Symphonie Nr. 2: In fünf Sätzen, für grosses Orchester (review)

With the release of this edition of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, the International Gustav-Mahler-Gesellschaft has inaugurated the Neue Kritische Gesamtausgabe (NKG) that will essentially replace the Sämtliche Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA) published between 1960 and 1998. The “Auferstehung” (Resurrection) Symphony—a work for expanded orchestra, chorus, soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, and organ—is now an established part of the modern repertoire and benefits from a number of fine recordings. Not being one of the composer’s more problematic scores, it is useful to compare the editorial practice associated with the critical edition of Erwn Ratz (Symphonie Nr. 2 (c-moll), Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2 [Vienna: Universal Edition, 1970], UE 13821), available for over forty years, to that in this new version prepared by Gilbert Kaplan and Renate Stark-Voit. Ratz’s critical apparatus occupies only three printed pages, indicating how the 1970 edition is a product of its time, when research on Mahler’s music was relatively new, and an appropriate approach to editing the composer’s works was still evolving. To understand the provenance of the new critical edition, it is useful to review the old one when several other volumes of the KGA had already been published, and the formula for the critical apparatus was predictably terse.

The concise preface by Ratz offers an overview of the compositional history of the work including some of the changes Mahler made in the first movement as he shaped the original conception—the single-movement tone poem Todtenfeier (1888)—into the first movement of the eventual five-movement symphony (1894). The preface does not cover the publishing history or any subsequent revisions, but the two-page Revisionsbericht lists without commentary various sources: the manuscripts for the first movement (1888) and the entire symphony (1894); the copyist’s Stichvorlage with corrections in Mahler’s hand; the first edition published by Hofmeister (1897); the revised edition published by Joseph Weinberger (undated); and the publisher’s proof (Bürstenabzug) of what Ratz calls the “2. Fassung” (dated 1909), and the subsequent “endgültige Fassung” (ultimate version) from Universal Edition. Ratz also mentions that the Stichvorlage zu 2. Fassung, an important source, was unavailable to him.

The paucity of dates in Ratz’s summary is typical of the reports in the KGA, a situation that Mahler specialists—see Stephen E. Hefling (“The Making of Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier’: A Documentary and Analyti cal Study” [Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985]), and various bibliographic articles by the late Edward R. Reilly—have been amplifying with important details. Yet in the preface to his edition Ratz uses a few paragraphs to describe the 1909 revision along with the provenance of the 1943 edition by Boosey & Hawkes, itself based on the undated Weinberger edition, and not the last one that Universal Edition released. Thus, when the copyright was returned in 1952 to Universal Edition, which subsequently released a new edition, it was based on the Weinberger edition and not on the 1909 revised edition. Ratz states that he based his text on the “old edition” [“Da für unsere Gesamtausgabe die Platten der alten Ausgaben verwendet werden mußten”], and goes on to present the list of revisions in the Revisionsbericht: twenty-one specific revisions in addition to the tacit correction of mistakes in music notation that do not affect content, only its presentation. This brings into the critical edition the revisions from 1909 as found in the 1910 version (the endg...