I came across a copy of the Ninth Edition (1955, reprinted 1956) of Percy Scholes's Oxford Companion to Music. This being Mahler's 150th. anniversary year, and because this publication came out before the Great Mahler Revival, I had a nosey at Mahler's entry. Scholes's opinion?
"Like Brahms, he may be styled a classical-romantic, for he wrote symphonies (of a sort) yet expressed the typical German romantic feeling. He was also influenced by Bruckner, still another classical-romantic, and greatly, also, by the spirit and technique of Wagner." Also: "His forty-two songs [but, presumably, none of his symphonies?] are of importance."
There's not much of that has withstood the test of time! That "(of a sort)" is a remarkable thing for a serious scholar like Scholes to come out with, especially in the mid-Fifties.
However, there's a footnote to the entry that intrigued me no end. It says, "In 1938 it was announced that Mengelberg had discovered the autographs of four juvenile and hitherto unknown symphonies by this composer."
Really? It was my understanding that Mahler had destroyed the manuscripts of a number of juvenilia including three (not four) symphonies. Does anybody know anything about this? Were these scores found to be not Mahler's, or did someone just calmly put them back in their oubliette - or what?
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pretty much reflects the thinking on Mahler-the-composer of the time... i'm glad you dug it up. and intriguing (but very likely misleading) about the juvenilia. with all the mahler hoopla over the last 30 years, hard to think someone would not have come forward with that. especially since the RCO/Amsterdam archive is pretty tightly organized about everything reg. Mahler!
ReplyDeleteAccording to my source these two or three unpublished symphonic works - whatever they may have been - ended up in the Weber family house in Dresden and were destroyed in WWII.
ReplyDeleteI love those old books - the ones where names like Debussy appear as 'The Moderns'...