Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

Volume 14 | Issue 1 Article 5

Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities

Isabella Spinelli Northwestern University

Recommended Citation Spinelli, Isabella. “Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities.” Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology 14, no. 1 (2021): 115-178. https://doi.org/10.5206/notabene.v14i1.13410.

Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities

Abstract Performers and scholars have argued for generations over what should be done with musical works that have been left incomplete by their composers. Though many attempts have been made to bring such works to completion, some scholars feel that these fragments should remain untouched because the pieces in question were left incomplete during the composer’s own career. With this debate in mind, I undertook a study and completion of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, a piece for which Mahler composed a complete first movement, Nicht zu schnell, and twenty-four bars of a second movement, Scherzo, when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. I began by analyzing Nicht zu schnell in order to understand Mahler’s treatment of motives, form, and harmony. In addition, I studied contemporary works by Schumann and Brahms. Based on my analyses, I then composed a completion of the Scherzo in a style that is, in my opinion, idiomatic of Mahler. After a performance of my completion, seventy percent of the audience responded with five on a scale of zero to six when asked in a survey how closely my Scherzo aligned with Nicht zu schnell. One hundred percent of the listeners ethically approved of the task of completing unfinished music. Adding to the discourse on musical completion, this paper addresses the musicological debate surrounding unfinished music, discusses my process of completing Mahler’s quartet, and assesses public reactions to the ethical issues, such as hubris, that often arise when an alternate composer completes an unfinished work. Keywords Gustav Mahler, authenticity, completion, unfinished music, piano quartet, ethics

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NB

Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and

Authenticities

Isabella Spinelli Year IV – Northwestern University

What should be done with a musical work that has been left in an incomplete state? Scholars and musicians have debated this question for generations, particularly with regard to notable incomplete works such as Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished” Eighth Symphony and J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, among others. Over the years, many musicians have attempted to bring such works to completion so that concert-goers may enjoy the pieces and scholars may reap the benefits of the intense study required for the task of completion. However, there are also those who demur to such an endeavour, either for pragmatic or ethical reasons. These objections are in part due to the fact that many of the pieces in question were left incomplete by the composers themselves at the height of their careers; if a composer had wanted to complete a piece, they would likely have done so. An attempt to complete an unfinished work from a composer’s juvenilia may circumvent at least some of these arguments, while

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also presenting different challenges. In this paper, I shall discuss some of these obstacles in the realms of completion and musicology by describing my own study and completion of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, which Mahler left incomplete in 1876.

While attending the Vienna Conservatory, Gustav Mahler composed a piano quartet for which he completed one full movement, Nicht zu schnell, and twenty-four bars of a second movement, Scherzo. Although Mahler almost certainly composed a great deal at this time for both his studies and his own enjoyment, only the aforementioned quartet and fragments of two songs survive from this pivotal period in the composer’s development.1 Despite the lack of scholarship detailing Mahler’s conservatory years, records show that the young composer had a rather successful first year of study; on July 1, 1876, he was awarded first prize for a first movement of a Piano Quintet at his conservatory’s composition competition.2 However, there is a significant amount of both biographic and primary source evidence that leads to confusion surrounding this quintet. Musicologist Donald Mitchell asserts that this award-winning work is in fact the Piano Quartet in A minor, claiming that this theory is supported by the fact that Mahler and his conservatory friends played a concert, whose program included a piano quartet by Mahler, in the composer’s hometown of Jihlava on September

1 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler: Volume I (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 33-35; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Mahler, Gustav,” by Peter Franklin, accessed July 19, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40696. 2 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 34.


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12, 1876. It would be most natural, Mitchell argues, for Mahler to play for his friends and family the work that had recently won him a prize.3 Mitchell is not alone in this claim: musicologists Hans Holländer and Hans Redlich both also cite the first movement of the Piano Quartet in A minor as having a close connection with the prize-winning quintet.4 Furthermore, though Vienna Conservatory records detail a piano quintet composed by Mahler, they fail to list the performers’ names or the instrumentation; these are striking omissions for a prize-winning work, implying that this quintet was perhaps not the work which won the competition.5 Such omissions, as a result, bring into question the reliability of these records.

Although it is possible that the quartet and quintet are entirely separate pieces with no relation, the evidence provided by scholars, including those mentioned above, makes a compelling case for a relationship between these pieces and thus the A minor quartet’s importance to Mahler. There are two possible scenarios that explain the connection between the quartet performed by Mahler and his friends in Jihlava and the mysterious, award-winning quintet. The first possibility is that these works are, in fact, the same piece, meaning that there never was a quintet. In this scenario, the Piano Quartet in A minor won the composition competition in 1876 and was performed in Jihlava that September. Alternatively, Mahler may have composed two different orchestrations for the same piece; he may have composed the work first as a quartet, later expanding it into a

3 Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, 35. 4 Ibid. 5 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell, trans. Basil Creighton (London: Viking Press, 1946), 6.

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quintet, or vice versa. Today, the manuscript of the Piano Quartet in A minor—along with the fragmentary Scherzo—is located in the Pierpont Morgan Library at the bequest of Ali Rosé, who was the niece of Gustav and Alma Mahler by marriage.6

This manuscript of the fragmentary Scherzo was written almost entirely in pencil, with the exception of a couple of ink splatters and markings. While the seemingly sloppy, doodle-like markings on the manuscript may at first glance indicate that Mahler was careless in composing this movement, the placement of these markings, situated very specifically, instead proves otherwise. For example, a marking at measure 15 is placed in such a way as to indicate that only the piano part should begin an ascending crescendo line in a transition from the original thematic iteration of measure 14. After the seventeenth bar, Mahler forgoes sketching for the full piano quartet instrumentation, and instead writes his last seven bars only for piano. There are nine more bars which were deemed illegible by transcribers7; upon close study of the manuscript, I was able to decipher that Mahler uses these bars to begin developing, through a harmonic sequence, the theme that he introduced at the beginning of the movement (Figure 1). These indications are significant because they suggest that the young Mahler expended detailed thought and planning when working on this movement,

6 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Rosé [Rosenblum], Arnold,” by Carmen Ottner, accessed August 23, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.23827; “Arnold Josef Rosé,” Mahler Foundation, last modified January 5, 2015, https://mahlerfoundation.org/gt-member/arnold-josef-rose/. 7 Gustav Mahler, “Piano Quartet in A minor,” autograph manuscript, 1876, 115204, Department of Music Manuscripts and Books, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY, United States.


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making it unlikely that he initially intended on discarding the work.

Figure 1: The autograph manuscript of the Scherzo from Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor. Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum.

Given that Mahler destroyed nearly all of his other student works, his choice to preserve the manuscripts for both Nicht zu schnell and Scherzo suggests that he had further plans for these movements, or at least that he felt a certain amount of pride in

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them.8 However, Mahler’s potential intentions for this piece’s completion do not negate its current unperformable state, given that the Scherzo ends after only twenty-four bars. This state begs the question of what should be done with the fragment. Given the deficit of information on Mahler’s juvenilia, it would be negligent to discount this sketch, no matter how fragmentary its condition; it is for this reason that I chose to study and compose a completion of this work. Nevertheless, there are both ethical and logistical dimensions to such a seemingly quixotic project, which I will now outline.

The issue of unfinished music is complicated by the various ways in which works may be left incomplete: a work may consist of only the opening measures with clear intent to continue, or it may be complete in certain respects and incomplete in others (for example, if all pitches and rhythms are accounted for, but instrumental details are not indicated). Alternatively, a work may be missing entire movements, despite having several movements completed. Furthermore, a piece may be left incomplete by choice of the composer, or as a result of uncontrollable life circumstances. Each of these cases poses different challenges to someone interested in attempting a completion, thus leading to various ways in which a completion may be undertaken. For example, while an unfinished work for which the composer finished full or considerably complete drafts may call for an orchestration completion, a piece whose sketches survive with definitive gaps requires a continuity completion.9

8 La Grange, Mahler: Volume I, 55. 9 Speculative completion: “composing [a completion] from ‘very fragmentary’ sketches.” Continuity completion: “these involve unfinished works for which sizeable quantities of continuous sketches survive, but


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The Scherzo of Mahler’s piano quartet falls into a third category: speculative completion, or completion of a work for which there are very few extant drafts or other pieces of information.10

Furthermore, a completion may be motivated by various artistic and aesthetic aims. For instance, the German-Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) composed a completion of Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor in 1988; however, he wrote this work in a free manner, making no attempt to continue the piece in Mahler’s style. Rather, Schnittke used the theme from the second movement of the quartet as a point of departure for a highly dissonant, eclectic movement of his own creative devices.11 In fact, the resulting work is generally referred to as “Schnittke’s Piano Quartet in A minor (after Mahler),” and it is immediately clear to anyone familiar with Mahler’s work that Schnittke was not attempting to imitate Mahler.

There are also ethical components of completion to consider. The task of completing unfinished music has been a site of contention for years, leaving a rich repository of sources and arguments opposing it. One such objection is rooted in the belief that it is simply impossible for another to capture the talent of the

which contain gaps that cannot be filled in with any certainty.” Orchestration completion: “involves the completion of a work that was both in progress and considerably advanced at the time of its composer’s death (or abandonment), for which continuous drafts of the remainder survive.” In Robert Winter, “Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations, and Reconstructions: From Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’ to Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony,” Journal of Royal Musical Association 116, no. 1 (1991): 99-101. 10 Ibid., 99-100. 11 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Schnittke [Shnitke], Alfred,” by Alexander Ivashkin and Ivan Moody, accessed August 25, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.51128.

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original artist, and hubristic to believe otherwise. Such an attitude is evident in George Grella’s review of the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (using Deryck Cooke’s 1960 completion). He calls the performance an “odd experience … After [the Adagio], one experienced short passages of Mahler but most mostly Cooke’s editing and orchestration … the composer was merely an intermittent ghostly presence in the hall.”12 It is tempting to consider the manner in which Grella’s prior knowledge of the piece may have biased his listening; had he not been aware that this performance was a completion by Deryck Cooke, he may not have felt so negatively about this performance of Mahler’s Tenth. This argument is augmented when the composer is considered a “genius” like Mahler. However, I believe that issues of arrogance and hubris are avoided in a completion of Mahler’s piano quartet because none regard this early work as a masterpiece. At sixteen, Mahler was clearly a talented young composer, but he was far from producing the symphonic works that are associated with the peak of his creative output.

Another objection to musical completion states that the act of finishing an incomplete work defies the wishes of the composer: if the composer did not complete the piece herself, she must not have wished for it to be completed. This position is loosely exemplified in the case of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, whose final movement was not complete when the composer died. Due to the composer’s

12 George Grella, “Rattle and LSO can’t quite make a case for the Mahler/Cooke Tenth Symphony,” New York Classical Review, May 8, 2018, https://newyorkclassicalreview.com/2018/05/rattle-and-lso-cant-quite-make-a-case-for-the-mahlercooke-tenth-symphony/.


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fervent Christianity, musicologist and conductor Hans-Hubert Schönzeler espouses the belief that Bruckner would have viewed his passing before the completion of his symphony as a sign of God’s will that it should remain unfinished.13 Schönzeler further supports this claim with the fact that Bruckner himself suggested that, should he fail to complete the Finale, performances should use his song Te Deum as the symphony’s closing movement. Thus, Schönzeler declares that “a ‘completion’ of the movement is unthinkable, and no one with the slightest love or respect for Bruckner would ever consider such a thing.”14 Despite this argument, however, there have been several attempts to compose completions of the Finale.

Unlike with Bruckner, it cannot be said that Mahler actively wished to discard his A minor quartet simply because he left it incomplete. Given Mahler’s tendency to destroy his student works, his preservation of these manuscripts in particular was likely intentional. In fact, even if he had not been motivated to preservation by a specific incentive, Mahler did not actively wish to discard the work; the composer’s reflections on his early works, documented by his dear friend and confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner, cogently demonstrate this fact. On June 21, 1896, Mahler told Bauer-Lechner that the best of his early works “was a piano quartet.” He then continued to describe his youthful tendency to leave works incomplete: “My mind was still too restless and unstable. I skipped from one draft to another, and finished most of them merely in my head. But I knew every note of them, and could play them whenever they were wanted—until,

13 Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, Bruckner (London: Calder & Boyers Ltd., 2008), 107-9. 14 Ibid., 108.

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one day, I found I’d forgotten them.”15 This statement implies that the adult Mahler wished he had completed the unfinished works from his conservatory days. Thus, if we understand the piano quartet that he references as his “best early work” to be the Piano Quartet in A minor, it is plausible that Mahler especially regretted leaving this work in its fragmentary state, eliminating the argument that completion of this piece defies the wishes of the composer.

Still, there are those that argue against the completion of unfinished music for aesthetic reasons. One such critic of the practice is Richard Kramer. Kramer argues that the concept of “finished” art took on different meanings in different eras; in Classical thought, an unfinished piece of music was simply a piece left incomplete, such as Mozart’s Requiem, while in Romantic thinking, the term “unfinished music” referred to works that both facilitate and require ongoing admiration, creativity, and consideration. Thus, Kramer argues, “unfinished-ness” is a construct, rather than an objective measure, and it is therefore impossible to know whether a work is truly incomplete.16 Later in his monograph on unfinished music, Kramer takes a more aggressive stance, contending that a musical completion written by someone other than the original composer is “debased [and] deprived of its authenticity,” and that the entire process is a “forgery.”17 Analysis of such an attack requires a definition of “authenticity.” Anthropologist Charles Lindholm states that there

15 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. Peter Franklin, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 26. 16 Richard Kramer, “Hedgehog,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2 (1997): 135. 17 Richard Kramer, Unfinished Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 313.


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are two “modes” for characterizing a product or experience as authentic: origin and content.18 The former refers to the object’s genealogy or history, and the latter refers to its identity and correspondence.19 Broadly speaking, a completion of a musical work by anyone other than the original composer cannot be entirely authentic in origin, but, according to musicologist Robert Winter, the resultant work may be comprised of authentic content, depending “on the quantity and quality of the source material.”20

Sociologist Richard Peterson further expands the criteria for an object to be considered authentic with his six definitions, or “modes,” of authenticity.21 The two modes that are most relevant to the issue of completing music are “authentic reproduction, not kitsch,” and “credible in current context.”22 An object that is an authentic reproduction, not kitsch, is one that is designed to be just as it was at some specific point in the past. Historically-informed musical performances, historical heritage sites, and even some gourmet meals fall into this category, since each of these strives to exactly recreate an experience from a foreign time or place. In contrast, an object that is credible in current context does not strive to accurately present a specific object from the past, nor does it claim to do so; rather, such an object presents a construction of the past object in a way that is

18 Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity (Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 2. 19 Ibid. 20 Winter, “Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations, and Reconstructions,” 101. 21 Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 207-8. 22 Ibid., 208.

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believable to the modern viewer. This mode of authenticity is most often achieved through nostalgia, both personal and cultural, and collective memory. The popular 2010s Netflix series Stranger Things provides an excellent example of this mode. Although the show does not depict historical events that took place in the 1980s (nor does it claim to do so), it evokes this decade through corresponding fashion, music, and casual lingo. Its depiction of and rootedness in the 1980s is credible to modern viewers—both those who lived through the 1980s and those born much later—due to its incorporation of details that have become part of our fabricated memory of that decade. In a similar way, I do not claim that my completion of Mahler’s A minor Piano Quartet is definitively—or even likely—how Mahler would have continued the work. Rather, I am simply presenting a completion of the quartet that is stylistically appropriate to the composers own and related repertoire, and one that I believe, based on my study and understanding of Mahler’s harmonic language, thematic treatment, and use of form, the original composer may have himself considered.

Not only is the practice of completing unfinished music defensible, but I argue that it is urgently needed. First, a fragment cannot be appreciated if its incomplete state prevents its performance. As Winter explains, “it is easier for the eye to take in a fragmentary canvas … than it is for the ear to make sense of a musical work that breaks off before the end.”23 Thus, delivering a performance has been a primary motivation behind many attempts to compose completions. Furthermore, not only does performing a completion allow the fragment to be heard, but it

23 Winter, “Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations, and Reconstructions,” 97.


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also expands art music repertoire by connecting the past with the present. Art music has become largely associated with composers of bygone times, and this association has led orchestras and opera houses to perform essentially the same set of canonic works in a cycle (with occasional exceptions). As a result, a completion of an unfinished musical work may offer concert-goers the opportunity to enjoy a new work, but one in a familiar compositional style and under the name of a lauded composer.

Second, the process of completing unfinished music can in itself be a valuable study through which modern composers and listeners gain fresh insights into the style, form, and other musical characteristics of a composer’s music from a specific time. To quote musicologist and Mahler specialist Susan Filler’s defense of her preparation of a performance version of Mahler’s Scherzo in C Minor and Presto in F Major, “… the opportunity to hear the works in performance can be the only way to determine if this music can stand with the works in the repertoire as a representative of Mahler’s creative process.”24 It seems from this statement that Filler was motivated not only by a desire to hear the Scherzo and Presto performed and to study Mahler’s compositional style, but also by a desire to compare them to other, more canonical works by Mahler that she knew and admired; she wished to interrogate the artistic value, the “greatness,” and the “genius” of these works. There are certainly a number of justifications for completing unfinished music, and I would like to make clear that my own interest is not in evaluating the artistic value of Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, but rather in the process of completion as a study and exercise in itself.

24 Susan M. Filler, “Mahler’s Sketches for a Scherzo in C Minor and a Presto in F Major,” College Music Symposium 24, no. 2 (1984): 80.

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In composing my own completion of the Scherzo, I strove to remain as conservative as possible, basing each musical decision on my analysis of Mahler’s compositional language, as well as related repertoire from the era (a full score of the completion is available in the Appendix). I selected the following related repertoire to consult: Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (1861), Brahms’s Piano Quartet in A major, Op. 26 (1861), and Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 44 (1842). These works are significant examples of the Romantic chamber music tradition and are works that a young Mahler would have almost certainly known and studied, making them an appropriate stylistic reference. My study of these pieces is further supported by the fact that Julius Epstein, Mahler’s piano instructor at the Vienna Conservatory, was a good friend of Johannes Brahms and a champion of his work.25

It is important to note that, before I could begin my completion, it was necessary for me to correct notational errors and omissions in the extant manuscript. Such errors include Mahler’s mistakes in notating accidentals, note values, rests, and, in some cases, sloppiness of penmanship. In addition, there were a number of places where it was necessary to complete the implied harmonic and contrapuntal texture of the music. I used three basic methods to fill in incomplete textures: transplantation of material (reusing and repurposing the themes introduced by Mahler), simple harmonization to complete sonorities (completing chords using the basic rules of Western harmony), and motivic counterpoint (composing simple counter-melodies).

25 La Grange, Mahler: Volume I, 34.


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Upon composing further than the original twenty-four measures, it was first imperative for me to decide whether the theme begun by Mahler would continue past bar twenty-four, or whether bar twenty-five should bring about new material, such as a contrasting theme. I chose to repeat the original theme, but with altered instrumentation, moving the melody to the piano where it had previously been in the strings. I based this decision not only on Mahler’s own thematic treatment in Nicht zu schnell, but also on the form of the Scherzo movements in Brahms’s piano quartets. This technique of composing a repeated theme with altered instrumentation is illustrated particularly well in the Intermezzo—which functions as a Scherzo—from Brahms’s first quartet, Op. 25 in G minor (Figure 2). Brahms’s piano quartet also follows a relatively traditional Scherzo-Trio form. This structure informed my decision to use the same form in my Scherzo completion. I composed the completion in an overarching A-B-A form wherein the B section is in either the dominant key or that of the sixth scale degree, and in which the A’ section sounds in the dominant before returning to the tonic. Correspondingly, my completion begins in G minor, moves to E major for the contrasting Trio, and sits in D minor for the recapitulation before returning to the home key of G minor for the movement’s conclusion.

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Figure 2 (continues on next page): The opening to the second movement of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor. Note that the piano takes over the theme initially in the strings. Johannes Brahms, Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor

(Breitkopf & Härtel, 1861).


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Figure 2 (continued)

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Figure 2 (continued)


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As I continued to compose beyond the scope of the existing fragment, I incorporated motives from the first movement in accordance with Mahler’s fondness for cyclic forms in multi-movement works. This motivic return was also common practice during Mahler’s time; the technique gained popularity throughout the nineteenth century, with a notable example occurring in Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 44, in which the transition into the second episode of the second movement reuses the descending octaves that are introduced in the second ending of the first movement’s exposition (Figure 3).

Figure 3a: The second ending from the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44. Note that the descending octave figure in the piano returns in Figure 3b. Robert Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44 (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1842).

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Figure 3b: The transition into the second episode of the second movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44. Note the descending octave figure in the

piano in common with Figure 3a. Robert Schumann, Piano Quintet, Op. 44 (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1842).

The Trio section of my completion posed particular challenges. Because a Trio section of a Scherzo movement generally introduces new and contrasting material, there is no indication of what Mahler’s intentions for this section may have been. Since this Trio is almost entirely my own composition, a case can be made for the dismissal of either this Trio or the entire completion, considering Mahler’s lack of progress on it and the objections outlined above. However, a point made by Deryck Cooke in reflection on his work on Mahler’s Tenth Symphony justifies a degree of creative freedom on the part of whomever is working on a completion of an unfinished work:

Admittedly, to make the sketch as it stands performable, it is necessary to provide a certain amount of conjecture …


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but these elements, in comparison with Mahler’s own ‘fully-prepared’ thematic, harmonic, tonal and formal argument, sink to the level of subsidiary … It can be argued … that the result [of a completion without a reasonable amount of conjecture] would be artistically unacceptable, since it would not be a definitive, perfected, fully-achieved work of art.26

After composing my completion of Mahler’s piano quartet, I presented a performance of the work adjacent to its complete first movement with the proper instrumentation. In conjunction with the music, I gave a brief introductory lecture that outlined my research and completion process. Despite my skepticism regarding the utility of such a measure, I was required by the grant which had funded my work to distribute a survey to gage the audience’s perception of the completion. In the survey, I asked each audience member to complete a short series of questions in which I interrogated their familiarity with Mahler’s compositions, their understanding of the word “genius,” their stance on the issue of completing unfinished music, and their opinion on how closely my completion aligns with Mahler’s first movement. Of the nineteen surveys that I collected, all of the respondents approved of the practice of completing unfinished musical works. When asked how closely they found my Scherzo to align with Mahler’s first movement, twelve of the nineteen audience members responded with a five on a scale of zero to six, four members responded with a six, two responded with a three, and one member declined to respond.

26 Deryck Cooke, Vindications: Essays on Romantic Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 93-94.

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Perhaps there is something more to be said about the grant committee’s insistence on judging the performance of my completion of Mahler’s piano quartet based on an audience survey. This conviction is an example of the academic community once against attempting to determine the validity, merit, and authenticity of the practice of completing unfinished music, and, more broadly, my completion itself as a piece of music. As I have discussed over the course of this paper, scholars have been completing unfinished musical works for generations with varying methods and conclusions, as exemplified by the aforementioned academics; Winter bases his opinion of a completion on the amount of original material on which it is grounded, while Filler’s motivation for composing a completion is to measure it against the rest of the composer’s canon. While I personally support the practice of completing unfinished music, there is no definitive answer to the debate surrounding the ethics and validity of the endeavour.

There are no objective criteria with which to measure the success of a completion, and while I take pride in the fact that the audience members who heard my completion of Mahler’s piano quartet seemed to enjoy it and believe it to align with Mahler’s first movement, this response does not mean it is a successful completion. Ultimately, how can we, with our twenty-first-century ears and sensibilities, evaluate a piece also composed using modern ears and sensibilities against a piece composed in nineteenth-century Vienna by a young boy who would proceed to redefine the symphonic genre? The only one who could begin to answer the question of the true success of my completion is the composer himself, Gustav Mahler.


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& Härtel, 1853. Winter, Robert. “Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations, and

Reconstructions: From Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’ to Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.” Journal of Royal Musical Association 116, no. 1 (1991): 96-126.


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Documents

Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished