Putting Mahler In The Right Order

When Mahler wrote his almost unbearably bleak 6th symphony, he broke up the pervasive despair of the score with a beautiful, lush slow movement. Mahler originally intended the slow movement to be played just before the finale, but then switched it with the scherzo movement in the work’s first rehearsals. The new order remained the standard until 1963, after Mahler’s death, when the inner movements were flipped again, ostensibly because of ‘new scholarship’ on the work. “Now it has become clear that the transposition of movements was no mere mistake but a willful act of an editor, Erwin Ratz.”