Comments on: Mahler 5- The butler may have done it, but I bet he had help, and I bet he feels bad about it

By: Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium » Performer’s Perspective- Mahler 5, two changes

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:33:39 +0000

[...] slightly different version of this post appeared in Feb 2009 [...]

By: Kenneth Woods

Kenneth Woods — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:38:11 +0000

Cheers guys- thanks for the notes. Erik- yours is one of the big questions. I think often, scholars get so,er, up their own ____’s that they’d rather tell you what you should do than show you what you could do and why.

Of course, we’re all taught that the last version of Mahler’s works is sacrosanct, that Bruckner is messy, and that with Stravinsky the original is more definitive and that many of his revisions were motivated by profit. Should we accept that? Why not record the original version of Mahler 6?

But I’d probably do the Haas Bruckner 8 (where the finale exists in a form never seen or sanctioned by Bruckner), which makes me a whore….. I just think it makes more musical sense, and that the cuts were made under pressure from others and so Haas was right to re-open them

By: Erik K

Erik K — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 04:38:38 +0000

Great post.

The concept of Mahler’s original intentions being the “final” word is something applied rather selectively, as you point out. My question is…if a composer leaves so many possible “answers” to his musical riddle, are any and all of them valid? As a conductor, are you in a position to say, “I’m going to do Scherzo-Andante” or “I’m going to do the 1877 version of Bruckner 3″ and have that jive with magnifying the composer’s work? It was, after all, his work. Or is your job to play detective to some degree and find the most relevant answer possible. Or both.

I’m looking forward to this performance tremendously.

By: Zoltan

Zoltan — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:41:57 +0000

Thought-provoking ideas there, Ken! Indeed, it seems to me, that there’s more than just a simple dichotomy at work, even with Mahler.
I am reminded (though, do not want to imply that it’s necessarily the case here) how we in science work out theories that seem to be one-sided, and then sometime down the road end up with a synthesis which works best for most cases.

And now ask me as an amateur violinist how I would play a pizz. which has an “sf” above it and is in the context of a funeral march?

I’d pluck it, as if it was my last pizzicato, but soft enough so as not to make a snap pizz.