As many of you know, for the past two weeks Leonard Slatkin and the NSO
held a Beethoven festival with a twist: they did Beethoven symphonies 3,
5, 7, 9, and several other pieces, all of them as retouched by Mahler.
Last night I attended the festival's final concert, Beethoven 9.

The evening kicked off with a lecture by the festival's technical
advisor, David Pickett.  He spoke for an hour on Mahler's famous/notorious
Retuschen, illustrating his talk with slides showing the score where Mahler
had made the most typical, or sometimes the most controversial, changes.
Pickett as much as anybody was the brains behind the festival.  He pieced
together various fragments of the Retuschen -- scores, notes, comments --
from all over the place over many years.  It must have been a thrill for
him to see his baby finally come to life.  According to the festival notes,
this is believed to be the first time that a festival totally dedicated to
the Retuschen has been held.  In a side converation, Pickett expressed the
belief that the retouched Beethoven 9 has not been performed since the
collaboration in the 1920's between Schoenberg and Webern, who, Pickett
believes, lost the score they used!

Possibly Pickett's most shocking revelation came when he showed a slide of
the score of B9, movement II.  There's a big X on the first few bars, and
Mahler's handwritten notation, "Bleibt." Yes, Mahler seriously considered
deleting the famous first bars of B9/II, the outburst that Americans of a
certain age are familiar with because it started out the Huntley-Brinkley
news show.  Mahler's justification was that the outburst was simply an
introduction for the movement proper.  Can you imagine??!  But in the
final analysis, Mahler retained it.

The concert itself started with a really excellent talk by Leonard Slatkin
on the Retuschen.  "Beethoven.  Why should we inflict Mahler on him? Why
did he feel the need to inflict himself?" Slatkin explained it all: the
change in the size of the typical orchestra, which caused a change in
the typical orchestra's balance, thereby obscuring a lot of the passages;
the improved acoustics as various halls were constructed; the changing
technology that resulted in more range for instruments, illustrated by more
available notes in the flute; and the appearance even of new instruments,
such as the tuba.  Slatkin made the very same argument that Mahler did:
that if Beethoven had had access to these things, he surely would have used
them.  So where exactly was the sacrilege? (The sacrilege, of course, is
the fact that Mahler's critics used the Retuschen as a cover for the worst
kind of anti-Semitic attacks, a subject that Slatkin did not bring up)

To illustrate the various dilemmas that Mahler faced, Slatkin had the
NSO play around 10 excerpts of music as composed by Beethoven, and the
solutions that Mahler found.  Not all of these involved "quadrupling the
trumpets" or making similar augmentations.  Mahler did add instruments,
but he was just as likely to take some away and shift the balance in
ways that added clarity.  He even added instruments at times: while the
E-flat clarinet was not used in B9, it was in one of the other retouched
symphonies.  The addition of the tuba in B9, while sparing, made a big
difference in sonority.

One excerpt was really telling: Slatkin played it as composed, then
followed it with Wagner's changes, then Richard Strauss's, then Toscanini's
(the "anti-Furtwaengler," in LS's words, who has a reputation for absolute
faithfulness to the score but who was discovered to have changed some
Beethoven himself), then Szell's, then Mahler's.  It was a fascinating
survey of how some of the greatest musical minds in history grappled with
some problems, a real tour de de horizon and tour de force as well.

Another interlude that brought the house down: Slatkin related how he and
his fellow students argued about how to cope with a certain passage.  He
showed how he dealt with it, then played Mahler's "better" solution.  At
the end, he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "See, Mahler had it right
all the time." The audience applauded both Mahler and Slatkin, it seemed to
me.  Slatkin then brought *my* house down by saying, "You can E-mail your
applause to www.mahler.com." Actually, he got that wrong.  The Mahler home
page is

   http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/mahler

The Mahler List is:

   http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/mahler-list.html

But give LS bonus points for topical reference.

At the end of his talk, Slatkin summed up the festival and made the classic
anti-HIP argument (paraphrasing): "We can play with period instruments,
but our ears have heard Stravinsky, Bartok, and others.  It is impossible
for us to hear Beethoven with the same ears that listened to him in the
1820's.  Mahler brought his own era's Romantic notions to the music, and
clarified what had become obscured over the past 75 years.  The Retuschen
are legitimate."

So musically, what's the final result? Let's take a person who is more
than cursorily familiar with Beethoven 9 but who is far less than an expert
-- I consider myself in this group.  If this person had walked into that
hall without being tipped off, I think he would have known immediately that
something was up.  The Retuschen were more than just a nip here and a tuck
there; they really made a difference.  Summing up, Slatkin said that this
festival has made the NSO think of Beethoven in a different way, that they
would be taking things that they had learned during the festival with them
when they played Beethoven in the future.

Leonard Slatkin spoke for nearly 40 minutes in the most expressive,
engaging way.  Is he a committed Mahlerian? He's really making a believer
out of me.  After all, he's recorded a Mahler 2 with the SLSO; conducted
the world premiere of the (now withdrawn) Mazzetti version of Mahler 10;
has programmed a Mahler symphony every year for the past several years
(next spring he's got Mahler 1 scheduled); and conducted outstanding
performances of the M6 and M7, both of which I was privileged to attend
within the past 15 or so months.  This Beethoven/Mahler Festival, however,
*really* makes a statement.  I'll say it again: this is believed to be
the first time that a festival totally dedicated to the Retuschen has
been held.  And it's Leonard Slatkin who did it.

Mitch Friedfeld