An unfinished work...

As we mourn the much too early death of Derek Boogaard

I could not find a better way to express my feelings on the sad news than by this.

And it is so apropos, since Better Half and I have tickets for the Houston Symphony's presentation of Mahler's 10th, as finished by Deryck Cooke, this afternoon.

Half a symphony, half a game, just hope the winning half will be when we get there :-)... btw in case you wonder, we bought these tickets wayyy before we know Aeros would be playing Round 3 Game 2!

Unfinished symphonies have fascinated music fans ever since


Schubert's Grave in Wien

Franz Schubert left his namesake work in that state at his death in 1828.


Mahler worked on the sketches of his 10. unfinished symphony in 1910, during his usual summer vacation at the then Austrian village of Toblach. Perhaps inspired by the majesty of the scenery!

Vist near Toblach, now in Italy

 

Mahler feared, all throughout the time he wrote this music, his wife Alma would, as she indeed later did, leave him for Gropius. During the composition he agonized about it on his sketches. He died on the 18th of May in Vienna 1911 before he could finish it.

Hitler banned all performances of Mahler’s music in Germany and Austria during WW 2.
A worldwide Mahler revival went underway after Alma's death  thanks to the efforts of conductors Bruno Walther and Leonard Bernstein.

There were several attempts to finish this symphony by musicologists and composers.
But in the end Deryck Cooke's version has become the preferred version.

"Cooke's revised and completed version, conducted by Goldschmidt, was premièred at the Proms on 13 August 1964 and recorded soon after. After Alma's death, also in 1964, her daughter Anna allowed Cooke access to the full set of manuscript sketches, many of which had not been published four decades earlier. In the light of these Cooke made a revised performing version in association with the British composers Colin and David Matthews between 1966 and 1972, and thereafter his final version before his death in 1976.

The release of these pages also prompted the International Gustav Mahler Society in Vienna to issue another, more complete collection of Mahler's manuscripts in facsimile (Ricke, 1967). This revised edition of Cooke's first complete score was published in 1976, shortly before Cooke's death. A further revision, with mostly minor changes made by the three surviving collaborators, appeared in print in 1989".