There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the history of music. Basic facts: Mahler finished the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1910. At the same time he discovered that his wife Alma was having an affair with Gropius, and that he had an incurable heart complaint and hadn’t long to live.
One might have thought that these last two completed works are as movingly valedictory as anything ever written, but Mahler’s view was more complicated than that, and he immediately set about writing a Tenth Symphony. Over and among the notes, he scrawled messages to Alma, God and even the Devil, anguished pleas and expressions of despair. The symphony was designed, it seems, to mark a new departure, but what might this new departure be? It looked for many years as if we would never know Mahler’s solution, genuine or attempted, to that question. Alma was in possession of many pages of manuscript, but it was taken for granted that they were fragmentary and anyway indecipherable.
Over and among the notes, Mahler scrawled messages to Alma, God and even the Devil
That turned out not quite to be the case. On closer examination the first movement was found to be not only legible but to all intents complete, and it was performed by several conductors, though Bruno Walter, Mahler’s closest collaborator, thought it should rest unplayed. Over the decades more of Mahler’s scrawls were uncovered or discovered, until the point was reached where several musicians thought it was possible to get the work into performable shape.
The most ardent, conscientious and altogether admirable toiler in this field was Deryck Cooke, a highly trained musician who wrote notes for BBC concerts and books on Romantic composers.
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