Word: mahler
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...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...
...What Mahler left of the work was a patchy sketch of seemingly inscrutable calligraphy. In 1924, Composer Ernst Krřenek 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...
...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...
...familiarity with music and dance enables him to discuss a musical from book through choreography and score with unusual expertise. "Music is my religion," he explains. "Where others might go to church when they are on the brink. I just lock myself in a room and listen to Mahler. I don't know how many times that has pulled me back...