Symphony No. 10 in F‑Sharp Minor

When Mahler died in 1911, he left a Tenth Symphony unfinished. On inspection, it turned out that two movements—a big “Adagio” and a strange, haunted little movement entitled “Purgatorio”—were nearly complete; the rest, however, seemed to be mostly confused sketches. The two movements were performed in 1924, and while the “Purgatorio” was hard to understand shorn of its planned context, the “Adagio” made a magnificent and profoundly stirring statement in its own right, and as such it has been performed ever since. But Mahler had insisted that the Tenth Symphony was essentially complete, and various attempts have been made to realise his sketches. The most successful has been the “Performing Version” by the English musicologist Deryck Cooke (he never called it a “completion”), and in recent years this has been performed and recorded increasingly often. Cooke’s version shows that the “farewells” of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde were not Mahler’s last words, and that he had begun to move stylistically and spiritually in new directions.