Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: Ritrovato un (quasi) manoscritto di Mahler (Sinfonia n. 1)

Da Haaretz di oggi:
Manuscript of Gustav Mahler's First Symphony found in J'lem
 
By Noam Ben Ze'ev
 
 
 The manuscript of Mahler's First Symphony with corrections by the composer
in red ink
 
 
 
Every student and faculty member in music academies is familiar with them:
the old booklets of sheet music and scores that are strewn with handwritten
comments and marks of analysis - testimony to the many hands that dealt with
them in libraries in the course of decades. They were purchased for a
pittance in second-hand stores or donated from the estates of deceased music
lovers, and now their pages bear the library's stamp and pages covered with
the names of the borrowers are attached to them.
Looking at a small pile, about 30 centimeters high, of such scores - all of
them copies of Gustav Mahler's First Symphony - on his desk two weeks ago,
the conductor Charles Zacharie Bornstein had no idea of the scale of the
miracle, as he describes it, that was about to befall him. Within a few
minutes he was going to distribute the booklets to his students and launch
into a class on Mahler's symphonies at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance
in Jerusalem. His hand reached for the third score in the pile; he pulled it
out, began to riffle through it - and what he saw threw him into shock. He
realized that he was holding the most sensational musical discovery in its
field for the past half-century: a manuscript of the greatest symphonic
composer of the twentieth century.
Bolt of lightning
Just two weeks earlier, on October 20, Charles Bornstein had arrived in
Israel from New York as a new immigrant. The Academy of Music in Jerusalem,
whose director is Avner Biron, gave him an appointment as a lecturer and
conductor and made it possible for him, as he says, to begin a new life in
Israel. "To conduct classical and modern music and to lecture, and so to
transmit everything I have learned - that is what I dreamed of doing here,"
he says.
In the 1970s, Bornstein, a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York and
of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, was the assistant of the renowned conductor
Leopold Stokowsky and the last student of the legendary Hans Swarowsky in
Vienna, whose students include the conductors Claudio Abbado and Zubin
Mehta.
"Mahler is at the center of my musical universe," Bornstein says. "I have
conducted most of his works and he has always appeared at turning points in
my life. I learned his symphonies from copies of the manuscripts. Swarowsky
showed that one can learn from manuscripts what it is impossible to learn
from printed notes. So as a student in Vienna, I used money that was
supposed to go for food and rent to buy facsimiles of the Ninth and Tenth
Symphonies. Then, as I was about to give a class about him, I suddenly see
his handwriting again! It was like a bolt of lightning."
The score Bornstein had found was actually an early version of Mahler's
First Symphony. It was printed and published by the Viennese music publisher
Josef Weinberger, probably in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and
Mahler decided to revise it thoroughly. Bornstein stared at the booklet in
sheer astonishment: There was the handwriting of the composer himself, in
red ink   corrections and notations, additions and erasures, instructions
for performing the work and extracting the right sound.
"Mahler cried out to me from the score. The manuscript dazzled me, the
passion that dominates his writing, the incredible speed at which he worked:
it call came back to me in a flash. It was a revelation, and I had to
continue with the class trembling in every fiber of my body," Bornstein
recalls, as he peruses the score with tremendous excitement: "Just look at
the intensity. The large movements, the energy: you can actually see the
process of creation, as though he were writing it now. Here, do you see
this? He turned the page so fast that the ink didn't have time to dry, so
you can see how it stains the previous page. Only a composer can write like
that, and no assistant
or proofreader erases notes with this kind of momentum, with such broad
marks."
New musical world
"Is it a weasel, a cloud or perhaps a camel?" the Viennese critic Gustav
Schoisch wrote after the premiere of Mahler's First Symphony in 1894, while
the well-known critic Eduard Hanslick added, "Someone here is crazy, and
it's not me." The conductor Bruno Walter, however, was excited by the
symphony when he heard it for the first time at the age of 18: "I marveled
at the singular courage of the unknown composer ... and ardently desired to
know the man responsible for so extravagant a work," he wrote in his book
"Gustav Mahler."
The extreme reactions are understandable: Music like this had never been
heard before. Even in this early work the listener can feel Mahler's break
with the tonality and the classical-romantic tradition in which he was
raised. He turned his back on the dramatic principles of the symphonic work
since Beethoven, and although he adhered to the conventional formal
framework, his music was radical in its harmony, its melodic themes and its
orchestration.
Extreme fluctuations of mood and the introduction of coarse folkloristic
elements alongside sublime moments are among the major traits of the music,
along with the sudden cuts between conflicting stylistic worlds: "Deliberate
musical dyslexia" is Bornstein's description of the style.
Mahler began to compose the symphony immediately after completing his first
important work, the symphonic song cycle "Songs of a Wayfarer," in 1884. He
worked on the symphony for four years; it was first performed as a symphonic
work in two sections and five movements in 1889, with parts of the song
cycle integrated into almost every movement.
This version abounded with plot allusions inspired by "Songs of a Wayfarer,"
and like it, was taken as a symbolic journey of a hero amid the ordeals of
life. Henceforth, borrowing and quoting from previous works would become a
Mahler trademark, lending his works - which include ten symphonies (the last
unfinished) - the sense of a creative world of thematic and autobiographical
uniformity.
The silenced trumpets
Bornstein leafs through the score he found. "Mahler's genius," he observes,
"lies in the personal note that the music exudes: the pathos, the fear, the
emptiness and the feeling of disaster, yet along with them the naivete and
the deliberate childishness that is a modernist approach unique to him.
Here, these erasures of the double role of the French horns and the erasure
of their densified accompaniment: That is the aspiration to strive for his
own sound, which is less embellished. And here" - he points to the end of
the first movement - "all the trumpets have been erased so as not to detract
from the surprise of their entrance in the last bar, and also, again, to
thin down the denseness of the orchestration and allow a pause of space and
time before an instrument enters."
Bornstein's excitement mounts: "Look, here he erased the wood instruments in
order to make the orchestration drier. And here he wants a larger volume of
sound, so he wrote a part for an extra French horn, but at the same time he
reduces the strength of the sound to piano in order to avoid a strident
fortissimo. That is the thinking of a conductor, not a composer. Changing
the coloration of the sound by means of doublings, thought about the warmth
of the sound, expressiveness - it's astonishing that at such a young age he
was already taking an interest in these subtleties. Even in an early work
you can see how far ahead of his time he was."
A perusal of the Jerusalem score shows more and more changes, relating to
every possible musical aspect. Mahler instructed the strings about the type
of movements and effects he sought; he changed markings relating to the
intensity of the sound, added parts and notes to the instruments,
embellished musical entries with small decorative sounds, wrote instructions
for performance - for example, "Not too fast" at the head of the second
movement and added punctuation signs in the famous movement in which he
distorted the French folksong "Frere Jacques" in order to transform it into
a grotesque funeral march in a minor scale. He added and changed
instructions for tempo and sound production, and placed small "x's" next to
the rows in order to draw the editor's or
proofreader's attention to the revisions.
But above all, he erased: by thinning out some instrumental parts and making
the orchestral fabric airier, he created a feeling of modernist clarity and
sharpness. "Like a sculptor who relentless chips away at what he has already
created in order to eliminate the excess and the exaggeration," Bornstein
says.
Detective work
To confirm the authenticity of the score Bornstein found, it had to be
compared to the "critical score" published by the renowned Universal Edition
firm, which is accepted as the final version of the work by all orchestras
and music academies. The comparison was a moving experience: One by one,
Mahler's revisions were reflected in the critical score. Whole sections he
erased in the archaic score published by Weinberger disappeared and the
notes he added appeared, along with his comments in the margins and the
marks.
At the same time, the comparison turned up a sensational discovery: Many
revisions, some of them crucial, such as the transfer of the opening bars of
the symphony from oboes to flutes, were not inserted into the critical
score. It will be up to the researchers to determine whether this is due to
mistakes and neglect by the publisher or to additional changes that Mahler
introduced between writing the Jerusalem score and the final edition. In any
event, the light that the newly discovered copy of the work sheds on the
process of the symphony's composition will undoubtedly bring about
significant changes in the understanding and performance of the First
Symphony.
The next step was to ascertain the age of the score. The documents
laboratory of the Israel Police forensic identification department
volunteered to undertake this task. The head of the laboratory, Chief
Superintendent Aya Shohat and her staff were thrilled to receive such an
unusual document amidst the usual suspected forgeries of money and letters
of various kinds that they deal with. Their findings proved that the score
was in fact printed using an old relief print technique and that the
markings were done by hand using a fountain pen or a nib, in red ink. These
and other findings, the laboratory stated, match the printing and writing
methods and the type of paper that were in use at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
Finally, a letter from Henry-Louis de La Grange, director of the Gustav
Mahler Library in Paris and one of the greatest living experts on Mahler's
works, dispelled any doubt as to the authenticity of the manuscript. "Dear
Maestro Bornstein," de La Grange wrote, I wish to inform you that I have
carefully examined the pages of the samples you sent me and I have compared
each and every note in them to the Mahler manuscript that I have in the
library. I can now tell you that based on my understanding and considerable
experience, these are without doubt pages from the proofreading copy of the
first edition of Universal, including corrections in red ink in Mahler's own
hand."
In a telephone conversation with Ha'aretz this week, de La Grange described
the find as being of "inestimable importance," adding that there is "no
doubt that the new critical score of the symphony, which is planned to
appear in a few years, will have to take the new findings into account and
change the work accordingly."
What do you think were the circumstances that prompted Mahler to make the
changes?
"It was apparently at the beginning of the century, after he had conducted
the symphony. He meant the revisions for the changes he wanted to make in
the wake of the concerts and ahead of the first printing by Universal, in
1906."
What were your feelings when you saw the samples?
"I tried to remain cool. My intuition told me immediately that this is
Mahler, according to the erasures, but I took a manuscript of the Eighth
Symphony [which was written in the same period] and compared the two. It is
definitely Mahler's handwriting."
Does the find have a high cash value?
"I have never encountered any such notes of Mahler's that were put up for
sale, and I even checked through the catalogues. This is the first document
of its kind, so I have no way of knowing."
New premiere
One mystery still remains: how the score ended up in a Jerusalem library.
The only hint lies in the wording of the seal marked on the cover: "Music
Department in memory of the late Ben Zion Halperin, 1861-1953." It has yet
to be determined whether Halperin, who was born a year after Mahler
(1860-1911) had any connection with the composer or with a music publisher,
or whether perhaps his heirs donated the score to the library without being
aware of its value.
The lending card that is affixed to the inside cover indicates that the
score went through many hands over the years until it reached Bornstein, who
rescued the musical treasure from possible damage or loss.
"The last two days have changed my life," Bornstein says rapturously. "God
gave me such a beautiful gift and in one day made me an Israeli." In the
weeks ahead Bornstein will conduct the academy's ensembles in a series of
concerts, first in Jerusalem with the academy's orchestra in the opening
concert of its season and at the "Voices of the Desert" festival in Kibbutz
Sde Boker in the southern Negev, and with the chamber ensemble at the
beginning of January.
Bornstein is grateful to the academy and its director for giving him the
opportunity to work in Israel; he attributes his finding of the Mahler score
to the will of God. In the past he has conducted important international
orchestras, such as the radio orchestras of Bavaria and Southwest Germany
and the BBC, Brooklyn and Buffalo philharmonic orchestras. His dream now is
to conduct an Israeli orchestra in Israel in the new version of Mahler's
First Symphony in a world premiere and also perhaps a first recording.
Gateway to the twentieth century
The Viennese composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) brought the genre of the
classical-romantic symphony to its peak, continuing the tradition of his
great predecessors Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. In his ten symphonies
(the last unfinished), his work "Das Lied von der Erde" (Song of the Earth)
and his symphonic song cycles such as "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (The Youth's
Magic Horn), Mahler concluded the Austro-German style in music and opened
the gates of music of the twentieth century.
His works achieve a personal expression suffused with tragedy and death,
which mixes conflicting stylistic worlds: coarse folksongs and strident
barracks music juxtaposed by crystalline flights, and waltzes and funeral
marches alongside melodic refinement and sweetness. In his symphonies he
turned away from the ideal of drama in music, and achieved a new language of
expression, flowing over with inventions of melody and form never before
heard.
Mahler came from a Jewish family in Bohemia. He and his wife, Alma
Schindler, had two daughters, but the elder died in childhood. That tragedy
and Mahler's heart ailment, which portended his approaching death, were
among the causes of the personal note of tragedy in his work.
In addition to his immense importance as a composer, Mahler is considered
the first great modern conductor. His tenure with the Vienna Opera, from
which he was compelled to resign because of surging anti-Semitism, remains a
model of musical performance to this day.
 
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 By Noam Ben Ze'ev
arrivi in ritardo.
li leggi i miei threads o ti schifano completamente?
:-)
A.