E-Mail This Article to a Friend Finishing touches Were Mahler’s first thoughts his best? BY JEFFREY GANTZ

When is a work of art finished? And who decides what the final version is? Shakespeare reworked some of his plays when they were revived for new productions, or perhaps for different audiences. Dickens provided two endings for Great Expectations; Balanchine made changes in Apollo and Mozartiana. The movie that plays in theaters isn’t always the same one that reappears on the DVD, or as the director’s cut. Jazz by its very nature doesn’t have a finished form, and with the advent of the remix, pop music is beginning to follow suit.

Classical composers have always felt free to rework their compositions, whether to command a larger audience or on the advice of friends or because the music didn’t sound the way they expected when they wrote it down. Sometimes two versions survive, like the Dresden and Paris versions of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Schumann rewrote his Fourth Symphony, and the new version is what’s almost always performed, but a few conductors prefer the original. No one performs the final version of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony; the consensus is that he should have left well enough alone.

Gustav Mahler made changes in many of his symphonies after they’d premiered. Few composers have agonized so obsessively over getting it right; yet 100 years later, questions linger over his decision to remove the Blumine movement from the First Symphony and his switching the order of the inner movements in the Sixth. A trio of new recordings — Zsolt Hamar and the Pannon Philharmonic doing the 1893 "original" version of the First (Hungaroton); Benjamin Zander and the Philharmonia doing the 1906 "final" version of the First (Telarc); Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra doing the "authentic" version of the Sixth (Channel Classics) — put those decisions back in the spotlight.

Mahler’s First Symphony had a long genesis. Its seeds were a set of four songs — Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer") and a trumpet serenade he wrote in 1884; they grew into a five-movement "symphonic poem" that premiered in 1889 and after two further performances and some rewriting became the four-movement symphony that’s now standard. The trumpet serenade became the second movement of the symphonic poem and in 1893 was given the name Blumine (after an essay collection by the German Romantic Jean Paul and referring to flowers), but that’s the movement Mahler eliminated. He gave conflicting explanations, the most persuasive being that Blumine was naive and sentimental and "not symphonic." There might have been other reasons, however. Blumine, like the Gesellen lieder, was written for Johanna Richter, the blonde soprano with whom Mahler had been infatuated in 1884 and who shared her last name with Jean Paul, at the time his favorite writer. (For a time the symphonic poem bore the name Titan, after one of Jean Paul’s novels.) By the 1890s, Mahler’s personal life had moved on, and perhaps he felt his symphony should as well. The catch is that the germ of Blumine, the opening six-note trumpet phrase, sprouts in the other movements and especially in the finale, where the lyric second theme flashes back to the hero’s youthful amour before he moves on. In the four-movement symphony, there’s nothing for the finale to flash back to.

Back in 1982, Hungaroton released a five-movement version of the First by Iván Fischer infamously labeled the "original 1889 Budapest version," though the 1889 score has not survived and the LP offered just the standard 1906 version with Blumine dropped back in. The label does hardly better this time out: the liner cover trumpets Zsolt Hamar’s performance as the "Weimar version, 1893," whereas in fact Mahler conducted his symphonic poem in Hamburg in 1893 and Weimar in 1894; and the conductor in his liner note is unaware that there even was a Hamburg performance. But that’s the version on this CD, and the members of Pannon Philharmonic, which is based in Pécs, the southernmost town in Hungary, play it as if they’d never heard it before. Which turns out to be a blessing: they provide steady tempos (no stampeding at the end of movements), a dance-like pulse, a balance that doesn’t favor the strings, and the odd quirk that tells you they’re playing the music and not the notes. The trumpet in Blumine is stiff and the Funeral March needs more room, but this one puts the magic back into Mahler.

Benjamin Zander has performed Blumine, and done it well, with New England Conservatory youth orchestras, and he recorded it with the Philharmonia for this Telarc release, but the movement didn’t make it onto the CD, Zander having decided he preferred the standard four movements, as do most of his peers. A number of conductors, among them Simon Rattle, have included Blumine as an appendix on their recordings, and if that had been done here (there was room on the disc), listeners would have had the opportunity to judge for themselves. Blumine and the entire genesis of the symphony also get short shrift on Zander’s bonus discussion disc, which is the usual mix of inspired, inspirational, and insipid, with the odd inaccuracy: we learn how Mahler incorporated the cuckoo’s song into his symphony, and we do get to hear a snatch of Blumine flickering in the finale, but a weirdly literal interpretation of Mahler’s "Under Full Sail" description of the Scherzo substitutes for a discussion how he transformed the Austrian ländler. The performance is more emphatic and thicker-textured than Hamar’s, with some cogent phrasing but also some vulgarity and a lot of digging in rather than moving on. It’s the standard "mature" approach to this symphony, and Zander executes it more gratifyingly than most, but perhaps what Mahler wrote wants something younger and fresher. And though the Gesellen lieder make an appropriate complement, even those for whom Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is too mannered may find Christopher Maltman insufficiently heroic.

Twentieth-century Mahlerites grew up on the four-movement First, the one Mahler published and authorized; the 1893 version didn’t even turn up till 1959. But they also grew up on the Sixth Symphony with the Scherzo second and the Andante third. Mahler had conceived the work and even published it that way; he changed his mind during rehearsals for the premiere and performed it with Andante second and the Scherzo third, but it was understood that before his death he’d changed his mind again and reverted to the original conception. Now it seems clear that he didn’t. The original conception allows the Andante, a transcendent Alpine pastoral, to allay the Halloween horrors of the Scherzo; the revision is an altogether tougher and less comforting creature. Did Mahler make the change for that reason? Or was he afraid that the Scherzo didn’t afford enough contrast when following the Allegro energico first movement? He never explained his decision.

The trend among major Mahler conductors is to accept this new "authentic" version: Claudio Abbado on his live 2004 Berlin Philharmonic recording; Michael Tilson Thomas in recent concerts. John Barbirolli always conducted it that way, and Simon Rattle has from the beginning of his career. Iván Fischer’s intriguing reading is short on neurosis, drama, passion, angst, and most of all transgression, and he doesn’t always have the right gear changes, but this performance, in Budapest’s new Palace of Arts, is never bland or homogenized and has an unmannered delicacy to go with its elegiac timbre. The Andante, performed second, makes a modest impression. For years, conductors, perhaps subconsciously, "solved" the Scherzo-Andante problem by turning the Andante into an Adagio and giving it more weight. Listening to Leonard Bernstein or Klaus Tennstedt might make you wonder whether they rather than Mahler hit on the right answer.