Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony: One Last Declaration of Love
Gustav Mahler's symphonies rightfully deserve their place in the repertoire. They convey so much emotion and philosophy in an hour and a half's worth of music — one symphony, the third, approaches the two hour mark. One of them however, is not commonly known, programmed, nor heard on recordings. This is the unfinished tenth symphony.
When Mahler finished writing the symphony in short score, his efforts to orchestrate it were only partially finished when he had to revise the orchestration of his ninth symphony in 1910. It was by this time he discovered that his wife, Alma, was cheating on him for a young architect by the name of Walter Gropius, who in a ridiculous Freudian slip sent Alma a love letter that was misdirected to "Herr Direktor Mahler''. If in 1907 he received three blows of fate: his forced resignation from the Vienna Court Opera, the death of his first daughter, and the discovery of a congenital heart defect were tragic enough, the discovery of the affair placed the composer into a deeper bout of depression. This had troubled him so much that he had to book an appointment with Sigmund Freud in order to help him out and find a way to fix his marriage — this in itself is the subject of a 2014 movie titled Mahler on the Couch.
The symphony is in five movements with the first being fairly orchestrated enough to be considered performable. The rest were only partially orchestrated but finished in short score with occasional markings of what instruments intended for certain sections. It was from there that composers since Mahler's death have tried or were asked to complete the orchestration of the symphony. The early efforts were from Ernst Krenek, Franz Schalk, and Alexander von Zemlinsky. Composers who were influenced by Mahler like Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Arnold Schoenberg were asked to complete it but refused. The job then went to British musicologist Deryck Cooke who — through his efforts within a span of some 20 years with help from composers to attempt a Mahlerian orchestration— managed to create a performable version of the entire work. Alma was aware of the effort but iffy of it for a time, wanting to veto any performance or recording of his version; she changed her mind when she read the score and heard excerpts of it on the BBC; she wrote a letter to Cooke in English congratulating him for such monumental effort. By the time she died in 1964, Anna Mahler —the surviving daughter of Alma and Gustav— gave Cooke more resources to make revisions to his performing version of the symphony. His version is commonly performed and recorded today although other versions like that of Russian conductor Rudolf Barshai exist. There were some conductors who refused to conduct any completed version of the symphony as they believe that the first movement alone was the only one deemed performable as Mahler intended. Some of these were Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, and Michael Tilson Thomas.
The first movement opens with a bleak melody by the violas before the adagio proper that gives us a bitter sense of longing and unrequited love with the occasional Viennese waltz in certain sections before a massive shriek brought by an extremely dissonant extended D flat chord - a D flat seventh flat nine below an A half diminished seventh chord before ending in relative peace. The first scherzo is a light moment of happiness, probably a reminiscence of the starting days of Mahler's love for Alma; it also has a Ländler, an Austrian folk dance. The purgatorio movement —the title not coming from Dante's Divine Comedy, rather from Sigfried Lipiner — shows a struggle in their marriage in such a brief moment; it is the shortest of the five. The last scherzo is scary and demonic especially upon knowing what Mahler had written down in the short score of the movement:
"Der Teufel tanzt es mit mir." ("The Devil dances it with me.")
"Wahnsinn, fasse mich an, Verluchten!" ("Madness, take hold of me, the accursed!")
"Vernichte mich" ("Destroy me")
"Dass ich vergesse, dass ich bin!" ("Let me forget, that I exist!")
"Das ich aufhöre zu sein." ("That I cease to be.")
On the end of the movement, Mahler wrote the following:
"Du allein weißt, was es bedeutet." ("You alone know what this means.")
- This was a reference to a funeral procession for a fireman in New York City that they witnessed. A loud drum could be heard from the procession, something Mahler incorporated at the end of this movement.
"Ach! Ach! Ach!"
"Leb wohl mein Saitenspiel" ("Farewell my lyre.")
"Leb wohl!" (“Farewell!”)
"Leb wohl!"
"Leb wohl!"
"Ach wohl"
"Ach Ach!"
The final movement quotes much from the first in the bleakness of its character, featuring again the horrifying extended D flat chord. Most notable in this movement are the drum strikes that are so strong the shock value is undeniable. Moments of serenity follow after the scenes of horror, showing Mahler's undying love for Alma regardless of what had transpired from the events of his three hammer blows to the discovery of the affair. At the end of the score, Mahler wrote these:
"Für dich leben!" (“To live for you!”)
"Für dich sterben!" (“To die for you!”)
"Almschi!" (Mahler's pet name for his wife)
There is no doubt that at the end of the symphony and his life, Mahler's love for his wife never faltered. Prior to composing the symphony and the discovery of the affair, he had realized that the insistence of him being the only composer in the family - completely disregarding Alma's abilities - hurt her so much. He tried to play her wife's lieder, realizing the pain he had caused, and had them set up for publication only for Alma to be further disheartened. Her unhappiness and feeling locked in an inescapable marriage lead to the affair with Gropius. She wanted to be loved but could not abandon her husband. Nevertheless, Alma cared for him until his dying breath in May 1911.
One can wonder what Mahler’s effects would had been had he either lived long enough to orchestrate the whole work or put aside the revisions of the ninth symphony to a later date. There is no doubt however that there are those like Cooke who managed to complete the work with Alma’s approval that give us the closest thing to what Mahler had intended for his final symphony — or care to say, his probable Schwanengesang (Swan song). The tenth symphony is Mahler’s most dissonant and in my opinion — save for Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) — his most personal.
Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the first movement with the Wiener Philharmoniker:
Here is a complete performance of the tenth symphony conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra:
