The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (Cambridge Companions to Music) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Instrumental changes, rearrangements, Werktreue and the critics

Mahler was neither the first nor the last conductor to ‘touch up’ the music of Beethoven and other composers, though he was the one who was most pilloried for it. The practice derives from an earlier and perhaps less honourable era, when Bach arranged the works of Vivaldi for organ and Handel plagiarized Kerll in tacitly adapting that composer’s Fourth Canzona as the chorus ‘Egypt was glad when they departed’ in his own Israel in Egypt . In a pre-copyright age this recycling of the works of otherwise dead and unperformed composers was considered fair game; and it was a way of at least keeping their music, if not their names, before the public. Not much later, in 1789, Mozart adapted Handel’s Messiah to the spirit of his own time for the concert series of Baron van Swieten, with his own harmonizations and counterpoints, and adding horn, trumpet and trombone parts in contemporary style. Half a century later, Liszt appropriated and adapted Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus for his own Evocation à la chapelle sixtine , and this was in its turn freely arranged for orchestra by Tchaikovsky as the third movement of his Mozartiana Suite .

Although much of the primary evidence has been destroyed, we know that Mahler followed the tradition of opera performance in adapting stage works for the production at hand. Well-documented examples of this are his addition of the court scene to the third act of Figaro , his revision of the libretto of Euryanthe , and his use of Beethoven’s Third Leonore Overture to sustain the tension and cover up the noise of the scene change in the second act of Fidelio ; but there were others. The purpose of these changes was to make the staging of the operas theatrically more effective, and thus better appreciated and understood by the public, and a similar purpose might be said, grosso modo , to be the motivation for his changes to concert works.

Justification of this is provided by Busoni when he wrote in 1902 to the Belgian critic, Marcel Rémy. Rémy had evidently criticized Busoni’s ‘alterations’ in the Prélude, Chorale et Fugue of César Franck, and Busoni replied: ‘You start from false premises in thinking that it is my intention to “modernize” the works. On the contrary, by cleaning them of the dust of tradition, I try to restore their youth, to present them as they sounded to people at the moment when they first sprang from the head and pen of the composer.’ 9

Busoni explained further in 1907 when he wrote:

What the composer’s inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own . . . Every notation is in itself the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form . . . The performance of a work is also a transcription, and still, whatever liberties it may take, it can never annihilate the original . 10

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