Orchestra tackles Mahler and Strauss

Philadelphia's midwinter parade of guest conductors continued with the Spanish-born Juanjo Maena, himself a late substitution for the ailing Czech maestro Jiri Belohlavek. The change on the podium meant a change in the program, as Belohlavek had intended to conclude his concert with the seldom-performed Martinu Third Symphony, but Maena plugged in Beethoven's familiar Pastoral Symphony instead.

The change offered a more cohesive program, at least in theory, as the Pastoral, a landmark of early Romanticism, contrasted with the two late Romantic works that preceded it: the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony and Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

Mahler's Tenth Symphony was his last work, and he left it mostly in short score— that is, fully sketched but largely unorchestrated. The result might be likened to a cartoon for a painting with patches of color but large areas left in black and white.

No one today would "finish" coloring the work of, say, a Raphael left in such condition. The performance equivalent in music, though, would be to alternate between playing certain passages or movements with a full orchestra, and others on two pianos. That would be highly unsatisfactory, however accurate.

Three alternatives

The choice, then, is either for a second hand or hands to produce a fully orchestrated version; to perform only the sections of the work left complete by the composer; or not to perform the work at all.

In the case of Mahler's Tenth, the opening Adagio in F-sharp was fully orchestrated, and the Allegro moderato third movement, subtitled "Purgatorio," was partially scored. "Fully" does not, however, mean "finally," because Mahler inveterately reworked his scoring both before and after performance.

The composer's widow, Alma, did not publish the Tenth until 1924, 13 years after his death. Her son-in-law, Ernst Krenek, made a performing version of the first and third movements that was occasionally performed in subsequent decades, although the score was riddled with errors. This curiosity— a typically extended Mahler first movement with an intermezzo-like torso appended— was musically as well as musicologically unsatisfactory, ending as it were in mid-gesture. The Adagio alone, however, was much more nearly a freestanding work, and it has been frequently performed as such during the past half century.

Schoenberg declined

Alma Mahler, hoping to present a performing version of the complete symphony, shopped the score around to Schoenberg and Shostakovich, among others. Both men declined, though they took on similar projects with other composers— Schoenberg for Brahms (a particularly soggy extrapolation of the First Piano Quartet) and Shostakovich for Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. The British musicologist Deryck Cooke devoted much of his life to the job instead, ultimately with Alma's blessing, and others have since produced realizations of their own, though none generally superior.

No one, obviously, can compete with what Mahler might have done, but half a loaf is better than none when bringing a masterpiece on the order of the Tenth to the table.

Still, some musicians prefer to perform the Adagio on its own. It's longer than many complete one-movement symphonies (for example, the Sibelius Seventh or Roy Harris's Third)— longer, for that matter, than many classical four-movement symphonies.

It unfolds in a clear arch (though with significant digressions and episodes) that culminates in a climax never heard before or since in music, a colossally dissonant brass chord that issues in a sustained blare pierced finally by soaring violins. Of course, the whole of the Tenth is a grand arch, and this chord, restated in the finale, is the pole that anchors it. We may take the Adagio as a self-sufficient work of art, but Mahler intended it as a mere subtended element in a far larger design.

Not in Klemperer's league

Most conductors dispatch the Adagio in 25 minutes or so. You don't want to prod it, of course, but Maestro Maena took a full half-hour, with grandly extended gestures and little balletic steps on the podium into the bargain. An Otto Klemperer could get away with such a tempo without slackening tension, or even occasionally a Leonard Bernstein, but Maena is not in that league.

The result was a performance that enabled one to savor details (the opening bars, for violas alone, were particularly fine), but at the sacrifice of pace and drama. Mahler is long, but he's not long-winded. In short, he's not Wagner.

Strauss looks back

Strauss's Four Last Songs— also, as its title announces, a final work— went better, thanks to the composer's succinct writing and the superb artistry of Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who made liquid gold of the lyrics of Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff. The Orchestra played beautifully with her—the Sawallisch years, if nothing else, made the Philadelphians a Strauss orchestra— except where the horns obtruded, which in Strauss is frequently enough.

Mahler and Strauss were contemporaries, but Strauss survived Mahler by 38 years, so that his parting work was intended as a valediction, whereas Mahler's Tenth merely served as one.

Toward the end of Four Last Songs, Strauss quotes from a 50-year-old work, the tone poem Ein Heldenleben, and just at the end, from a 60-year-old one, Death and Transfiguration. In the latter work, the then 25-year-old Strauss, brimful of early genius, imagined his decades-off death as a glorious apotheosis; in the Four Last Songs, he faces it with a not-quite accepting resignation and a backward glance at all he has loved.

Other composers have quoted their youthful selves, but few with such moving and lapidary effect. But the Four Last Songs are something more: the swansong of Romanticism itself, the final distillation of a century and a half of musical history.

If Mahler had survived…

The young Richard Strauss was a great enfant terrible, whose works stood in the forefront of early 20th-Century musical modernism. Had he died in his middle 40s, the latter half of his career could hardly have been guessed, and the Four Last Songs would certainly not have been predicted.

On the other hand, had Mahler lived four score years instead of 50, what fruit would those years have borne, and how might 20th-Century music have been affected by it? Impossible to say, of course; but the Tenth Symphony is the work of a man probing the boundaries of his art, not comfortably settled within them.

Beethoven grabs a new century

The Beethoven of the Pastoral Symphony is a still young man grabbing the early 19th Century by the horns and tugging it amiably, if a bit roughly. We need to take thought now for how revolutionary each and every Beethoven symphony is, how daringly it breaks new ground even when it seems to pause for reflection.

The Sixth, for example, presages Mahler himself in its five-movement form, the last three movements of which run together. Maena's leisured account of it seemed rather to emphasize its classical balances, as many performances these days do.

Perhaps he thought his audience needed some relaxation after the heavy weather of the program's first half. But he missed an instructive opportunity to comment on the full span of the Romantic legacy.