The Crucial Enigma

"The devil is dancing with me! Madness, take me and destroy me!" So, in anguished scrawls, wrote Composer Gustav Mahler in the margins of his Tenth Symphony. Slowly dying of a streptococcus infection, he was torn between periods of black despair and intimations of immortality -- all of which he attempted to pour into the five-movement Tenth, which was to be the last great testament of his life. But in 1911, before he could complete it, the disease killed him at the age of 51.

What Mahler left of the work was a patchy sketch of seemingly inscrutable calligraphy. In 1924, Composer Ernst Krrenek stitched together the more fully outlined first and third movements, but abandoned the rest as unsalvageable. Then in 1960, British Musicologist Deryck Cooke set out to solve the enigma. Making a painstaking note-by-note transcription of Mahler's sketch, Cooke "found to my amazement that what I was slowly writing down was entirely intelligible and indeed fascinating music."

Cooke's first version of the symphony, which he estimates is about 85% pure Mahler, was played twice over the BBC in 1960, then banned by the composer's widow, the late Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. Three years later, upon hearing a tape of the broadcast, Alma was "so moved" that she approved "performances in any part of the world."

The U.S. premiere of Mahler's Tenth, or rather, "a performing version of a sketch," as Cooke protectively calls it, was presented this month in Philadelphia, followed by a second performance last week in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall.

Played by the Philadelphia Orchestra, it was a rewarding achievement worth the waiting. The long, tragically beautiful opening theme is shot through with un utterable sadness. The rambling and slightly diffuse second and fourth move ments bracket a brief, mocking middle movement entitled Purgatorio.

It remained for the 20-minute-long fifth movement, which one critic called "among the very greatest things that Mahler has left us," to lift the pall of futility. The doom-laden thump of a muffled drum, an idea that Mahler conceived one day when he heard the drums of a funeral procession passing his Manhattan apartment, intrudes repeatedly, driving back the forces of light. Then, unfurling slowly, the divergent strands of the opening themes are resolved in a finale of radiant transfiguration, ending as serenely as oncoming sleep -- or death. "The Tenth" says Cooke, "holds the secret of Mahler's final settling of his account with life and fate."

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