The Great Unfinished Works

00:00:00

John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's, Linda Carducci, and we're exploring five famous works that composers never completed, whether because of death, government intervention, or even a curse, yet they are still performed today. We look at how some of these works ended up being completed and maybe what we could have done to get these composers to finish them to begin with.

If we're going to talk about unfinished works, Linda, perhaps we should start with, well, what do we even mean by unfinished? Because hasn't every composer basically left behind unfinished works, but why do we focus on some rather than others?

00:00:48

Linda Carducci: Right, and it raises the question too, that maybe we might consider it unfinished because it doesn't have the requisite number of movements, but the composer may have considered it in his mind to be finished.

00:00:57

John Banther: That's right. And sometimes the work is unfinished because, well, we'll find out they just happen to die or it gets forgotten about or shoved in a drawer or any kind of a reason really. But finishing these works is not like me finishing a puzzle you left out the night before, Linda, where we're just looking at the same picture and it's just a puzzle you put together. There's a lot of information that has to be gone through.

00:01:21

Linda Carducci: Yes, and I think it's easy to forget. One thing when we talk about this, John, and the whole context of this is that when composers write music, they don't often write linearly. They may start something and put it aside for a few moments and decide to concentrate on a different piece of music and then come back to that at some point maybe a month or a week or a year later. So not everything is done until it's completed. And sometimes maybe they meant to complete it, but they just never got around to it.

00:01:50

John Banther: And sometimes composers write the first thing we hear in a piece last. You know that.

00:01:56

Linda Carducci: Yes.

00:01:57

John Banther: So we have five unfinished works to explore here, left in varying circumstances, and we even have a supposed curse here, as well, to look at. So let's start with our first one, a pretty popular one, Linda, Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8. He composed this and then abandoned it in 1822, but then he lived six more years before he died in 1828. He left behind two completed movements out of what we might assume would be four, I think, for a symphony at this time. And while this was written in 1828, it was actually performed eventually in 1865, but this is a big one everyone loves.

00:02:35

Linda Carducci: Yes, this is probably the first one that comes to mind when people talk about unfinished. This was written by Franz Schubert who lived in that sort of transition period between late Classical Era of Beethoven and Mozart and not quite into the Romantic Era, but he was sort of on the cusp of the Romantic Era. So some of his music still is in the idiom of classicism like Mozart or Beethoven or whatever. And I find personally, John, in this Symphony No. 8, I hear some influences of Mozart, particularly the darker moments of Mozart in this symphony of Franz Schubert.

00:03:11

John Banther: Because there's elements of Beethoven, but I hear that as well. Some of the darker moments, they're not Beethovenian, if that's a word. They have a different feeling to them. And Schubert, he left two fully written and orchestrated movements, and then a little bit of a scherzo, just a few measures, and then a bunch of blank pages. So it's like we've got two movements, not really a third, nothing about a fourth possibly though he did have a finale or some material that he then reused for incidental music for Rosamunde, which we know of today.

00:03:46

Linda Carducci: Yes, that's right.

00:03:53

John Banther: Looking at the scherzo, when Schubert stopped this, it seems like he might've stopped it quite abruptly.

00:04:00

Linda Carducci: Yeah, that's what it seems. So something caused him to stop, and maybe it was because his concentration was diverted elsewhere to a different piece of music.

00:04:10

John Banther: The opening of this symphony, Linda, is so fairy tale and magical in my ears, the oboe and winds against the strings. And Eduard Hanslick in 1865 after the two movements were performed, really liked it as well, writing when clarinet and oboe in unison began their gentle cantilena above the calm murmur of the violins, Schubert was whispered in the audience.

00:04:46

Linda Carducci: Oh, that's a very nice tribute to Franz Schubert. It is a magical opening. I find it, too, that it's showing the maturity of Franz Schubert showing some very interesting orchestration, not coming at you right out of the gate and something loud, but setting an atmosphere right from the beginning.

00:05:10

John Banther: The atmospheric part is spot on. And for this time period for Schubert, 1818 to 1822, he's writing a lot of works, as you said, non- linearly, they're going through this. So it wasn't uncommon, I think, for him to have a bunch of unfinished things at one time.

00:05:28

Linda Carducci: Yes. That's one of the positions that has been posited for why he didn't complete it, that it wasn't unusual for him to not complete some other things.

00:05:36

John Banther: He was also getting pretty sick at this time too, I guess.

00:05:40

Linda Carducci: Yes.

00:05:41

John Banther: Syphilis and he also had depression.

00:05:42

Linda Carducci: Yeah, it was a difficult time for him physically. And some people think, too, that maybe he just was unable to find a suitable answer to the large scale, the sheer monumentality of those opening two movements, which are very highly thought of.

00:06:00

John Banther: I love them. And we get to the point now where why was this unfinished? Was it because he could not find an answer to these first two movements? That's what I think. There's a thought that maybe he wrote these two movements and he thought this was everything that needed to be said in this particular symphony. I've heard conductors say that as well.

00:06:21

Linda Carducci: I see. I've heard, too, that some people think that may not be a viable answer though, because back in those days when Schubert was writing particularly because he was rather traditional, there were more than two movements for a symphony.

00:06:33

John Banther: Right, right. I don't really buy this one. I'm not totally convinced. To me, it feels like he's almost painted himself into a corner because as you listen to the first movement and you listen to the next movement, you hear a lot of music in 3/ 4, three beats in a measure, which there's not a lot of symphonies I can think of, if any, that have the first two movements in three from this time period. And listening to the second movement, there's some beautiful moments. And you think, " Where's he going to go now? Where do you go into a scherzo that is also in three?" So I feel like he's almost painted himself into a corner.

Sometimes when I'm in my work, I feel like I've produced myself into a corner and you feel like, " Oh, I don't know how to get out of this spot or go from here to there." And it's often because of a tiny decision you made much earlier. So I wonder if Schubert got this great idea, started writing it, and then just went on with it and then realized, " Oh no, I'll figure this out later." Puts it aside.

00:07:35

Linda Carducci: Could very well be. Yeah, maybe he wanted to refashion the scherzo into something that wasn't 3/ 4 meter, but just never got around to it.

00:07:41

John Banther: That's right. So he writes this, he lets it go. In 1823, just a year later, he gave it to a composer, Josef Hüttenbrenner, who I guess gave it to a brother, Anselm, who then shoved it in the drawer, and it remained there for decades. Just imagine a score of Schubert just sitting in a drawer.

00:08:02

Linda Carducci: Yeah. And that's not the first time that Schubert's music has been concealed somewhere and found many years later. I agree with you too. And in 1860, Josef mentioned in a letter to another person who was an influential Viennese musician, that his brother, Anselm, " possesses a treasure" in Schubert's B Minor Symphony, which we rank with his great C Major Symphony, his instrumental Schwanengesang and with all the symphonies of Beethoven, only it is unfinished.

00:08:33

John Banther: And when you listen to this and you listen to the two movements, you do feel, I don't want to say satisfied, I don't feel like I'm totally missing out on something. When I listen to Schubert 8, it does feel, I don't want to say complete. It's not complete, but I'm not left wanting. It's not like they forgot my appetizer at dinner or something.

00:08:52

Linda Carducci: I agree with you completely, John. Of the Schubert symphonies, it is my favorite because I think there's some depth here. He alternates between lyricism, some lighter things, but also some serious things. I can see even almost scherzo- like styles in those first two movements, even though he didn't complete the scherzo. So maybe it is true that he just believed that those two movements were just fine as they were.

00:09:15

John Banther: We'll never know. But what if we could go back in time and somehow get this completed? We'll answer that question with all of these. For me, Linda, how would we get this to be not unfinished? Maybe I'd go back in time, get in a time machine and go to Schubert, get in line behind him at the bakery and just hum very softly the theme in the first movement, trying freak him out a little, make him a little nervous, make him think maybe I should start working on that one again.

00:09:43

Linda Carducci: Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

00:09:45

John Banther: But other than that, I'm not sure. So let's go to our second piece. What do we have, Linda?

00:09:51

Linda Carducci: Mozart's Requiem. This is another one that we think of when we talk about unfinished works. Mozart wrote it late in his life. He died in the year 1791, and he wrote it very, very late. It was unfinished at his death on December 5, 1791. And you can hear in this work in what Mozart did leave for us a sadness, a feeling of eternity coming upon him.

00:10:28

John Banther: This is used so much in all kinds of music and just culture moments from this, especially the Lacrimosa that you hear that it's that immediate feeling and recognizability you get. So for Mozart, he finished the first movement and then he had some detailed drafts of the second movement, most of the third, a few measures of the Lacrimosa. These are all words that maybe not everyone knows. You don't have to. These are just standard movements you find in a requiem. So we find some details he left behind, but it was unfinished when he died, completed the year later by Franz Süssmayr, and then performed that same year, 1792, for Mozart's wife, a benefit concert, Constanze. So that's what happened there in the span of really just months, less than a year, I think, of working on this, him dying, and then it being premiered by Süssmayr.

00:11:21

Linda Carducci: Süssmayr's an interesting character. He was a composer and a conductor in his own right, but we don't hear his works nowadays. They aren't of the level of Mozart. But he worked with Mozart at various venues. At some of Mozart's concerts, he would play the harpsichord. He knew Mozart, he knew Mozart's style. And so using the drafts that Mozart left behind and knowing Mozart's style, I really think he was a good fit to complete this work.

00:11:48

John Banther: I think so too. I remember being pretty surprised when I first learned how much was actually filled in and written by Süssmayr for this. And it's because he knew the music. He knew Mozart. He has just hundreds of works of Mozart to draw on and look at to see, well, when he does this, he tends to do this or that. He's able to fill in gaps and make assumptions better than most people at that time. And this is a literal example of a piece being unfinished because they died literally while they were also writing it. And we know he wanted it to be finished because it was a commission. And Mozart, not being so financially responsible, needs this income. And I imagine for Constanze, after Mozart dies, she probably recognized this was a lot of money, this commission. There is a lot of probably news surrounding Mozart. This momentum won't last, maybe. And so maybe there is or was an urgency for her to get this completed to then, well, get the commission and, well, maybe be a little more stable.

00:12:55

Linda Carducci: Yes. I think that's true. John. I think also Constanze, like Clara Schumann, after Robert Schumann's death, Constanze believed in the music of Mozart. She knew the value of it, and so she wanted to continue to perpetuate his music. But I think one of the interesting things about the Requiem that we should probably at least touch on is the legends that come up as to why and how it was created.

00:13:22

John Banther: For me, it's all from the movie Amadeus. That's how I learned it all. Him and Salieri, enemies, maybe they became frenemies or maybe they were never enemies to begin with, it sounds like.

00:13:33

Linda Carducci: Yeah, it sounds like they got along. I think Salieri was quite envious of Mozart and the craft that Mozart had. Salieri wished he could be such a good composer. There were so many myths about this. And as you're talking about Amadeus and Amadeus doesn't come out and say it, but I think that it implied that stranger who came to the door, Mozart's door, and gave him the commission in disguise was maybe Salieri commissioning Mozart because Salieri wanted to take that work and pass it off as his own.

00:14:03

John Banther: Yeah, but that didn't happen.

00:14:05

Linda Carducci: No, that didn't happen, no.

00:14:06

John Banther: But one of the things that I was reminded of in looking at this piece again, is that it comes to us in tragic circumstances. It was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg because his wife, Anna, died tragically at age 20 on February 14, 1791. So this Requiem also feels a little cursed, written for this woman who died at age 20, Mozart dies while he's writing it.

00:14:34

Linda Carducci: Same year.

00:14:35

John Banther: Yeah, and if someone asked me to finish it, I'd say, " I'm busy."

00:14:40

Linda Carducci: Yeah, and some people believe that Mozart believed he was writing his own Requiem when he was writing that.

00:14:45

John Banther: Yes. And that also adds another, well, mystique or, I know know, creepiness about it.

00:14:52

Linda Carducci: It does.

00:14:53

John Banther: The cursed aspect.

00:14:53

Linda Carducci: Yeah, it certainly does. He was ill. He was very, very ill. Maybe he knew that death was imminent, and you can hear that sadness in what he did produce in it. One other silly legend is that the person who came to his door and commissioned that in disguise was his father, Leopold.

00:15:09

John Banther: Right, yeah.

00:15:10

Linda Carducci: But that's debunked because I think Leopold was dead by then.

00:15:12

John Banther: Yeah. So how would we have prevented this work from going unfinished, Linda? This is hard because he gets sick and it's so sudden. I think after learning so much about viruses in recent years, maybe I would go back in time and find Mozart two or three weeks before the symptoms start and say, " Hey, did you hear about this new casino? It's just in the next town over. Everyone gets to gamble for free. They pay you to drink the wine." Mozart will hop in the carriage, I imagine. I'll take him to the country, lock him in a shed, and then bring him back a month later when this virus has cleared Vienna or something. I don't know. That's just my silly guess.

00:15:52

Linda Carducci: He'd enjoy that, I think. I think if he had enough strength in him, and what I would do is maybe try to appeal to him and say, " This is a very, very important work, Herr Mozart. If you have just a little bit of strength left, let's finish this very important work. This is going to live forever."

00:16:15

John Banther: And perhaps we've broken a case wide open here, Linda, like paranormal investigators. Maybe we've proved that ghosts don't exist, or at least not because they have unfinished business, because Mozart, he died. I imagine if he was a ghost, five minutes later, Constanze would turn around and he'd be at his desk writing.

00:16:31

Linda Carducci: You bet.

00:16:32

John Banther: I'll be out in just a minute, just I got to write this down.

00:16:35

Linda Carducci: That's right.

00:16:36

John Banther: And we'll get into the next unfinished work right after this. Okay, Linda, now on to our third unfinished work, Les francs- juges, The Judges of the Secret Court, by Hector Berlioz. He wrote this in 1826, but it was left unfinished ultimately. He completed two acts. This is an opera. He completed two acts, and he completed most of a third act, but it's unperformable. Most of the music was probably destroyed, but the overture is performed. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've performed this, and I didn't know that it was from an opera that was just non- existent basically.

00:17:18

Linda Carducci: I see.

00:17:19

John Banther: I did wonder why we played so many Berlioz overtures, but there weren't as many operas going around.

00:17:25

Linda Carducci: Yeah, there's always a reason for it. But I can imagine you as a brass player would love Berlioz. Hhe loved to focus on brass, didn't he?

00:17:33

John Banther: Oh, yes. It's a pretty standard... There's a lot of Berlioz excerpts that are in your auditions, and you just have to know it like the back of your hand. But Linda, this is an unusual one in that it wasn't unfinished because Berlioz died or because he left it at the train station or something. This one, it's a little different.

00:18:03

Linda Carducci: Yes. In fact, Berlioz was relatively young. This was early in his career.

00:18:08

John Banther: It was like his first year at Conservatoire.

00:18:09

Linda Carducci: Yes, yes. And he was given a libretto and very excited about writing Les francs- juges. It's a story about the secret judging tribunals that were held in medieval Germany, and the judges were very powerful, and I'm sure there was a story woven into that, whatever. But if you listen to the overture, you can hear the elements of Hector Berlioz that will come through in so much of his other work, particularly the brass. So it's a shame that the entire work, even though he started work on it and he did complete a good portion of it, is not heard nowadays.

00:18:42

John Banther: Yes. And it's not heard because of a reason you might not guess. And that is because the theater, Odeon Theater, where it was supposed to be performed, could not get the government licensing to stage new French operas. It sounded like that was something that was ongoing. And then the government said, " No, the French operas have to be in the big theater, not in a smaller theater." So they had all kinds of rules and things around, well, art and culture. This is one of them. And so it just ends up on a shelf for a while before Berlioz basically destroys a bunch of it, besides the overture, which he then published eight years later, also in different versions like piano four hands. So I thought it was interesting that the whole thing is gone, but he then makes different arrangements of the overture.

00:19:31

Linda Carducci: Yes. In some of the music, he repurposed for his great Symphonie fantastique.

00:19:36

John Banther: Yes. Maybe the March to the Scaffold section, but without a score or any performances, it's hard to really show that.

00:19:44

Linda Carducci: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Berlioz did try to have it performed at various other venues, but to no avail. Berlioz during his lifetime believed that his music was underappreciated, and sometimes he would get a little bitter at that. So maybe this is just the start of some of the frustrations that he had during his career, that things would not be performed or they were performed and not appreciated.

00:20:10

John Banther: It's a shame it didn't get performed because of the rules in the government, which we saw go on for decades. In Paris, if you're going to have an opera, you couldn't have a French opera unless there was ballet in it as well. So there were composers like Verdi, even having to write more music after an opera has already been done and performed years ago.

00:20:30

Linda Carducci: Yes. And over the years, we have learned about operas that, not necessarily Berlioz operas, but operas that were staged and were ready to be performed. At the last minute, the censors came in and said, " No, we don't like the way you're depicting a type of character, maybe a member of the clergy or a member of the government. Therefore, you either change the opera or you can't perform it." It's almost a form of censorship in a way.

00:20:55

John Banther: It really is. And that's a reason why when thinking about, well, how do we prevent this from going unfinished, might have to let it go. Things had improved by the 1820s, but the French government, they still had that guillotine. It was still polished. So maybe you'd have to go to whoever the French official is there in charge of all those things, and I don't know, do something to change their mind or delay this decision. But that is one, an opera, that has gone unfinished, and it's unfortunate when something as big as an opera goes unfinished.

00:21:30

Linda Carducci: It is. Now, thankfully, he was able to write one of the great French grand operas. He went on to write Les Troyens. So thankfully, he kept his hand in opera a little bit, despite this frustration. And as we're talking about opera, John, we might mention two other famous operas that went unfinished due to the death of the composer, and the first one, of course, that comes to mind is Turandot by Puccini. He did not want it to die, though. He knew he was dying, but he asked Toscanini to keep this opera alive. And eventually, another composer, Alfano, came in and completed it for him. The second case was Borodin in Prince Igor. He, again, died before it was finished, and Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov came in and finished it for him.

00:22:11

John Banther: It's always nice composers helping other composers because maybe they think, " Well, I'm going to be in a similar position someday too."

00:22:18

Linda Carducci: Right.

00:22:19

John Banther: Maybe like our fourth one, which is by Béla Bartók, his viola concerto. This is our most recent work. He composed it in 1945, and he died that year of leukemia before he could finish it. And he left it in what has been described as basically disarray. There were some completed sketches, meaning some melodies and some harmony, maybe some indication of orchestration, maybe you write a line and write violin or oboe next to it. But no completed movements, no actual full score yet. It was completed and premiered in 1949. So this looks like our most unfinished work yet, Linda, and maybe the biggest challenge because how does one complete a modern concerto without even one completed movement or even a good amount of orchestration? There's just probably a million variables and directions you can go.

00:23:16

Linda Carducci: But we know that Bartók did want it completed.

00:23:19

John Banther: Yes.

00:23:19

Linda Carducci: He gave it to his good friend by the name of a Tibor Serly, who was a violist and a violinist and a conductor, and he wanted Serly to complete it.

00:23:29

John Banther: Yes. Before Bartók goes into the hospital, he gives that composer, Tibor Serly, the sketches, gives him also, I guess, instructions like, " I want this and this." And we see he also wrote about it in that way a week or two before in August, less than two months, really like seven weeks before he died, he wrote to William Primrose, who was the violist that was going to premiere it, describing it as a serious allegro, a scherzo, a rather short, slow movement and a finale beginning allegretto and developing the tempo to an allegro molto. Each movement, or at least three of them will, be preceded by a short recurring introduction, mostly solo for the viola, and that's what we hear. We've got three movements and this short solo introduction by the viola, which it's a short statement that then things develop off of, but talk about a tough one to do.

00:24:25

Linda Carducci: To reconstruct. Serly took the sketches and the instructions and the ideas, as you mentioned, John, and completed the concerto using those sketches. He expanded the orchestration a bit too. But again, we see a similar situation as we saw with Süssmayr and Mozart and Alfano and Puccini in that the person that came along and reconstructed it, in this case, Tibor Serly, knew the composer, knew his style. He was friends with him. So I think that adds really a lot to reconstructing something when you understand what that person was about, what they liked, what they didn't like, and you can put that to the music.

00:25:09

John Banther: I wonder if not as many people really know this aspect of how composers really know how other composers write. I remember learning in school how composers, and I think we had to do this too, copy out full scores of music of a piece to see as you're doing it by hand, I guess, helps you also remember better literally what they're doing with the lines and with the harmonies better than just trying to read it out of a score.

00:25:37

Linda Carducci: I see. So you understand patterns, for example.

00:25:39

John Banther: Yeah. You probably recognize certain patterns that appear more easily if you've copied it out by hand rather than just skimming over it.

00:25:49

Linda Carducci: Yep, yep, yep, stylistic devices. Mozart used chromatics, for example.

00:25:52

John Banther: Yes.

00:25:52

Linda Carducci: I'm sure Süssmayr took that into effect when he created the Requiem.

00:25:57

John Banther: And this also shows another side of unfinished music and that is us, the audience, and how we appreciate or approach it because if a composer left behind such scant material like Bartók did, and a random person said, " Oh, I'm going to go in and finish it, and then we're going to perform it," it's basically just about them completing something and performing it and getting whatever money from orchestral rental parts or something. We find that wrong or grotesque. But here, it's the same scant material that's used, but the composer's literally giving it to the person saying, " Here, finish this." And then it's, well, whatever happens, that's what it is.

00:26:37

Linda Carducci: Yeah, yeah. It's an authorized completion. It's authorized by the composer himself, and the composer trusts that person.

00:26:45

John Banther: I think the only way to get this one finished by Bartók himself, Linda, is if we went back in time and then brought him to the present for medical treatments.

00:26:52

Linda Carducci: Oh, yeah, I agree with you.

00:26:53

John Banther: Don't look at anything Bartók. You're going to lose your mind. Don't open your eyes.

00:26:58

Linda Carducci: There are violists who really, really like this work. They think it's very challenging to perform, but there's this lyricism that Bartók uses, but, boy, he combines it with atonal movements and rhythm too.

00:27:09

John Banther: Oh, yeah. How many big concertos for the viola do you get from composers like this? A lot of them are from composers that have been pushed aside in history, but not Bartók.

00:27:21

Linda Carducci: They sure have. That's an instrument that doesn't get a lot of concerto attention, unfortunately.

00:27:51

John Banther: Our last unfinished work here, number five, is by Gustav Mahler. It is his Symphony No. 10. He composed or started writing this in the summer 1910. He died in 1911. He did complete the first movement, and then he left behind mostly drafts and four staves of the remaining movements, that's meaning four parts. It's like a skeletal structure. You've got these four parts that then you can expand on, but that's very little material when you think of the scope of a symphony by Mahler. It was completed by a few people. The versions done by Deryck Cooke, a British musicologist, those are the ones that are most performed and " approved" by Alma. This one is filled with, maybe not mystique, but there's a lot of anxiety because of this curse of the ninth that Mahler also believed in. Basically, after a composer writes their ninth symphony, you're going to die.

00:28:48

Linda Carducci: That's right.

00:28:49

John Banther: That's it, while you're finishing your 10th or before you can even get the ninth premiere. Mahler even tried to structure a work that he wrote earlier to not be like a ninth symphony to avoid this curse.

00:29:02

Linda Carducci: That's right. Look at Beethoven, he went nine, Schubert, Bruckner, he didn't even complete his ninth, Dvořák. So you can see where Mahler, who probably tended to be a little superstitious and anxiety ridden as it is, was bothered by this.

00:29:18

John Banther: And after Gustav died, Alma Mahler, his wife, she held onto the score, and it wasn't immediate like, " Oh, there's a symphony we need to finish," or some kind of attention. John Mangum of the LA Phil in some program notes, I like this, he wrote that it was seen as the haphazard work of a temporarily deranged madman, a genius suffering from a psychological collapse brought on by his personal crisis. And part of that crisis is at this time, Mahler's wife, Alma, is having an affair that he also finds out about. And he writes lines into the score about this, madness, seize me, the accursed, negate me, so I forget that I exist, to live for you, to die for you. He's writing these lines in her pet name he had for her in the score that he had written, and she held onto this for 13 years.

00:30:13

Linda Carducci: Wow. You can't talk about the 10th Symphony of Mahler unless you talk about his wife, Alma Mahler. She played a very important role in this 10th Symphony. You've alluded to it a little bit too already, but there was a personal crisis going on in their marriage because she was being unfaithful, and he found out about it. He was also suffering from a heart ailment, so he probably knew that the end was near. Back then, they didn't have whatever was needed medically to cure him. So this particular symphony continues Mahler's search that we hear through his other symphonies, the search for the meaning of life, wanting to hold onto life in the face of death. That's a common theme that he uses in his pieces. That coupled with, as you say, the curse of the ninth, many composers died after the ninth, and you can see the anxiety that is written into this work.

00:31:05

John Banther: It's very dissonant, and it feels like he's desperately trying to hold onto something that he knows he can't hold onto. It's just slipping out of his fingers as he tightens his fists more and more.

00:31:15

Linda Carducci: Yes, that's right. I think it's interesting that the middle movement, if I'm not mistaken, I believe it's in the middle movement, an intermezzo after the first scherzo, is called Purgatorio, referring to purgatory. In Catholicism, purgatory is a place where the dead souls go to expiate their sins, to repent for their sins before they are permitted to enter heaven. And it can be a dark place. It can be an uncertain place. And so it's interesting that he called that intermezzo within that work Purgatorio.

00:31:58

John Banther: Eventually, after Alma has some clean copies made of what Mahler wrote, the British musicologist, Deryck Cooke, starts to work on this and also complete it. And he ultimately does complete the work, and Alma is actually against it all of a sudden. She does not want the work to be performed. There were a couple of composers that had this sentiment, maybe because this is Mahler, no one can know or be able to really fill in these gaps or finish this. So for a little bit, she was like, " No, I don't want this played at all."

00:32:33

Linda Carducci: Yeah, and as you say, there were other composers who also believed that this is incomplete. We should not take it upon ourselves to even assume or have an arrogance that we could complete this Mahler work.

00:32:44

John Banther: But it did get played in London. And Alma Mahler heard a recording of it, and she actually wrote to Cooke. In 1963 in May, she wrote, " Dear Cooke, Mr. Harold Burns visited me here in New York. Today he read me your excellent articles on Mahler's 10th Symphony and showed me your equally authoritative score. Afterwards, I expressed my desire to finally listen to the London BBC tape. I was so moved by this performance that I immediately asked Mr. Burns to play the work a second time. I then realized that the time had come when I must reconsider my previous decision not to permit the performance of this work. I have now decided once and for all to give you full permission to go ahead with performances in any part of the world." Sincerely yours, Alma Maria Mahler. And that is 50 years later.

00:33:38

Linda Carducci: Oh, that's amazing. But she finally gave the authorization for Deryck Cooke's version.

00:33:42

John Banther: Yes.

00:33:43

Linda Carducci: That's right. Deryck Cooke, I think aptly described this work, which I think that finally shows Mahler's acceptance. Acceptance finally, after all these years of anxiety and worrying about death and putting the specter of death in his music, finally accepting life and accepting death. Deryck Cooke wrote in part that the work culminates in a hymn to human love, a serene unlamented acceptance of the inevitable human love and an acceptance of the dilemma of mortality that he was trying to run from throughout his life. I hear that, John, especially in the final movement, it's rather slow. I think it's an adagio. I really do get that final sense of peace, and when we think that this was not just reconstructed out of whole cloth, this was based on Mahler's drafts, so maybe Mahler was finally coming to a sense of peace and acceptance in his life.

00:34:43

John Banther: Maybe. That final movement is intriguing, especially how it opens, because it actually opens with this tuba solo. And then there's a low note that comes in, I think, maybe contrabassoon and someone else, and then a bang in the percussion.

00:34:59

Linda Carducci: Yeah.

00:35:06

John Banther: And when I first heard it, as a tuba player, of course, it's great when you are featured like that, but also, I thought, " Wait a second, would Mahler have done that? Wouldn't this maybe start with bass and then tuba would enter with contrabassoon, and then we would have that bang?" And then the tuba has a little solo moment a minute later in response with some things with the brass. I thought maybe that would be the way. But hearing how you've described how Cooke saw this and how Mahler was interacting with it in an acceptance type of way, maybe I can hear this in a different way as well. I don't know. That really caught me. That really grabbed me, the opening here, and it seemed very different, but still on the road that would be Mahler.

00:35:48

Linda Carducci: Yeah. Well, it wouldn't have been fascinating to hear what he would've written for that?

00:35:53

John Banther: Yes. That's the question, how do you get this thing finished besides going back in time and maybe making Gustav Mahler treat Alma a little bit better, a little bit sooner? Maybe that would've improved his outlook on life and maybe his workflow. He was actually so busy, insanely busy in 1910, so busy I think he was practically... He was just exhausted, and that's what got him that bacterial infection that went to his heart, that then took his life.

00:36:28

Linda Carducci: But it's these puzzling things, these questions that we have about these pieces that I think make them so unique.

00:36:34

John Banther: I think you're right. And the conductor issue with this piece still continues. Conductors like Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas, I think Bernard Haitink, they never performed or recorded the symphony in full. They've only either played or recorded the first movement because that is what they knew Mahler had written, and that's all they would do. So there is that aspect to it still.

00:36:59

Linda Carducci: I see, out of respect for Mahler.

00:37:01

John Banther: Yeah. But it's still recorded more than I actually thought. I think there's been 20 recordings since the year 2000.

00:37:06

Linda Carducci: Oh, I'm surprised. It's worth listening to.

00:37:09

John Banther: It is. And we're going to put performances of all of these on the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org. But do you have anything else, Linda, for unfinished works?

00:37:23

Linda Carducci: Well, I think that we can look at Mozart too. He did not finish a Sinfonia Concertante for violin and orchestra, but that was eventually finished by an English composer and, boy, does it sound like Mozart.

00:37:33

John Banther: Oh, okay. We'll put that one up there too.

00:37:35

Linda Carducci: Yeah, that's a wonderful one.

00:37:37

John Banther: Well, let's then get to your reviews from Apple Podcasts. We have a review from, I will pronounce it as glackfather, they gave us four out of five stars and said, " I would give this a full five stars if the background music, which changes frequently, and I personally find overly distracting from the otherwise beautiful depth and flow of these conversations, could be limited to just the musical examples relevant to whatever person, composition they are actively discussing." Well, thank you for the four stars, glackfather. We appreciate it. And thank you for a comment on the flow and depth of the conversations.

I include a lot of music, Linda. Sometimes it is a piece that might not be directly related, but for those who might know a little bit more or a little bit deeper, they might recognize the connection or maybe I just find it a rather intriguing comparison. But that's to say, if you ever hear something and you think, " Wait a second, what is that? I don't know what that is," you can always write in and say, " Hey, what was that music at..." And give a timestamp. Without a timestamp, that's not going to happen. We can't go through 100 hours of stuff. If you give us a timestamp, we can absolutely tell you what that piece was right away.

00:38:46

Linda Carducci: Oh, we appreciate the feedback and we appreciate the comments.

00:38:49

John Banther: Well, thank you so much, Linda, for joining me for all things unfinished. Maybe we'll leave this episode unfinished too.

00:38:55

Linda Carducci: Thank you, John. It was a joy.

00:39:00

John Banther: Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@ weta. org. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.