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Gustav Mahler and Universal Edition
Here you can find out why conductors choose the Mahler editions of Universal Edition and its partner publishers (Edition Peters and Boosey & Hawkes) to present the music of Gustav Mahler to their listeners exactly as the composer intended.
The world's best orchestras trust Universal Edition
What are the advantages of the Mahler editions of Universal Edition?
- Authorised by Gustav Mahler himself
- Mahler expertise for over 100 years
- State-of-the-art research
- Editions based on all available sources*: Sketches, particels, score drafts, engravings, performance materials, correspondence, private documents
- Based on intensive collaboration with the International Gustav Mahler Society
- Awards**
- All turning points practically arranged
- Handy format of the conducting score
- Excellently legible, harmonious notation
- Extensively informative, scholarly preface
*Gustav Mahler was as respected as he was feared as a relentless perfectionist throughout his life. After performances of his own works, he usually made revisions. This revisionary activity often concerned the clarification of phrasing and the refinement of instrumentation.
**Titan in the New Critical Complete Edition, for example, won the German Music Edition Prize BEST EDITION. With this prize, the Deutscher Musikverleger-Verband e. V. (DMV) honours the editorial achievement of this work.
Why UE Mahler material is the best choice
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1. Designed for practical use
The new editions are at the very highest scholarly level, and even those who are only interested in the practical realisation are also perfectly served by the new performance material - in an exemplary and unrivalled manner. In all these aspects, the new edition clearly differs from all other editions, some of which have only recently been published by other publishers.
2. Highest Demands
The new edition undoubtedly represents a new standard in Mahler research. And if one takes seriously the perfection and seriousness that Mahler himself pursued - and not only for the realisation of his own compositions - then one cannot avoid using only these new scores and the new performance material from now on.
3. Mahler expertise
The New Critical Complete Edition of the Works of Gustav Mahler is presented by the International Gustav Mahler Society in co-operation with Universal Edition and its partner publishers Edition Peters and Boosey & Hawkes.
As practical editions of the complete edition volumes, our editions offer a comprehensively informative, scholarly preface, a detailed revision report, practical performance notes, etc. The conductor will find what he is looking for here if he wants to deal with the work in more than a superficial way, because the UE score represents a kind of "summary" of all aspects associated with the work. This is due to the ambition of the New Critical Complete Edition of Gustav Mahler's works, which forms the basis here and whose conception is not least due to our initiative.
The International Gustav Mahler Society is the academic authority for my grandfather's work and Universal Edition is his trusted publisher.
Our publishing concept in relation to Mahler is easily explained: the highest possible quality based on the overall source situation. You have to know Mahler's way of working to understand the importance of first-class publishing work. After Gustav Mahler resigned as director of the Vienna Court Opera, he revised almost without ceasing. In co-operation with the International Mahler Society, we are the only publishing house to have one hundred percent access to the existing sources of the works published by UE. Mahler's great concern until the end was updating and revising his works. This has always been and still is our aim.
Even before one of his works goes to print, there are several stages in Gustav Mahler's work in which he makes changes or where mistakes may have been made that are perhaps never seen again later. It is therefore the task of a Mahler editor to compare all these stages with each other and to check again and again whether anything has been left over from the previous stage, or whether something has always been overlooked, or whether something has been changed in such a way that in the next stage it either no longer has any meaning or suddenly has a completely different meaning. All variants of a passage must be compared with each other, and only then can a decision be made as to whether the last one that he has decreed is the valid one - i.e. whether it reflects his last will and, above all, of course, whether it makes musical sense! - or whether something has been lost along the way that might contradict it. The decisions on all such cases are documented in detail in the Critical Report.
The Mahler study scores
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Discover the original Gustav Mahler editions from Universal Edition
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