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<\/span><\/span>Schubert, Franz arr. Mahler\/Woods – String Quartet in D minor (Der Tod und das M\u00e4dchen\/Death and the Maiden), New Critical Performing Version<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div> Franz Schubert may have had an even more powerful influence on Mahler\u2019s creative personality than Beethoven, one which is perhaps most easily seen in Mahler\u2019s earliest and latest works. Mahler\u2019s first fully-formed masterpiece,<\/span> Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen <\/span><\/i>(Songs of a Wayfarer) is practically a musical love letter to Schubert\u2019s late song cycles, <\/span>Die sch\u00f6ne M\u00fcllerin<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Winterreise<\/span><\/i>, and this influence remains strong and almost ever-present through Mahler\u2019s Fourth Symphony. Schubert\u2019s influence is perhaps less keenly felt in Mahler\u2019s middle symphonies, but again becomes central to Mahler’s final trilogy of works, <\/span>Das Lied von der Erde <\/span><\/i>and the Ninth and Tenth symphonies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Schubert was only thirty-one at the time of his death, and yet the works from the last years of his life are often cited as exemplars of a \u2018late style.\u2019 The sense of leave-taking present in almost all of Schubert\u2019s last works has much in common with that in late Mahler. <\/span>
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\n<\/span>Mahler began work on an arrangement of Schubert\u2019s penultimate String Quartet in D minor around 1896, marking up a score of the quartet with his ideas. He had envisioned making string orchestra versions of the greatest works in the string quartet literature, and had worked on versions of the Schubert and two by Beethoven: the \u201c<\/span>Serioso<\/span><\/i>\u201d Quartet opus 95, and the great Quartet in C-sharp minor, opus 131. Only the <\/span>Serioso <\/span><\/i>was performed in its entirety. The arrangement of opus 131 is lost, and it remains unknown just how complete it was. The sole performance of the <\/span>Serioso<\/span><\/i> in 1889\u00a0 was interrupted by so much booing, that Mahler sent two members of the orchestra into the audience to eject the most vociferous complainers. With the exception of Eduard Hanslick, critical reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Mahler cancelled the planned performance of Beethoven\u2019s opus 131 Quartet and never conducted the Serioso<\/em> again.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot-2024-07-08-at-13.35.09-600x515.png\")
<\/a>One of many pages in Mahler’s score without any annotations in his hand. This is consistent with the arrangement being left in an unfinished state.<\/p><\/div>\n
In the case of the Schubert quartet, Mahler conducted only the second movement in a concert in Hamburg in 1896. Alma Mahler eventually bequeathed Mahler\u2019s copy of the quartet score with his markings to Donald Mitchell, and it was Mitchell and composer David Matthews who put together the first published version of Mahler\u2019s arrangement. Matthews and Mitchell\u2019s work is scrupulous and meticulous.<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a>This opening page of the second movement, the only movement Mahler conducted, shows a much more detailed set of markings. It seems quite certain that the other movements would have been much more carefully and thoroughly worked through had Mahler had the opportunity to perform them.<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n<\/span>Around 2007, I was heading to a concert with my friends in the wonderful Rose City Chamber Orchestra when I found out that the publishers of the main work on our program, the chamber ensemble version of Bruckner\u2019s Seventh Symphony, had sent the wrong piece. Someone suggested doing Death and the Maiden, but there was no chance of getting the parts to that either. Instead, I stayed up all night marking up a set of string quartet parts as best I could remember with Mahler\u2019s changes. As I went, I allowed myself the licence of adding a few things to the double bass part. The result left me with a lot to think about: not least the fact that Mahler didn\u2019t use the basses at all for almost the entire development and coda of the first movement.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot-2024-07-08-at-13.19.59-600x138.png\")
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<\/a>Mahler’s omission of the basses from almost the entire development section of the first movement seems very unlike him. The editor’s ossia<\/em> is clearly marked, and the bass part is printed with both the ossia<\/em> and the version with Mahler’s empty bars (the lower line) so the performers can make up their own minds about what to include.<\/p><\/div>\n
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More recently, I was able to obtain a scan of Mahler\u2019s copy from the British Library. A careful inspection led me to two conclusions. First, that David Matthews had done a fantastic job in transcribing it, and second, that Mahler had definitely never finished it. In fact, the level of detail of his markings and emendations in the one movement we know he conducted is so much greater that it left me feeling a little uncomfortable calling the other three movements Mahler\u2019s. Especially when one compares the very sketchy level of detail in Death and the Maiden to Mahler\u2019s retouchings of the Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann symphonies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a>Mahler generally took care to reinforce extremely high violin writing, except when using it as a very intense effect (often in his late music). Here, I’ve suggested an octave divisi in the violins (annotated KW). In the following bar, the divisi comes from Mahler’s own score and is marked with a GM.<\/p><\/div>\n
In the end, I donned my metaphorical protective headgear and took up the challenge of producing a \u2018performing version\u2019 of Mahler\u2019s Death and the Maiden sketches. I\u2019ve looked carefully at Mahler\u2019s own string writing, his arrangement of the <\/span>Serioso,<\/span><\/i> and contemporaneous string orchestra arrangements of chamber works such as those by Schoenberg, and tried to bring this arrangement to a more \u2018finished\u2019 state – one which I hope gives a more accurate sense of what Mahler\u2019s plans for the project probably were. I took courage in this from the example of Mahler\u2019s completion of Weber\u2019s <\/span>Die Drei Pintos<\/span><\/i> and the Cooke Performing Version of Mahler\u2019s 10th Symphony (to which David Matthews made such an important contribution). One of the beauties of Cooke\u2019s version of the Tenth is that the score includes a complete transcription of Mahler\u2019s incomplete draft, so the interpreter can see exactly what is Mahler and what is Cooke and Co.. In my new edition, anything I have added, which amounts mostly to the filling out of the bass part and some changes in string divisi, is clearly marked and can be easily omitted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a>Mahler’s deliberate changes of Schubert’s dynamics and tempi are pointed out in the score, but remain included in the parts as they represent an important part of Mahler’s creative contribution to the arrangement<\/p><\/div>\n
Schubert scholarship has also come on a great deal since Mahler\u2019s time. Mahler\u2019s score was a copy of the old Collected Works edition of Schubert co-edited by Brahms and Eusebius Mandyczewski. The more recent Urtext editions give a great deal of valuable insight into Schubert\u2019s unusual use of accents and other expressive markings. Where the modern Urtext offers a clearer window into Schubert\u2019s intentions, I\u2019ve incorporated those into the edition, usually with some note of explanation. However, where Mahler has made a creative choice to change something by Schubert, I have left that in place. Mahler\u2019s scores of the music of other composers offer an incredibly important and useful window into his approach to interpretation, one that is essential to understand when trying to do justice to his music.<\/span><\/p>\n
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