarinet), three bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, two to six harps, and strings.

WHEN BRUNO WALTER CONDUCTED the posthumous premieres of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Munich in November 1911 and the Symphony No. 9 in Vienna in June 1912, it seemed that all of Mahler’s music had been offered to the public. It was assumed that the Tenth Symphony was in too fragmentary a state ever to be performed, and word went about that Mahler had asked his wife to destroy whatever drafts remained.

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In 1912, Arnold Schoenberg, that paradoxical confluence of the rational and the mystic, wrote: “We shall know as little about what [Mahler’s] Tenth …would have said as we know about Beethoven’s Tenth or Bruckner’s. It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must die. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too near the hereafter. Perhaps the riddles of this world would be solved if one of those who knew them were to write a Tenth. And that is probably not going to happen.”

Mahler, for that matter, had his own misgivings about going beyond the Ninth. He had called Das Lied von der Erde a symphony without numbering it, so that the symphony he called No. 9 was actually his tenth. Thus he had dealt with “the limit” by circumvention, or so he believed. With ten symphonies completed (counting Das Lied von der Erde), Mahler moved virtually without pause, fearlessly and with white-hot energy, from the last pages of the official No. 9 to the first of No. 10. In 1911, the discovery of penicillin was still seventeen years away. Had that antibiotic been available to combat his blood infection, there is little doubt he would have finished his work-in-progress that summer.

Schoenberg in fact did not know how far Mahler had actually progressed on his Tenth. Only Mahler’s widow had any idea until 1924, when she asked the twenty-three-year-old composer Ernst Krenek to “complete” the symphony. Krenek felt this to be an “obviously impossible” assignment, but he prepared a practical full score of two movements, the Adagio, which was complete, and Purgatorio, which was nearly complete. At the same time, Alma Mahler Gropius, as she then was, allowed the Viennese publisher Paul Zsolnay to publish a large part of Mahler’s manuscript in facsimile. Her decision was surprising.

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Gustav Mahler, in 1910, was a man in torment, for he believed himself on the point of losing his intensely beloved, much younger, bright and lively, beguilingly beautiful wife. Alma Maria Schindler met Mahler in November 1901, became pregnant, and married him four months later. Their devotion was mutual and passionate, but they were fundamentally out of tune. Eight years into their marriage, Alma, flirtatious by temperament and frustrated by Gustav’s sexual withdrawal from her, was restless. In May 1910, she met Walter Gropius, four years her junior and about to embark on one of the most distinguished careers in the history of architecture. Under trying and even bizarre circumstances—Gropius had by accident (!) addressed the letter in which he invited Alma to leave Gustav to “Herr Direktor Mahler”—Alma chose to stay with her husband, who later told her that if she had left him then, “I would simply have gone out, like a torch deprived of air.” Through the score of the Tenth Symphony, Mahler scribbled verbal exclamations that reflect this crisis, and it cannot have been easy for Alma to agree to the publication of such painfully intimate material. The so-called Krenek edition of the Adagio and Purgatorio, long the only available performing edition of any music from the Tenth Symphony, lacked too much both of science and art to be satisfactory; in any event, with the appearance in 1964 of the Adagio in the critical Mahler edition and that of Cooke II in 1976, it has for all intents and purposes dropped out of circulation.

It was Mahler’s biographer Richard Specht who suggested, after studying the facsimile, that more could be done about the Tenth Symphony than had been done, and he urged that “some musician of high standing, devoted to Mahler, and intimate with his style” should prepare a performable full score of the entire work. Alma Mahler Werfel also showed Schoenberg the manuscript, but he declined to work on it. In 1942, the Canadian-born Mahler scholar Jack Diether tried in vain to interest Shostakovich in the task.

Some considerable voices, including those of Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, Rafael Kubelík, Pierre Boulez, and Erwin Ratz (chief editor for the International Mahler Society), have spoken out against the “complete” Mahler Tenth. Cooke himself pointed out that Mahler would undoubtedly have “elaborated, refined and perfected [his score] … in a thousand details,” that he would also, “no doubt, have expanded, contracted, redisposed, added, or canceled a passage here and there,” and that he would “finally, of course, have embodied the result in his own incomparable orchestration.” Deryck Cooke, who died in 1976, would never have taken the position that Cooke II—or Cooke anything—was the last word on the Mahler Tenth. What Mahler left is open to many interpretations and realizations in “performing versions.” All this is background to a performance of music that Mahler did complete, the Adagio we hear now.

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In the Tenth Symphony, Mahler returned to the symmetrical five-movement design he had used in his Fifth and Seventh and in the original version of the First. This idea was not clear to Mahler to begin with, and he changed his mind more than once about their order within the whole. He called his first movement an “Adagio,” but he does not enter that tempo—nor, for that matter, the main key, F-sharp major—until measure 16. He begins, rather, with one of the world’s great upbeats: a pianissimo Andante for the violas alone, probing, wandering, surprising, shedding a muted light on many harmonic regions, slowing almost to a halt, finally and unexpectedly opening the gates to the Adagio proper. This is a melody of wide range and great intensity—piano, but warm, is Mahler’s instruction to the violins—enriched by counterpoint from the violas and horn, becoming a duet with the second violins, returning eventually to the world of the opening music.

These two tempi and characters comprise the material for this movement. A dramatic dislocation into B major, with sustained brass chords and sweeping broken-chord figurations in strings and harp, brings about a crisis, the trumpet screaming a long high A, the orchestra seeking to suffocate it in a terrifying series of massively dense and dissonant chords. Fragments and reminiscences, finally an immensely spacious, gloriously scored cadence, bring the music to a close.

THE EARLIEST MUSIC BY MAHLER we are likely to encounter in concert is the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), which were probably composed in 1883-84. Das klagende Lied takes us back to a span of time that begins with the seventeen-year-old as a student both at the Vienna Conservatory, from which he would graduate a few months later, in July 1878, and at the University of Vienna, and which ends with the young man back in Vienna after a summer of conducting operettas at Bad Hall in Upper Austria. Bad Hall was hardly a stimulating artistic experience; nonetheless, it changed Mahler’s life. He loved conducting. In later years, when he had become, with Toscanini (a bit younger) and Nikisch (slightly older), one of the greatest conductors of his generation, he sometimes railed against the life that obliged him to confine his composing to the summer months, but the fact was that the bug that bit him in the summer of 1880 never released him, and if he did not give up conducting it was not only for financial reasons.

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Of course Mahler hoped for a performance of Das klagende Lied, but as an unknown twenty-year-old he had no leverage with which to organize such a huge undertaking. His next plan was to submit the score in 1881 for the Beethoven Prize, given annually to a Conservatory student or alumnus. Winning that would have brought welcome publicity, to say nothing of 600 florins; however, the prize that year was awarded to Robert Fuchs for his Symphony No. 1. Mahler was embittered for years about that decision.

When at last he was able to get Das klagende Lied performed, twenty years after completing the score, Mahler was a conductor at the Vienna Court Opera and of the Vienna Philharmonic, and he was able to enlist some of the outstanding singers of the day, notably the three women, Elizza, von Mildenburg, and Walker. The thorn in his side was the Singakademie, a mediocre chorus that was not professional in literal fact or in attitude and which was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. But Mahler enjoyed a warm public success, a relatively rare event for him. The reviews were mostly so-so to negative. The critics who were generally sympathetic to Mahler were disappointed because his four symphonies and recent songs had set their expectations at a higher level than this impressive student work—but student work nonetheless—was able to meet, and the writers in the anti-Mahler camp heard nothing to make them change their minds.

Another muddle concerning Das klagende Lied has been the assertion that Mahler originally intended the work as an opera. The biographer and critic Ernst Decsey, who wrote his recollections of Mahler at the time of the composer’s death, seems to have been the first to put that non-fact into circulation, but aside from his 1911 article in Die Musik, published in Norman Lebrecht’s 1987 compilation Mahler Remembered and in most respects exceedingly interesting, there is nothing to back it up.

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The title Das klagende Lied is not easy to translate, and many writers don’t even try; nor am I am really satisfied with my suggestion of Song of Lament. The primary meaning of “klagen” is to complain, to lament; however, one of its secondary meanings in the world of jurisprudence is to go to law, to bring action, to sue. “Klagen” also brings to mind its derivative, “anklagen,” which means to accuse. These other meanings and associations are germane to Das klagende Lied, for here is the tale told in the cantata:

Part I, Waldmärchen: A beautiful, proud, and man-hating queen has conceded that she will give herself as wife to whichever knight finds a certain red flower in the forest, a flower as lovely as herself. Two brothers set out to find the flower; the younger one is sweet in manner and handsome, the elder “could only curse.” The younger brother finds the flower, sticks it in his hat, and lies down in the forest to sleep. Finding him thus, the older brother kills him, takes the flower, and claims his prize.

Part II, Der Spielmann (The Minstrel): A musician wandering through the same forest finds a gleaming white bone and fashions a flute from it. The first time he plays his new instrument, it sings the tale of the murder. The minstrel decides he must seek out the queen.

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Part III, Hochzeitsstück (Wedding Piece): At court there is a great feast in honor of the impending wedding of the Queen and the murderer-knight. The minstrel arrives and plays his flute, which once again tells its dark tale. The new king seizes the flute and puts it to his own lips, where it accuses him directly: “Ah brother, dear brother mine, it was you who struck me dead, and now you play upon my whitened bone.” The Queen falls in a faint, the guests flee in terror, and the walls of the castle collapse.

When Mahler came to set five of Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children) in 1901-04, he came to the task as an expert, so to speak, for of his thirteen siblings, seven died in infancy (his one older brother, Isidor, had died before Gustav’s birth), and in 1874 his favorite brother, Ernst, died of hydrocardia at the age of thirteen. One might also imagine that Mahler was an expert on sibling rivalry, and that the painful last illness and death of Ernst, one year younger than himself and his closest childhood companion, brought on a severe case of survivor’s guilt.

Where Mahler got the story has been much argued. Bruno Walter cited “The Singing Bone,” of the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm, as an important source. Walter overstated the case when he called Das klagende Lied Mahler’s versification of the Grimm tale, but otherwise the idea is not farfetched. It is true that in “The Singing Bone” the issue is the killing of a gigantic boar that has become a peril to the kingdom rather than the finding of a red flower, but the reward is the hand in marriage of a beautiful princess, the two brothers are contrasted Cain-and-Abel style as rough and gentle with “Cain” killing “Abel,” and the singing bone-flute corresponds perfectly.

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We know that a verse play by Martin Greif, the pen-name of a Bavarian poet, Friedrich Hermann Frey, and titled Das klagende Lied was performed by drama students at the Vienna Conservatory in 1876, so that is a possible source for the title; however, the play itself does not survive and we know nothing about it, so that is a dead end. But there is another and more relevant source, a tale collected by the nineteenth-century folklorist Ludwig Bechstein and titled by him Das klagende Lied. The striking difference between Bechstein’s version and Mahler’s (and, for that matter, the Grimms’) is that in Bechstein the rival siblings are brother and sister, the sister being killed. In any event, as we know well from a whole succession of works from his early songs right up to Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler was never one to leave a text alone, and Das klagende Lied may well be understood as a conflation of Bechstein, Grimm, and Mahler’s own excited imagination.

In December 1896, Mahler wrote to Max Marschalk, the critic whom he felt “understands my work better than anyone,” that Das klagende Lied, “a fairy tale for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, is the first work in which I found myself as ‘Mahler.’ This work I designate as my Opus 1.”

Yet inevitably we sense the ghosts of other composers—Wagner most of all, which will surprise no one. We may even be reminded of a great work yet to be written by a composer who was a close cousin in spirit to Mahler, the Gurrelieder of Arnold Schoenberg. I do not know whether Schoenberg knew Das klagende Lied, but he certainly could have known it. One aspect of Das klagende Lied that brings Gurrelieder to mind is the manner of Romantic story-telling that informs both works. Another of course is the grand scale of Das klagende Lied, and immense and fearless ambition is one aspect that makes the twenty-year-old Mahler so unmistakably recognizable as Mahler. This is truly the beginning of a chain of works that continues coherently right up to the unfinished Tenth Symphony. All through his life, Mahler’s works are remarkably linked, quoting their predecessors or taking them as points of departure. Another feature of Das klagende Lied, then, is that it constantly anticipates the Songs of a Wayfarer, and in startling detail.

I will not offer a point-by-point guide to the cantata. I do, however, want to make a couple of brief general remarks about Mahler’s accomplishment here. One is that his feeling for the orchestra is absolutely extraordinary and individual, and this is the more amazing as it comes from someone his age, who had never heard a note of his own orchestration. The other is that he commands a remarkable sense of atmosphere. From the first moments of the prelude to Waldmärchen, we believe without hesitation that this is music by the composer who will go on to write the Last Trump with its picture of a desolate earth in the finale of his Second Symphony and that most amazing of all his pictorial achievements, the prelude to the mountain gorge scene in the Faust portion of his Eighth Symphony (which Michael Tilson Thomas conducts at our concerts of June 6-10). One cannot help feel that Mahler still had much to learn about pacing, both in actual swiftness and variety, but again, this is a teenager with no practical experience. He would become a master of this in excelsis, and one of the many impressive things about Das klagende Lied is that each of its three parts is strikingly more assured and inventive than the one before. It is fascinating and moving to get a glimpse of a younger Mahler than the one we are accustomed to meeting and to hear the rightness of his proud claim that this is the work where the real Mahler is first discerned.

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On Disc and in Print

Leonard Bernstein, who never came to terms with the performing version of the Tenth Symphony, recorded the Adagio twice, with the New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical) and with the Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon). Sir Simon Rattle has recorded Cooke II with the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI Classics).

Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony, and the SFS Chorus have recorded Das klagende Lied, with soloists Marina Shaguch, Michelle DeYoung, Thomas Moser, and Sergei Leiferkus (RCA Red Seal).

The sourcebook on Mahler is Henry-Louis de la Grange's massive biography. Two volumes of the projected four are available in English: Gustav Mahler: Vienna, The Years of Challenge, 1897-1904 and Gustav Mahler: Vienna, Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907 (Oxford). Jonathan Carr’s Mahler: A Biography is a briefer introduction—intelligent and accessible (Overlook). Michael Kennedy’s book on Mahler in the Master Musicians series is one of the best short studies (Dent).