Gustav Mahler: Die drei Pintos

Eduard Hanslick’s 1888 review of the opera

"What's going on with Die drei Pintos? Are they not at all to be brought to life?" So did I [Eduard Hanslick] question more than once Max von Weber, the spirited son of the composer during his stay of several years in Vienna. "Give up every hope," he repeated regularly. "We have tried all possibilities, and sought the counsel of the truest friends and the best musicians—out of the few sketches that my father left for Die drei Pintos, there is nothing to create, least of all an entire opera." As is widely known, Die drei Pintos is a comic opera that Weber began to compose after the completion of Der Freischütz based on a libretto by Theodore Hell. Weber's diary gives evidence of the enthusiasm with which he started this comedy and how he, distracted by other major commitments, always thought about its continuation. However, the unexpected invitation to compose a grand opera for Vienna [Euryanthe], and later, the commission of Oberon for London claimed the creative energy of Weber so fully that he did not return to work on his comic opera. Of the 17 numbers that the original libretto contained, Weber actually sketched only seven, more or less. A single-sided page is orchestrated in draft: the first 18 measures of the introduction and the ritornello for the chorus that follows; all the rest is only sketched in a very small, not consistently clear hand, sometimes in pencil. The efforts that Weber's family undertook after his death to make these drafts into a complete work (with the help of, among others, Meyerbeer) remained unsuccessful. "It is truly unfortunate," said the recently deceased Jähns, compiler of the fine Weber-Katalog, as he concluded his report on the sketches for Pintos, "that the Master had not at least orchestrated the first draft; that would be partial compensation for the irreparable loss. But the treasure cannot be found."

Now the treasure has, on the contrary, been unearthed. The grandson of the great composer, Freiherr Karl von Weber, a captain in the Saxon army, undertook a reworking of the old libretto, [and] Gustav Mahler, currently director of the opera in Budapest, [Mahler was in Leipzig from July 1886 to October 1889, and in Budapest from October 1889 to March 1891] assumed the realization and completion of the music. His task lay, first of all, in the instrumentation of the seven musical numbers sketched by Weber; then, he had to assemble for the other two-thirds of the current 20 numbers enumerated in the libretto, music from various, mostly lost compositions of Weber. The present Drei Pintos are thus actually one-third Pinto; and that is the sum total, despite the youthful enthusiasm of a certain Dresden critic. [Editorial note: Throughout the nineteenth century a rumor persisted that Weber had indeed completed the score; his student Julius Benedict even reported that he saw it.] With the exception of the Entr'act and the last Finale [actually, the Finale A, no. 20], which Herr Mahler composed with the partial use of some of the motives previously found in the opera, Weberian music [Webersche Musik] is essentially all that we come to hear in Die drei Pintos. As with the reworked Sylvana by [Ernst] von Pasqué and F. [Ferdinand] Langer [in 1885], Die drei Pintos is not as much an opera by Weber as, rather, one from Weber. It should be here immediately noted that the treatment of Die drei Pintos by Herr Mahler and Herr Weber is made with far more understanding and taste than the exceedingly forced Sylvana. The reader will easily see how and whereof the sketches of Weber became an entire three-act opera if we demonstrate the development of the plot in summary. [Hanslick continues his review with a summary of the plot and musical numbers. At the end of the review, he returns to an assessment of the work as he perceived it.]

On the occasion of the revised Sylvana, I expressed myself from an artistic viewpoint against such "completions," which juxtapose individual pieces from the "collected works" against the plan and likewise behind the back of the Master, in order to arrive at something double the size of the original work. The numbers brought together by Gustav Mahler in Die drei Pintos are pieces that Weber composed at various times for different purposes; some of entirely different texts, other for different situations; but, to be sure, all without the slightest thought for Die drei Pintos. This is a mechanical process, that practical concerns excuse, but in the interest of serious art, it cannot be defended. With this same method of compilation a talented conductor and an adept litterateur could also assemble from the music for the Ruins of Athens an "opera by Beethoven." Besides, a solution was always conceivable. The Viennese Burgtheater gave the unfinished Demetrius by Schiller as a fragment, and Grillparzer's Esther as a torso. If it were merely a question of a resuscitation of the original seven Pintos sketches by Weber, then those could have been performed in Mahler's orchestration, if only as a fragment which would have reached the length of Weber's Abu Hassan. An entire opera, of course, could not be attained in this way. Yet if it had to be reworked, Herr Mahler did it with undeniable facility. His instrumentation betrays a fine sense of the orchestral idiom and sounds entirely related to Weber. Certain characteristic figures of Weber were turned by Mahler to good effect, except that he repeated too often the running sixteenth-note passages in the violins; one hears these throughout the entire opera. The forceful use of brass, most often the trombones, sometimes the bass drum, in a light comedy is hardly Weberian. Only the plain accompaniment to Clarissa's aria [no. 10, "Wenn das Du doch vermöchtest"] stands out against the—at times—all too full orchestration; the song sways in the air without, as it were, a firm foundation. Very lyrical and showing careful orchestration—already with a suggestion of Wagnerian sound—is Mahler's "Entr'act" before the second act.

The assumption of novelty proved itself to be very favorable from the beginning. The fresh, cheerful lines, which flow through the first act, imparted as much to the audience. In the second act, one became annoyingly bored; in the third act, however, one was once again moved to great joy.

Translated by James L. Zychowicz and Salvatore Calomino

Carl Maria von Weber, Die drei Pintos: Komische Oper in drei Aufzügen,der dramatische Theil von Weber, der musikalische Theil von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, [1888]), ed. no. 2953, title page. Lithograph of the copyists’ score.

Die drei Pintos, beginning of no. 1, Ensemble, “Leeret die Becher.” Lithograph of the copyists’ score.

James L. Zychowicz is a musicologist with experience in teaching and publishing. He completed his dissertation on Mahler's music at the University of Cincinnati and has done research in Vienna through a Fulbright Scholarship; he has lectured in the United States and in Europe on various aspects of Mahler's music, and has published articles in the Journal of Musicology and other scholarly periodicals. Among his recent publications is the monograph Mahler's Fourth Symphony, in the series "Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure" by Oxford University Press.