Completing Mahler’s Piano Quartet: A Study of Unfinished Music, Ethics, and Authenticities

Abstract

Performers and scholars have argued for generations over what should be done with musical works that have been left incomplete by their composers. Though many attempts have been made to bring such works to completion, some scholars feel that these fragments should remain untouched because the pieces in question were left incomplete during the composer’s own career. With this debate in mind, I undertook a study and completion of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, a piece for which Mahler composed a complete first movement, Nicht zu schnell, and twenty-four bars of a second movement, Scherzo, when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. I began by analyzing Nicht zu schnell in order to understand Mahler’s treatment of motives, form, and harmony. In addition, I studied contemporary works by Schumann and Brahms. Based on my analyses, I then composed a completion of the Scherzo in a style that is, in my opinion, idiomatic of Mahler. After a performance of my completion, seventy percent of the audience responded with five on a scale of zero to six when asked in a survey how closely my Scherzo aligned with Nicht zu schnell. One hundred percent of the listeners ethically approved of the task of completing unfinished music. Adding to the discourse on musical completion, this paper addresses the musicological debate surrounding unfinished music, discusses my process of completing Mahler’s quartet, and assesses public reactions to the ethical issues, such as hubris, that often arise when an alternate composer completes an unfinished work.