Gustav Mahler: Briefe und Musikautographen aus den Moldenhauer-Archiven in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (review)

One of the largest private collections of music manuscripts in the twentieth century was that of the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer (1906-1986), who called his archive "Music History from Primary Sources" to suggest the scope and significance of what he was assembling. The entire collection extended from chant through the twentieth century, and included printed music, autograph music manuscripts, letters, telegrams, and other sources. A comprehensive inventory may be found in The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial: Music History from Primary Sources: A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, edited by Jon Newsom and Alfred Mann ([Washington, DC: The Library of Congress, 2000], 423-728). After Moldenhauer's death, portions of the collection went to various institutions, and the Mahler materials were eventually deposited with the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. The volume under review is devoted to the Mahler manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek, including materials that had been part of its collection for years, the letters acquired from the collection of Henry-Louis de La Grange, and the music manuscripts by Mahler that Moldenhauer had amassed.

In the preface, Hans Zehetmair and Hermann Leskien discuss the acquisition of the materials for Munich. Beyond contemporary exigencies, it is useful to note that Munich was the site of the premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in September 1910, an international event which was, in a sense, the high point of the generally favorable reception of his music in that city during his lifetime. Mahler is, moreover, traditionally associated with Vienna, and research on him is not necessarily associated with Munich. Yet the acquisition of the Moldenhauer materials is significant for the unique manuscripts now part of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

Moldenhauer's collection of Mahler manuscripts has been known to scholars for years, either through the materials that would eventually make their way to his archive or as a result of the very limited access that was extended to selected scholars. That stated, the full extent of the Moldenhauer archive has been a source of speculation, and it is still not clear whether everything is listed in this catalog or in the one published by the Library of Congress. (The table on p. 230 is a useful overview of the music manuscripts discussed in this volume, but it does not include Mahler's letters.)

The present book is a descriptive catalog devoted to this manuscript collection and contains both an extensive text about the materials and a generous selection of facsimiles. The first part of the book is an overt attempt to make connections between Munich and the collection through an essay about Mahler's association with the musical life of the city (Günther Weiß, "Mahler Beziehungen zu München"). There is also an overview of Mahler's letters (Sigrid von Moisy, "Gustav Mahler's Briefe"), since a number of them are now held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. But most of the publication is devoted to the music manuscripts, described in Hartmut Schaefer's "Die Musikautographen von Gustav Mahler." The Moldenhauer manuscripts are listed by genre, specifically lieder (pp. 86-121) and symphonies (pp. 122- 225), followed with a listing of the other Mahler manuscripts that the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek had acquired previously (pp. 225-29). The catalog includes facsimiles of a number of manuscript pages either reproduced as halftones or in color. While some of the halftones are at times drastically reduced, many of the color reproductions occupy entire pages of this large- format catalog. The color facsimiles make the book extremely useful, especially when pages that apparently include several phases of composition are reproduced, such as the Mus. Ms. 22732 (p. 145), where markings in ink, pencil, and blue crayon occur in the original manuscript.

That page, and others, are correctly identified as to their connections with the completed work, but it is not always possible to gain a...