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