Performance of short score from the manuscript: Mahler 10 Mvt.4

This is a performance of Mahlers’ unfinished Symphony #10 mvt.4 MANUSCRIPT, with no attempts to complete or orchestrate what Mahler wrote. This video features manuscript images that confirm his authorship at every moment. Mahler 10 completions are indeed fascinating, but this recording forgoes the practice of completing unfinished works in order to just present the original "source material" that Mahler left when he died. The medium here is a modern Steinway piano (admittedly imperfect for orchestral music) because he left the music un-orchestrated.
Background:
Since Mahler’s death in 1911, the general public has only been able to hear all five movements of his incomplete Tenth Symphony through the remarkable performing versions created by posthumous editors such as Deryck Cooke, Rudolf Barshai, and Remo Mazzetti, who created and orchestrated Mahler-like material where he left gaps that had to be filled. Yet Mazzetti himself expressed that in an ideal world, listeners would be able to experience this music free from the intervention of any editor whatsoever. With the following video, I attempt to get as close to that ideal as possible.
Mahler left behind a fully-orchestrated autograph manuscript of the first of the symphony’s five movements. He left the second and third movements partly orchestrated, and the other two in “short score” (reduced onto a few musical staves). I’ve chosen to present the symphony's fourth movement, because unlike the previous movements, this one is hardly orchestrated at all. In his manuscript, Mahler jotted down ideas for orchestration in only 11 out of its 578 measures. This performance is not a “completion.” It contains only notes and rhythms that Mahler himself wrote down, although occasionally I made adjustments for broken chords, added ties and octaves. These adjustments were necessary so that Mahler’s musical material could be properly heard on a modern grand piano.
The complete manuscript of the unfinished symphony can be downloaded from www.imslp.org. The files you will find there also include some alternative material for the fourth movement that could not be included in this video. This is a single uninterrupted performance of the movement from its beginning to its end, and where Mahler left multiple options for a particular passage, only one option has been included here.
On the actual pages of his manuscript, Mahler scribbled anguished written texts that shed light on the autobiographical meaning of the symphony. Alma would later call these “outbursts and ejaculations addressed to me.” Below are texts and translations of what Mahler scrawled onto the cover page and onto the final page of his fourth movement.
Text from the fourth movement’s cover:
Der Teufel tanzt es mit mir
Wahnsinn, fass mich an, Verfluchten!
vernichte mich
dass ich vergesse, dass ich bin!
dass ich aufhöre, zu sein
dass ich ver . . .
Translation:
The devil dances it [this music] with me
Madness, seize me [I am] the cursed one!
destroy me
so that I forget that I exist,
so that I end [the process of] being
so that I . . .
Text from the last page of the fourth movement, next to the final musical note of the piece, played by a bass drum:
Du allein weisst was es bedeutet.
Leb’ wol, mein Saitenspiel!
Leb wol
Leb wol
Leb wol
Translation:
you [Alma] alone know what it [the final drum note] means.
Farewell, my muse!
Farewell
Farewell
Farewell
Also next to this final note, Mahler gives one of his few indications for orchestration, writing “Vollständig gedämpfte Trommel,” meaning “Completely muted drum.”
Alma Mahler explains the meaning of this drum in her memoirs, recounting a story from the couple’s previous stay in New York:
“Marie Uchatius, a young art-student, paid me a visit one day in the Hotel Majestic. Hearing a confused noise, we leaned out of the window and saw a long procession in the broad street along the side of Central Park. It was the funeral cortège of a fireman, of whose heroic death we had read in the newspaper. The chief mourners were almost immediately beneath us when the procession halted, and the master of ceremonies stepped forward and gave a short address. From our eleventh-floor window we could only guess what he said. There was a brief pause and then a stroke on the muffled drum, followed by a dead silence. The procession then moved forward and all was over.
“The scene brought tears to our eyes and I looked anxiously at Mahler's window. But he too was leaning out and his face was streaming with tears. The brief drum-stroke impressed him so deeply that he used it in the Tenth Symphony.”
Michel Galante