What should be done with a musical work that has been left in an

incomplete state?

This question has plagued musicians for many years, with examples

such as Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and J. S. Bach’s Art of the

Fugue. Many attempts have been made to bring such works to completion,

but there are also those who feel that these musical fragments should

remain untouched. I certainly recognize the delicacy of this issue, but also

find value in completing unfinished music because it offers a way to

intensely study the style of a composer, it revives obscure pieces, and it is

a place of intersection for questions of authenticity tradition that are crucial

to the field of musicology. This is why I have spent the past year analyzing

and composing a reconstruction of Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A

minor.
 Left incomplete in 1876 when Mahler was a 16-year old student at the

Vienna Conservatory, the quartet consists of one complete movement

marked Nicht zu schnell and the first 24 bars of a scherzo movement.

Based on biographical research, analysis of the first movement of this

quartet, and study of chamber works that could likely have served as

models for Mahler’s own work, I composed a completion of the scherzo as I

believe Mahler may have.

I began my research by studying the issue of completion. Already,

the matter is complicated by the various motivations that may be behind the

task. For example, the German-Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-

1998) composed a completion of the same Mahler quartet which interested

me, but in an extremely free manner. He used the theme from the second

movement of the quartet as a point of departure for something not intended

to sound like Mahler at all. In fact, the resulting work is generally referred
to as a “Schnittke’s Piano Quartet in A minor (after Mahler).” My aims were

quite different from Schnittke’s: I completed the Scherzo of Mahler’s quartet

on the basis of studying Mahler’s own style at the time of its composition.

No matter the motivation, there are numerous arguments against

composing completions of pieces. One argument is that they contradict the

wishes of the composer; if the composer did not complete the piece, he or

she must not have wanted the piece to be completed. Another objection is

that any completion is an act of hubris and the person composing the

completion is claiming the same genius as the original composer. Even

more broadly and aggressively, musicologist Richard Kramer has argued

that whenever a fragment of music is completed the work is “debased and

deprived of is authenticity.”

This requires us to define authenticity. Sociologist Richard Peterson

provides six definitions of authenticity, and the two most relevant to the
issue of completing unfinished music are “credible in current context” and

“authentic reproduction.” An object that is credible in current context does

not claim or strive to accurately represent the object from the past, but

rather to be believable to the modern observer. “Authentic reproduction,”

on the other hand, suggests that the object in question was designed to be

just as it was at some specific point in the past. Historic sites, stylistic

musical performances, and gourmet meals fall into this category. Likewise,

I am not claiming to have discovered the rest of the Scherzo in Mahler’s

notebooks, nor am I claiming access to any original source material that I

did not have; I am presenting a possible completion of the movement

based on thorough research of Mahler’s biography, studies, and

compositional style.

There are further ways to justify completing unfinished musical works.

First, the fragment in question cannot be appreciated if it is not performed

due to its incomplete state. I quote musicologist Robert Winter: “It is easier

for the eye to take in a fragmentary canvas…than it is for the ear to make

sense of a musical work that breaks off before the end.” Second, the

process of completing unfinished music can be a valuable study in itself in

which we can gain fresh insights into style, form, and other musical

characteristics of that composer’s music at a specific time. With regard to

objection of hubris, I was able to avoid this issue in the case of Mahler’s

Piano Quartet since no one regards this early work as a masterpiece. At

16, Mahler was clearly a talented young composer but far from producing

the symphonic works that we associate with the peak of his creative output.

Moreover, it cannot be said that Mahler actively wished to discard this

quartet just because he did not complete it; in fact, a letter to his friend

Natalie Bauer-Lechner, dated June 21, 1896, implies that he regretted

leaving the works of his youth unfinished: “My mind was too restless and
unstable. I skipped from one draft to another, and finished most of them

merely in my head. But I knew every note of them, and could play them

whenever they were wanted—until, one day, I found I had forgotten them

all.”

I like to think that my completion of this piano quartet countered some

of the restlessness that Mahler believed he possessed as a student. I

began the completion process with an intensive study of the first movement

of the quartet, Nicht zu schnell, in order to analyze his treatment of motives,

form, and harmony. I studied the autograph manuscript of at the Morgan

Library and Museum in New York City, where I saw details such as binding

and changes in ink that were undetectable in photocopies or a high-

resolution photograph.

The first compositional decision with which I was faced was whether

the theme began by Mahler would continue or end where he stopped

writing. I decided to continue the theme in the piano based not only on

Mahler’s own thematic treatment in the first movement but also on the form

of the Intermezzo of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1, which is one of the

works that I studied as a model. In this movement, the strings state the first

theme before the piano enters and takes the theme, as you can hear in this

brief excerpt. (Excerpt Brahms Intermezzo) In this excerpt from my

completion, you can hear that I use this same approach to thematic

treatment (Excerpt Mahler Scherzo mm. 1-21)

Within the movement, I followed a standard Scherzo-Trio form—an

overarching ABA form. As I continued to compose more “original” material,

I incorporated motives from the first movement in accordance with Mahler’s

fondness for cyclic form in multi-movement works. Here is an example of a

recurring idea I noted in the first movement of Mahler’s Piano Quartet that I

recalled in my completion of the second. As you can hear in the second

movement, I took Mahler’s ascending sequence of the motive in the first

movement and applied it in the second. Excerpt (2nd mvt 28-downbeat of

40, 1st mvt 54- downbeat 67)

I presented a performance of both Nicht zu schnell and Scherzo to a

small audience, prefaced by a lecture outlining my research and process.

After the performance, I asked each audience member to complete a short

survey in which I interrogated their familiarity with Mahler’s works, their

understanding of the word “genius,” how closely they found my completion

of the Scherzo to align with the first movement, and their stance on the

issue of completing unfinished music in general. Of the nineteen surveys

that I collected, 100% of my respondents approved of the practice of

completing unfinished musical works. When asked how closely they found

the Scherzo to align with Mahler’s complete movement, twelve of the

nineteen audience members responded with fives (on a scale of zero to

six). It is impossible to know how the particular audience that I had at my

lecture-performance would have perceived and reacted to a completion of

a larger-scale, more mature work by Mahler. But it appears that works left

incomplete at earlier phases in a composer’s career are indeed more

widely accepted. If this is indeed a trend, the implications for the expansion

of completing composers’ unfinished early works are enormous.

I would like to thank the Office of Undergraduate Research and the

Northwestern Alumnae Association for sponsoring my project, Dr. James

Zychowicz for providing me with valuable sources for my research, and

Prof. Jesse Rosenberg for his guidance, time, and support throughout this

project.