Gustav Mahler’s own music was greatly influenced by his conducting career. An exacting, demanding maestro, Mahler worked to achieve musical clarity in each of the works he conducted. Over the span of his career, his knowledge of orchestral technique grew considerably, and Mahler revisited his older works to apply his newest techniques to them. For each performance, Mahler added slight modifications, or Retuschen, to the printed scores of his works.
As a result, Mahler’s scores were in a constant state of change, and his revisions yielded multiple different versions of each work. When Erwin Ratz and the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft set out to create definitive performing versions of Mahler’s works in 1955, they would have to determine which revisions were appropriate to include and which were not. Ratz and his team adopted the editorial practice of Ausgabe letzter Hand, which defines the author’s final written revisions of a work as correct. This approach is particularly appropriate to Mahler when considering Mahler’s assertion that his latest revisions superseded all prior revisions.
This paper discusses Mahler’s evolving orchestral technique, how he incorporated his newest techniques into his and other composers’ works, and how editors incorporated these revisions into a modern edition.