I don't know this opera at all, Reiner, neither do I understand Russian, but I found that scene very moving. Thanks for the link.
I think I heard a trail on the radio for a Radio 4 programme about Mazeppa - perhaps on this week or last week. With Huw Edwards? It might not be of interest to someone already knowledgeable about it but I'll see if I can find it on the Schedule/LA.

MJ

Thanks Bobby, I got side-tracked and didn't find it myself. Last chance to Listen Again before the new programme tomorrow.

You didn't hear the BBC Phil do it on Sat night did you, FMJ? That was just one of my rather critical thoughts as I listened to the piece... (also an unfortunately similar moment in The Planets in part 1 that I might post on the appropriate thread...)

Exactly which notes would you change then, Andy?   

I'd forgotten the Butterfly chord and agree that it can sound wrong and not final but for some reason, not in every performance - presumably orchestral balance makes all the difference??

How about the last three chords of Mozart's A Musical Joke?

I find bare fifths very effective - like the beginning of Beethoven's 9th or the last chord of the first number in Mozart's Requiem.

FMJ,

I've always seen that theme as a yearning for the past which can never be again: an oasis of calm amidst the anguish, onslaught, sardony, and bleak resignation that permeate the rest of the work, perhaps in much the same way that the glorious theme which occurs early in Job establishes a mood of joyful radiance which is never to be fully recovered.

(As I think about it now, it's just struck me that much of the thematic material for the symphony relies heavily on groups of three notes - the very opening of the first movement a climb spanning a minor third, that of the second a chromatic climb through a second: the climbing phrase for wind and harp harmonics in the last movement back to a minor third, whereas the authoritarian tattoo of the second movement is three repeated notes with no vertical movement at all. That lush theme at the end of of the first is again basically steps of three notes, though the first phrase escapes the tyranny of the other sets of three by covering a fourth. Admittedly, the movement that seems to break this pattern is the scherzo, where the opening phrase of interlocking climbs through augmented fourths brings a new threat, and the winds' theme, based on journeys of a fourth, also contains repeated dotted figures which again just happen to be in groups of four notes, though the saxophone's plaintive jazzy wail returns us to the groups of three again.)