Corrective to a fault

Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’.

Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’. Stravinsky had already insinuated ‘Last Year at Marienleben’. And my pupils recently produced a better wordplay: asked what the name meant, they shyly volunteered ‘Married Life…?’ Copies of both versions have been lying about my rooms over the past few weeks, as I’ve tried to come to terms with what must surely be the most extreme instance of self-correction in all music.

Revision is frequent, of course; even commonplace. Mere correction of misprints sheers naturally into improvement of small details, thence into second thoughts. Often in the Baroque it was entirely pragmatic, rejigging instrumental parts for available forces, vocal lines for differing requirements of star singers.

Sometimes the rewrite can be more thoroughgoing — Beethoven’s ruthless shake-up of unsuccessful Leonora into imperfectly satisfying Fidelio, Brahms’s drastic recomposition of his early B-major piano trio, in all its looseknit romantic extravagance, into the taut manner of his late maturity. While Bruckner is oddest of all: terminal diffidence alongside radical boldness caused him to tinker endlessly with his symphonies old and new, by no means to their obvious advantage, and often to the clear reverse.

Unique to the Marienleben revision is a polemic from its composer invoking not just improved workmanship so much as a shift of stance that is also an elevation to higher moral ground. It’s piquant that the revised score with its breast-beating Preface came out in 1948, year of the notorious committee censuring Shostakovich and other notable Soviet composers for crimes of ‘formalism’.