Compositions Lost, Destroyed, Or Proposed But Not Composed

[Cato]

In writing privately to Karl Henning about Sankt-Veits-Tanz-Am-Rhein, a ballet which I composed c. 40 years ago and which is no longer extant, I thought I would share information about it with everyone, and then start a larger topic for discussion of works lost, destroyed, or proposed but not composed.

Thus we will no longer plague Karl's topic.

The ballet had at high points nonuple counterpoint, hence the 9 harpsichords. 3 bass clarinets, 3 English horns, 3 alto flutes, 3 bass flutes, 3 bassoons, and 3 krummhorns.   

Nine scenes as well: the score is long gone. R.I.P.  0:)

Saint Vitus Dance On The Rhein came from a chance encounter with a book in the University of Dayton library called Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages.  It talked of incidents where those afflicted by Saint Vitus' Dance catalyzed the mentally susceptible, and soon were joined by others from neighboring towns, resulting in impromptu festivals lasting days, which sounds very merry, although as one can imagine a good deal of crime and violence took place as well.

Amazingly, I found excerpts of the book online!  This passage intrigued me as the possible basis for the plot:


As early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at
Aix-la-Chapelle (i.e. Aachen) who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common
delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the
following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing
to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of
the bystanders, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell
to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme
oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed
in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered,
and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of
swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these
spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less
artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While
dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions
through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up
spirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterward asserted
that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which
obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens
open and the Savior enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious
notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their
imaginations.

For those who do not know or recall, I composed a not inconsiderable stack of music in my younger years, giving it up forever and destroying the works at some point in the 1990's, as their presence "tasked me" the way Moby Dick vexed Captain Ahab!       

The only exception to avoiding music paper was a request about 8 years ago to adapt a march by Joachim Raff from his Fifth Symphony for a wedding: so I boiled the march down for a church organ and composed a supersonic coda for it.   0:)

[Fafner]

9 (nine!) harpsichords? 



Was that for a tableux entitled "orgie of the skeletons on a tin roof?

[Gurn Blanston]

9 (nine!) harpsichords? 



Was that for a tableux entitled "orgie of the skeletons on a tin roof?

He was prescient in foreseeing the rise of the Family Brown; just a slight miscalculation on the quantity involved.

[Cato]

9 (nine!) harpsichords? 



Was that for a tableux entitled "orgie of the skeletons on a tin roof?

  There was a Totentanz quality to the concept!

[snyprrr]

Oh, you started a Thread about ME!

[Karl Henning]

He's proposed, but not composed.

[Karl Henning]

My Master's thesis at UVa was a (10'?) composition for chorus and wind ensemble, the first part of a projected five-movement cantata of sorts.  Musically, I don't think that first part worth recycling, let alone performing as it stands;  nor do I intend taking up the 'greater project', which I think was just my own private grandiosomania of the time.

[Most nearly] notably, one result was . . . my doctoral dissertation.  Having learnt how tough a sell is such a piece as was my Master's thesis, to any prospective chorus-master, my work-around (the history of my study of composition could be boiled down to a series of work-arounds, couldn't it? Oh, I can talk about it, now . . . .) was to lose the chorus, and write for three soli voices (and, again, wind ensemble).  The dissertation piece is a five-movement, 45' affair (so, a large-scale fulfillment, where the Master's thesis had been the first essay in a pipedream).

Musically, there is much that I own in the doct. diss., but for other reasons, I am happy simply to destroy it.  Rather than fuss over salvaging anything that I like in that piece, I should sooner just write a fresh piece, which I will like much better.

For the record, there are pieces even earlier than either of these, which I continue to perform (some of them, published, even).  So my overall feeling about the epoch is:  I knew how to compose even at the time;  these projects, though, were a valuable exercise, and if perhaps not worth preserving as artistic efforts, were an important step for my musical development.

[Cato]

Oh, you started a Thread about ME!

So tell us more!   

Musically, there is much that I own in the doct. diss., but for other reasons, I am happy simply to destroy it.  Rather than fuss over salvaging anything that I like in that piece, I should sooner just write a fresh piece, which I will like much better.

.  So my overall feeling about the epoch is:  I knew how to compose even at the time;  these projects, though, were a valuable exercise, and if perhaps not worth preserving as artistic efforts, were an important step for my musical development.[/font]

I was an autodidact in music, with the exception of guidance at first from my grandmother, a pianist whose repertoire began with the Greatest Hits of 1895 and who rarely ever hit a wrong note, and from a few others, most famously Alexander Tcherepnin.

My first composition at age 10 was The March of Charlemagne for piano, written in octaves     and lacking harmony    , which my grandmother in great confusion pointed out to me.   The melodic march was not particularly inventive, and although I kept it around for a while, I decided to throw it away when I was composing worthwhile things.

[The new erato]

Oh, you started a Thread about ME!

Inever hought of you as very composed?

[eyeresist]

With this thread title, I can't help thinking of Prokofiev. The list of compositions on Wikipedia has several opus entries depressingly marked as "unrealized".

Most notably, of course, the revision of the 2nd symphony which reportedly would have involved changing it from two to three movements.

A Piano Sonata No. 11 was also proposed. Apparently there is an incomplete Piano Concerto No. 6 - AFAIK it's never been recorded, so there's probably virtually nothing of it existing on paper.

[Zizekian]

Duke Ellington was planning an opera called Boola which was supposed to have told the story of African-Americans from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance. I don't think it ever made it out of the planning stage.

[Cato]

With this thread title, I can't help thinking of Prokofiev. The list of compositions on Wikipedia has several opus entries depressingly marked as "unrealized".

Most notably, of course, the revision of the 2nd symphony which reportedly would have involved changing it from two to three movements.

Fascinating, since the liner notes on the symphony usually say that he modeled the structure on Beethoven's 2-movement Opus 111.

Never to be forgotten under such a topic: Liadov.  I recall the notes from an old LP comparing him to the fictional Oblomov (the name of a novel by Goncharov), who is beset by the most paralyzing laziness that it takes him 40 or 50 pages to get out of bed.  However, some things were produced from unfinished projects: a planned opera (never really composed) apparently produced Kikimora.

Checking Wikipedia, I have discovered that the often repeated story that Liadov's failure to write a ballet for Diaghilev led the latter to offer the commission to Stravinsky is disputed.  It has a claim that there is no evidence that Liadov accepted such a commission.  The entry cites Richard Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition p.p. 577-578 as disputing the story.

Here are notes by Paul Serotsky with the story, which many of you probably already know:

The Enchanted Lake's exquisite perfumes, Kikimora's ability to ravage the vestiges of childhood fright-bones; these testaments to Liadov's exceptionally vivid aural imagination attracted Diaghilev like a fly to a jam-pot. However, Diaghilev was well aware that Liadov was both fastidious and - to put it bluntly - bone-idle. Hence, hedging his bets, whilst commissioning Liadov for his new ballet, the hard-nosed impresario retained as backup a virtually unknown but almost certainly more dependable composer. Wise move. The posters were already up when Liadov calmly reassured Diaghilev that the work was progressing well: "In fact, just this morning I bought some ruled paper." The camel's back snapped: Diaghilev contacted his backup who, presumably also aware of Liadov's foibles, had already been beavering away for a month. So it was, in 1910, that Liadov passed on the chance of a lifetime, and Igor Stravinsky scored a home-run with The Firebird.  

See:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/Programme_Notes/stravinsky_firebird.htm

I have come across the above story many times.  A myth?  If Liadov indeed never accepted the commission, none of the above makes sense.

[Karl Henning]

My 2¢ . . . the Second Symphony enjoyed something of an equivocal entrée, and it was quite a stretch in terms of his instrumental music.  Unlike a number of his other works, it never found its legs during the composer's lifetime.

The symphony and the ballet, Стальной скок (Le pas d'acier) came from the same period, a time of remarkable musical expansion for Prokofiev, I think.

Notably, in his efforts to repatriate to (now) the USSR, the ballet was a topical embarassment, as apparatchiki chided him for his Westernophile, fantasist view of the hardworking Soviet people.

Late in his life, no longer hale, and reeling from the formalist rigmarole of the 1948 Congress, I think the composer was apt to enjoy feelings of pride in the Opp. 40 & 41, and renewed disappointment that these scores went (apparently) nowhere.  Now, there was no way the ballet would enter Soviet musical life.  But the symphony now . . . what if he made a conciliatory effort to "rehabilitate" it? . . .

Obviously, I cannot pretend to get inside Prokofiev's head.  My unalloyed admiration for the Second Symphony disinclines me to the view that it 'needed' revision (as enjoyable as the result is in many ways, I am not sure that the Fourth Symphony 'needed' revision, either).  And as Cato indicates, the model of the Beethoven sonata was the core of the symphony's conception.  The 'plan' to revise the Second (which may have been musically no more than its inclusion in a sort of back-of-the-envelope list) strikes me as more a wistful wish that this old piece, in which he still had pride, and in whose merits he still strongly believed, might at last have an audience.

[pjme]

Edgar Varèse:

destroyed:

symphonic poem: Bourgogne ( written ca 1909)
performed in Berlin by the Bluthner orchestra December 15, 1910 cond. Joseph Stransky
score destroyed by Varèse in 1962.

symphonic poem "Gargantua" ( unfinished / after 1909)

opera: "Oedipus und die Sfinx"( incomplete / ca 1910-11 - sketches lost in a fire).

Sketched: Mehr Licht ( propably for orchestra), reworked as "les Cycles du Nord" ( unfinished?/ ca 1912)

André Jolivet : his opera "Bogomilé, ou le lieutenant perdu"( ca 1972-1974)
An orchestral suite has been prepared and orchestrated  from Jolivet's sketches by Michel Philippot.

P.

ps: not to forget both Debussy and Ravel who both dreamed of ,eventually worked on a lot of scores without finishing them.  Idem: Paul Dukas, Jehan Alain...

[PaulSC]

Another fascinating thread idea, Cato! The example that tantalizes me most is this one: "a lost collection by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Fugen und Praeambuln über die gewöhnlichsten Tonos figuratos (announced 1704), may have included prelude-fugue pairs in all keys or modes." (I quote from the Wikipedia entry on JS Bach's WTC.)

I recall a long list of "lost works" associated with Villa Lobos, although this discussion suggests that some of these belong in the "proposed but not composed" category.

[Cato]

Another fascinating thread idea, Cato! The example that tantalizes me most is this one: "a lost collection by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Fugen und Praeambuln über die gewöhnlichsten Tonos figuratos (announced 1704), may have included prelude-fugue pairs in all keys or modes." (I quote from the Wikipedia entry on JS Bach's WTC.)

I recall a long list of "lost works" associated with Villa Lobos, although this discussion suggests that some of these belong in the "proposed but not composed" category.

Many thanks for the Villa-Lobos link: so The Golden Centaur MS is still extant?

The IMSLP has this about the lost Pachelbel work: it might have been made part of a chorale book, Das Weimarer Tablaturbuch

Ewald V. Nolte and John Butt, in their article for Grove Music, say "The so-called Weimar tablature (ed. S. Schwenkedel, Arras, 1993), a manuscript of 1704 attributed on its title-page to Pachelbel, comprises 160 chorale melodies with figured bass, roughly half of which are accompanied by short introductory fugues based on the opening of the chorale. The tablature is clearly pedagogic, acquainting the organist with the art of harmonization and improvisation. As such, it is an extremely valuable document and the authorship of each fugue – given its simplicity – is largely irrelevant. Eggebrecht (1965), who was loth to attribute the whole collection to Pachelbel, on account of its uneven quality, noted that 16 of the pieces are reductions of known works by the master and six can be identified as works by his pupils. Suzy Schwenkedels, in her edition and commentary, is surely correct in attributing them to 'Johann Pachelbel and his school'."

See:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Kyrie,_Gott_Vater_in_Ewigkeit_%28Pachelbel,_Johann%29