"Mind if I cut in?" - The dilemma of the unfinished work

[TheGSMoeller]

I have a phobia. The unfinished work that is finished by another composer. It's something that has plagued me for years and there are certain cases where I don't even want to hear the piece because I find very little of the original composer within the work.
Now I'm not claiming to be the authority on this issue, it's purely my opinion. But there are certain levels of this that I struggle with. And I'm hoping for proper discussion here rather than a right vs. wrong scenario. I'll choose a few works that cover the spectrum of the unfinished work...


Mozart's Requiem - I don't think I've ever really felt I was given the final answer on the origins of this fine work, (I thought F. Murray Abraham finished it  ), either way I hear Mozart in it, so it's not as much of an issue. But I have read that the Lacrymosa is as far as he got. If so, how much of the final movements truly belong to Mozart?

Berg's Lulu - No problems whatsoever, the 3rd act was never fully scored but was, I believe, fully realized in a piano reduction. It's all Berg.

Elgar's 3rd Symphony - Can't do it, this is not Elgar to me. I know he said..."If I can't complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one." but knowing that this only existed in "sketches" says to me that the work wasn't close to completion.

Ives' Universe Symphony - I love Ives, I mean I love Ives. But I can't fathom the idea that this work was even close enough to completion, or enough of the sketches were available to make a close representation of this work. I have two recordings of this piece, one is 35 mins long and in one movement, the other is 1 hour and 5 mins and in 7 movements. 

Holst The Planets - Pluto...wait, wasn't Pluto even taken out of the planet family? Maybe that explains it. Never mind.


What say you, friends? About the works I chose or others I didn't mention?
Even having issues with some of these works I do enjoy discussing this topic, and who knows I might change my mind on a few of them. 

[Karl Henning]

Great q.!

[North Star]

There's nothing incomplete about the Holst, whatever the status of Pluto is these days.

Art of the Fugue of course has that startling ending that is as abrupt as anyth

[kishnevi]

Bruckner 9.... Mahler 10....Turandot

For me it depends on two things:  how much (or more precisely) how little the person who finished the work contributed to the final product.  Did he merely orchestrate a short score or did he compose large sections based on composer sketches or even just what he thought sounded correct?  Or (more usually the case) did he do something in between those extremes?

second is how well accepted the completion is.  Try to find a production of Turandot that stops where Puccini left off and Alfano took up the pen...but I'm not going to give up one of my favorite operas just because I can't find a recording that has no Alfano in it.  (Never heard the Berio completion.  would be curious about that.)

[ibanezmonster]

Holst The Planets - Pluto...wait, wasn't Pluto even taken out of the planet family? Maybe that explains it. Never mind.

Kinda like saying a midget isn't human, but calling them a "humantesimal."

[TheGSMoeller]

There's nothing incomplete about the Holst, whatever the status of Pluto is these days.

I know, kinda a joke. 

[TheGSMoeller]

Bruckner 9.... Mahler 10....Turandot

For me it depends on two things:  how much (or more precisely) how little the person who finished the work contributed to the final product.  Did he merely orchestrate a short score or did he compose large sections based on composer sketches or even just what he thought sounded correct?  Or (more usually the case) did he do something in between those extremes?

second is how well accepted the completion is.  Try to find a production of Turandot that stops where Puccini left off and Alfano took up the pen...but I'm not going to give up one of my favorite operas just because I can't find a recording that has no Alfano in it.  (Never heard the Berio completion.  would be curious about that.)

Bruckner 9 is another. Good one, Jeffrey.
And I didn't know that Puccini didn't complete Turandot. Will have to research that one.

And your "just what he thought sounded correct?" comment is what I struggle with in these type of works. How accurate is that assumption? No matter how much research is done into this, can it still be considered what the composer would think?

[Moonfish]

A larger question is if we would have recognized (as listeners)  the work as unfinished if we were unaware of its status?

[TheGSMoeller]

A larger question is if we would have recognized (as listeners)  the work as unfinished if we were were unaware of its status?

Great question. And a hard one to answer.

But look a few posts up. I didn't know Turandot wasn't completed by Puccini, not that I know the work inside and out but the times I have heard it I never did wonder why it begins to sound different in some way.

[Moonfish]

Great question. And a hard one to answer.

But look a few posts up. I didn't know Turandot wasn't completed by Puccini, not that I know the work inside and out but the times I have heard it I never did wonder why it begins to sound different in some way.

Do you notice the difference in Turandot when you listen to it?

[TheGSMoeller]

Do you notice the difference in Turandot when you listen to it?

No.
Now it's not a piece I listen to on a regular basis, but have listened to Butterfly, Tosca and La Boheme quite a bit so I feel I can distinguish Puccini's sound. I do now read that the opera was completed just two years after his death, so perhaps Alfano was close enough to realizing the ending.

However just read this...

Alex Ross, in The New Yorker,[4] notes that a new ending of Turandot composed by Luciano Berio premiered in 2002[5] is preferred by some critics for making a more satisfactory resolution of Turandot's change of heart, and of being more in keeping with Puccini's evolving technique.

Very interesting.

[amw]

Luciano Berio's got a pretty good track record of making finished things out of unfinished ones, even as in the case of Rendering where there wasn't enough material left by the composer to even attempt a completion. I wouldn't be too surprised by that.

[ritter]

You can listen to the Berio ending in this CD:

[asin]B00013UKME[/asin]

Also, this performance of the full work from Salzburg uses the Berio ending, rather tan the standard Alfano:


http://www.amazon.com/Puccini-Turandot-Gabriele-Burchuladze-Salzburg/dp/B000CEV64I/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1414314633&sr=1-1&keywords=turandot+gergiev

It might be worth noting that the Alfano ending (such as we know it) is, apparently, abridged (following advice or pressure from Arturo Toscanini). I believe there is some old British broadcast recording presenting the full thing...

[NorthNYMark]

I have a phobia. The unfinished work that is finished by another composer. It's something that has plagued me for years and there are certain cases where I don't even want to hear the piece because I find very little of the original composer within the work.

[Note: I apologize in advance for a rather long-winded post]

This is kind of fascinating, especially as, in calling it a phobia (however tongue-in-cheek-ly), you have honed in on what I perceive to be a certain anxiety many (most?) of us seem to have about the coherency of the author.  This brings to mind a text I have admired for years: Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"  A response of sorts to Barthes's (even) more famous "Death of the Author," Foucault analyzes the author not as a specific individual, but as what he calls the "author-function." Among other things, he argues that we demand of an author's name a principle of consistency--if we were to discover, for example, a new text by Freud or by Shakespeare that seemed completely unlike their more well-known work, we might be tempted to leave it out of the canon, as in "It is by Shakespeare, but it isn't really Shakespeare." In some ways, the issue of works disowned by their composers relates to this--if Beethoven refused to give certain works official opus numbers, do they cease to be "Beethoven?"  If not, do we consider even the most unpracticed of juvenalia to be part of the composer's oeuvre?

Of course, this thread is about the opposite issue--something attributed to the composer that may not have been written by that individual.  I remember experiencing a certain amount of this anxiety before a performance of Bartók's Viola Concerto, which I knew to have been completed by one of his students--in my first live experience of hearing a Bartók work, how much of it will really be Bartók?  Yet, I also realized that this was irrational--either I would enjoy the work and performance or not, and this would be the case even if the work were composed by the single, known composer.  Why do we care so much about who the composer is, to the point that it affects our perception of the work itself?

This phenomenon reached an extreme, I believe, in the visual art world in the 1990s with what was known as the Rembrandt Research Project, in which an international group of scholars systematically attempted to determine, once and for all, which of the world's purported Rembrandts were actually by Rembrandt, rather than any number of his students.  Large numbers of paintings were "debunked," including such well-known ones as the Man With the Golden Helmet in Berlin.  Of course, to have a painting "debunked" was to have immediate financial repercussions, as insurance values for those works plummeted.  What I find fascinating is that, rather than reappraise the status of the Man with the Golden Helmet's actual artist, we instead devalue the work itself for not being "a Rembrandt." How is it that the author's name becomes of greater importance in determining the value of a work than the quality of the work itself (when one presumes that the author only developed that reputation on the basis of the quality of the works themselves)?

To conclude in terms of unfinished musical compositions, shouldn't we simply listen to each work without prejudice, and without any concern whatsoever for whether it reflects the vision of a particular composer?  To the extent that we find this difficult, why do you think that is?  Why do we attach ourselves so firmly to the idea of a unitary composer whom we feel we can "know" or "understand," or at least recognize? I think the answers to this question might relate to other musicological debates--for example, those surrounding the question of how "faithful" to the composer's presumed intentions an interpretation should strive to be.

[Cosi bel do]

Berg's Lulu - No problems whatsoever, the 3rd act was never fully scored but was, I believe, fully realized in a piano reduction. It's all Berg.

Well, by mere coincidence, I was listening to Lulu this evening. And I agree with these words.

Among the unfinished words, we could talk about Mahler's 10th symphony (really unconvincing except the Adagio, whatever performing version I hear). Even his 9th is unfinished in a way, when you consider all the changes Mahler did for and after premieres.

[ritter]

Well, by mere coincidence, I was listening to Lulu this evening. And I agree with these words.

Among the unfinished words, we could talk about Mahler's 10th symphony (really unconvincing except the Adagio, whatever performing version I hear). Even his 9th is unfinished in a way, when you consider all the changes Mahler did for and after premieres.

It is curious that some conductors will do the Cooke performing edition of the Tenth, while others (among them, leading Mahlerians such as Bernstein, Abbado and Boulez) never conducted it...

Another "completed" work (much less known) is Manuel de Falla's Atlántida...what we know today, should be referred to as Atlántida by Falla and Ernesto Halffter, as the latter's contribution to the end result apparently is as important as the former's...one way or another, Atlántida is a work that IMHO deserves much wider exposure than it gets...   The two complete recordings that exist are almost unobtainable these days...

[Cosi bel do]

Among Cooke's performing scores of Mahler's 10th symphony, it's also surprising that I feel more convinced by his first complete realisation (performed by Ormandy and Martinon) than by more recent ones (including the "definitive" Cooke III version, despite Rattle's recording).

It's funny Schubert hasn't been cited at all (even to dismiss the truly unfinished character of his unfinished symphony)

Biggest issue with an unfinished work maybe : what about the last fugue of the Art of Fugue ? Should it be finished or not ? And do you find different attempts convincing ?

Among striking examples, Turandot was already discussed, but let's not forget Borodin's Prince Igor, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron...

[ritter]

Among Cooke's performing scores of Mahler's 10th symphony, it's also surprising that I feel more convinced by his first complete realisation (performed by Ormandy and Martinon) than by more recent ones (including the "definitive" Cooke III version, despite Rattle's recording).

It's funny Schubert hasn't been cited at all (even to dismiss the truly unfinished character of his unfinished symphony)

Biggest issue with an unfinished work maybe : what about the last fugue of the Art of Fugue ? Should it be finished or not ? And do you find different attempts convincing ?

Among striking examples, Turandot was already discussed, but let's not forget Borodin's Prince Igor, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron...

I'm really not that familiar with the different Cooke versions...I do own the Testament issue with the first performance and the spoken comments on the completion, which I must listen to again soon...

As for Moses und Aron, have their really been attempts in earnest to complete it? AFAIK, performances that present the third act have been done so with spoken dialogue illustrated by music extracted from the previous acts... Apparently, not very successfully...

The Stravinsky final chorus for Khovanschchina is superb, on the other hand!

[Jo498]

I am not familiar with the details, but there is a plausible hypothesis according to which the "last unfinished fugue" does not belong to the collection.
I find it mildly irritating that it stops in the middle, but this collection is not supposed to be listened to in total anyway, so it does not really get in the way as I usually only listen to a bunch of the other fugues.

With Schubert, everybody has heard the b minor symphony since forever in two movements, so people do not seem to be bothered. The form was deemed so unsatisfying that when the fragment was played in concert for the first time in the 1860s they concluded it with the finale (I think) of Schubert's 3rd symphony!
Of course there is a somewhat plausible reconstruction with the piece from Rosamunde as finale, but unfortunately I am not very fond of that Entr'acte...

[jochanaan]

Art of the Fugue: We can't really know whether JSB considered it nearly finished, half-finished, or even less; the impression I get is that it could have gone on for maybe twice as long as it is and finished with something so masterful that it might have, well, defined what was possible in Fugue for all time.  It would be possible to finish it in a manner "like Bach," but we can't know what Der Meister might have done.

Bruckner 9: I know nothing of how much of the last movement was actually completed, but the unprecedented scale and intensity of the previous movements argue for a spectacular ending that only humble Anton could have truly finished (as opposed to merely "completing").

Mahler 10: Although this is "complete" after a fashion, it lacks Mahler's unmatched skill in orchestration.  The various performing editions likely all have something to recommend them, but again, we can't quite know what Der Meister would have done.  Still, it's better to have something of this symphony than nothing, or even than only Adagio and Purgatorio.

Schubert 8: I have seen the score to a Scherzo supposedly based on Schubert's sketches.  It remains a mere curiosity in my mind.

The Planets: Holst completed this in 1916; Pluto was not discovered until 1930.  Therefore The Planets is in no way incomplete.  (I tend to agree with the "not a planet" designation; Pluto's orbit is so different from those of the other planets that I've always wondered how it could be a planet at all.  If it somehow wandered closer to the sun, it might show up as a comet...)

And finally , Mozart's Requiem: "Domine Jesu Christe" and "Hostias" are, I think, based on Mozart's sketches; "Sanctus," "Benedictus" and the first part of "Agnus Dei" are newly composed, while of course the Requiem ends with a repeat of the musical material from the Kyrie.  F.X. Sussmayer, who finished it, was a pupil of Mozart, and apparently a worthy composer, but he was not Mozart, and one can sense a definite drop in mastery after Lacrimosa.  Still, if we believe the stories, the work had to be completed to fulfill the commission, and Sussmayer did as well as he could, possibly as well as anyone could have.  And the completed version is commonly accepted...