In order to expand on what Ivor wrote above, I dug out my copy of the score to the Sinfonisches Präludium für Orchester (Edition Sikorski 1431, ©1981). The preface reads as follows:
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Gustav Mahler wrote his "Symphonic Prelude," a student work still displaying strong signs of Bruckner's influence, in 1876. There is now no trace of the original score, but a preliminary sketch for the score, apparently made by one of Mahler's student friends, is preserved at the Austrian National Library, where it bears the pressmark Mus. Hs. 28 208. The notes on orchestration which it contains give a broad indication of the composer's intentions.
As regards the authorship of the work, Paul Banks, in his thorough analysis and criticism of its formal and stylistic aspects (An Early Symphonic Prelude by Mahler, 19th Century Music, Vol. 3 No. 2, November 1979, University of California, pp. 141–149), has shown it to be almost certainly Mahler's, the same conclusion being arrived at by Donald Mitchell and David Matthews (Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, London 1980, pp. 305–308). Here I need point only to the formal parallels and manifest thematic similarities existing between the Prelude, the opening of Mahler's early Piano Quartet and the "Waldmärchen" in the first version of "Klagendes Lied."
The task of deciphering the somewhat tattered sketch and reorchestrating the Prelude was undertaken (at the request of Peter Ruzicka, intendant of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra) by Albrecht Gürsching, the Hamburg composer and musicologist. With great insight and understanding he prepared a further, more differentiated sketch in which he filled in the various instrumental parts and (by dint of painstaking comparisons with Bruckner's 3rd Symphony and other early works of Mahler's), succeeded in reconstructing the score itself.
The Prelude was first performed on 19 March 1981 by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, playing at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall under the direction of Lawrence Foster.
Jörg Morgener
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James
