sCoRe Reviews

The questions that any new critical edition invite are: why is there a need for it and what does it offer that earlier editions do not? In light of the publication history of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (which began in 1904) and the recent appearance of this score, these questions can be answered relatively easily. But it is also true that, for a variety of reasons, this work has entered the public, performance and scholarly consciousness of our time more deeply perhaps than most of Mahler’s other output, rendering the authoritative impulses of the critical editor all the more timely and desirable. For good or ill, the Adagietto tempo debate, sponsored most prominently by Gilbert Kaplan, together with the various misguided but powerful mythologies that have grown up around the movement, has helped to keep the public profile of the symphony high, while Visconti had already done his best to ensure that this movement, and indeed the symphony as a whole, remains the most widely used Mahler music in screen scoring history. The work has spawned four dedicated publications, all of which feature in the bibliography of Kubik’s edition: Eberhardt Klemm’s Zur Geschichte der Fünften Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Mahler und dem Verlag C.F. Peters und andere Documentation (Leipzig, 1979); Sander Wilkens’s Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Symphonie. Quellen und Instrumentationsprozeβ (Frankfurt, 1989); Kaplan’s Gustav Mahler Adagietto. Facsimile – Documentation – Recording (New York, 1992); and the Donald-Mitchell-edited New Sounds, New Century. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Bussum, 1997), which contains his own extensive study of the work, later expanded yet further into the 90-page colossus at the centre of The Mahler Companion (Oxford, 1999; rev. 2002). Also worth mentioning, as Kubik does here in his discussion of performance practice issues, is his own illuminating essay on Mahler’s adoption of Classical and pre-Classical articulatory notation practices in the Fifth Symphony as means of countering fashionable early twentieth-century continuous legato playing.1 Internet search engines (vague and unwieldy guides to contemporary popular reception though they undoubtedly are) consistently reveal the 5th Symphony to be in the top three of Mahler’s symphonies in terms of volume of hits (usually next to the 1st and 8th Symphonies), and when the enterprising German-based media company EuroArts recently decided to add a Mahler work to its educational DVD portfolio of ‘Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music’ alongside symphonic works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Strauss and Bartók, it chose the 5th Symphony. There seems to be a broad perception, then, that this chronologically central work in Mahler’s creative output is also