Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 10: 1st Movement Adagio

In the spring of 1924, Anton Webern, an ardent admirer of Mahler, wrote to a musician friend: “Mahler’s Tenth, … if only one could finally have it. I can’t wait. What will be in there!!!!” Ever since Gustav Mahler’s death, this final, fragmentary work had been the subject of speculation for over a decade. In 1924, Alma Mahler put an end to the conjecture by publishing a facsimile of the surviving manuscript. She also arranged for her son-in-law Ernst Krenek to prepare a concert version of the two most advanced movements. On 12 October, the slow opening movement and a compressed intermezzo, originally conceived as the third movement, were performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Franz Schalk.

The audience responded with thunderous applause. In the arts sections of the press, however, the performance and the treatment of the unfinished work sparked controversy. A critic for the Neue Musik-Zeitung concluded that it could not have been in the composer’s interest “to release something so unfinished”. Vienna’s eminent critic Julius Korngold, on the other hand, held a different view with regard to the opening movement, which exists in a complete draft score, and wrote: “a creation fully worthy of Mahler, which deserved to be made known to the musical world.” The publication of Mahler’s symphonic fragment was controversial also because the manuscript offers unfiltered insight into the composer’s troubled emotional state. During the summer of 1910, while sketching the work, Mahler learned of his wife’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius. Deeply shaken, he continued composing, jotting down cries of despair in the manuscript between the notes and, it is thought, even altering the musical conception of his final symphony.

In the case of the slow opening movement, which Mahler had sketched before discovering the affair, such annotations are absent. As in the outer movements of the Ninth Symphony, the first movement is based on a juxtaposition of two contrasting sound and expressive worlds that gradually dissolve. The work opens with an extended solo of the viola section: soft and at the same time intensely expressive, rhapsodic in tone, its melody roams freely over a harmonically unstable foundation. After fifteen bars, a sudden shift occurs: a chorale in the strings and three trombones, with an expansive theme in the first violins – “very warm”, as the composer noted already in the draft score. At the climax of the movement, a dramatic rupture takes place: a full orchestral outburst in the remote key of A-flat minor, followed by a sharply dissonant “chord of terror” comprising nine different pitches. It seems obvious to interpret this as a symbol of the personal catastrophe Mahler had experienced. Indeed, he appears to have inserted the disturbing passage only at a later stage. A revealing subtext in this context are two lines from a poem the composer sent his wife after a conversation with Sigmund Freud: “Merged into a single chord / My timid thoughts and my stormy feelings conjoined.”