Final Judging
From 19-23 June 1928 the 30 winning scores from the ten national zones were evaluated in Vienna by the International jury. This body consisted of one delegate from each of the zones plus an eleventh juror appointed in Vienna. The chairman was Alexander Glazunov; he was assisted by such luminaries as Franco Alfano, Alfred Bruneau, Walter Damrosch, Carl Nielsen, Franz Schalk, Max von Schillings, and Donald Tovey. The Polish delegate was Emil Młynarski; the eleventh, Viennese, delegate was Guido Adler. Since the deliberations of the jury were never published, they have been the subject of much rumour. It was agreed that all the completions of Schubert's Unfinished should be ruled out and the judging devoted only to the original works. The sole international prize was awarded to the Sixth Symphony of Kurt Atterberg. This was also the only work to receive a recording, and it was eventually reviewed with a fair amount of derision by international critics as a particularly weak and derivative specimen of contemporary music. It is clear that Atterberg's symphony was in direct competition with two other scores, namely Franz Schmidt's Third Symphony and Czesław Marek's Sinfonia, because both of these pieces - though they received no prize, no money and no recording - merited an 'honourable mention' in the final judgment. Other pieces may however have been involved in the final balance. Sources within the Columbia Graphophone company released unattributable stories to suggest that Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony, which Donald Tovey as British delegate certainly considered a masterpiece, was also evaluated, as well as a set of symphonic variations entitled Karma by the American Charles Haubiel. This account would square with a report in the New York Times (29 November 1928) which suggested that the jury were divided on four scores which were considered outstanding but eventually rejected as ‘in a modernistic vein inappropriate to the occasion’, and that Atterberg's Symphony was awarded the prize as the best of the others, with (it seems) five jurors dissenting and the deadlock broken by the casting vote of Glazunov. Yet Atterberg's Symphony No. 6 - though hardly the equal of Marek's, or indeed Schmidt's or Brian's works as a feat of symphonic thinking - is by no means the mere pastiche that it was represented as in contemporary reviews; and one might have expected that its rather prominent vein of polytonality would have rendered it equally ‘inappropriate to the occasion’.
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