Moritz Nahr Photo
Gustav Mahler
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra recently realized that it owns the rights to a piece of music that at one time was part of Mahler’s First Symphony.
According to San Francisco Symphony program notes, “The roots of his symphonic movement Blumine … stretch back to 1884, when it (or an earlier version of it) was one of seven movements of incidental music Mahler wrote to accompany … episodes from Der Trompeter von Säckingen … a popular, humorous epic poem by Victor von Scheffel. … Blumine next found a home in the early versions of Mahler’s First Symphony.”
While Blumine was part of Mahler’s First Symphony at the work’s 1889 premiere, it was excluded by the composer from the 1899 publication of the score.
“Once it was deleted from the First Symphony,” the San Francisco Symphony program notes indicate, “Blumine was effectively forgotten. Mahler gave the manuscript to his pupil Jenny Feld Perrin, and her family offered it for sale at a Sotheby’s auction in 1959. It was purchased by Mrs. James M. Osborn, who donated it to the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, which deposited it at Yale University Library.”
And “there it sat … until (musicologist) Donald Mitchell discover[ed] it” in 1966, Elaine Carroll, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s executive director, said.
Carroll said the New Haven Symphony was recently contacted by the Theodore Presser Company, a music publisher, which had realized it owed the New Haven Symphony about six years worth of royalties.
Carroll said her organization is trying to determine when the copyright to Blumine expires.
Adding further intrigue to this bit of historic trivia is the fact that longtime New Haven Symphony Music Director Frank Brieff, who died in 2005, performed and recorded a version — certainly against the composer’s wishes — of Mahler’s First Symphony that included Blumine. As Carroll pointed out, “Mahler did not (in the end) intend for it to be part of the symphony.”
In Missing movement? The provenance of Blumine in Mahler’s First Symphony, which he wrote for Colorado MahlerFest, Jeffrey Gantz indicated that “on April 19, 1968, Frank Brieff and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra performed the 1906 revision with Blumine inserted as the second movement … and they made the premiere recording of this hybrid score for Columbia’s budget Odyssey label.”
Asked if the New Haven Symphony has any plans, in light of this recent discovery, to present Blumine as part of a concert program, Carroll joked that her organization would earn money from such a performance.