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New Edition of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on Nashville Symphony’s Gala Opening Program

Sep. 01, 2006

The Nashville Symphony opens the doors of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center on September 9 for its eagerly awaited inaugural season in its new home, and the new edition of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 features on the gala opening night program.

Recent Mahler scholarship has led to new insights concerning the composer’s Symphony No. 2. This new release is essential not due to substantive changes in the instrumentation, nor to missing or superfluous measures, but rather because of a plethora of errors and inaccuracies that could not be corrected within the existing engraving image. This led to the joint project of Universal Edition and The Kaplan Foundation completely reprocessing the score and producing entirely new performance material. The volume’s editors are Renate Stark-Voit, who was responsible for recent volumes containing the Wunderhorn-Lieder, and Gilbert Kaplan, who has conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 frequently and has taken a particular interest in the work. Renate Stark-Voit provides an overview of the state of musicological research on Mahler’s Symphony No. 2:

"When Universal Edition released Symphonies 1–4 by Gustav Mahler as study scores in 1906, two conductor’s scores of the Symphony No. 2 already existed—the work had been printed in 1897 by Hofmeister in Leipzig before being transferred to Weinberger in Vienna—in which Mahler had entered corrections and changes in his own hand, probably over a period of several years. Universal Edition made the corresponding changes to the plates, and the work was offered for sale in octavo format. After this initial printing by Universal Edition, however, Mahler continued to make changes. He conducted and continued revising his Symphony No. 2, which he had begun working on in 1888, again and again throughout the remainder of his life—the last time in 1910, just a year before his death."

The new critical edition, a co-production of Universal Edition and The Kaplan Foundation, is based on Mahler’s autograph. As part of the editorial process, the work’s various stages of modification were examined in light of all available sources, in order to get as close as possible in terms of text and appearance to the composer’s intentions for his Symphony No. 2 as he documented them in 1910.

To learn more about Gustav Mahler and his work, please visit www.universaledition.com. For further details on this new edition of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, please send an email to info@eamdllc.com with “Mahler” in the subject line.

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