# Unfinished Symphonies



## georgeputland (Jun 21, 2014)

Hello

I am writing a play and I'm looking for some pieces of classical music that were unfinished as the composer died or lost interest, but were never completed by someone else.

What I am looking for is that feeling at the end of the piece that you can tell it hasn't been finished.

Two examples in which you can clearly hear this is:

Mozart's Requiem





Bach's Contrapunctus XIV





Some help to find other recordings where you can hear the unfinished nature of them would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

George


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony.

There is much to digest there in the way of drama. Mahler's last completed symphony, the Ninth, ends with a devastatingly beautiful "farewell" to what seems like not only life but his music (the tonal European tradition) itself. The Ninth was composed just as Schoenberg was taking over. But on his deathbed, Mahler seems to have rethought his final words, and he hastily sketched out a Tenth Symphony which seems to recant his final words from the Ninth and present a more optimistic look forward (and backwards at his legacy).

Good luck with your playwriting.

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By the way, you'll learn that the Mahler Tenth has been completed by other composers, but there are also completions of the two pieces you list. The same goes for Schubert's two unfinished symphonies, the Seventh and the (famous _Unfinished_) Eighth.

Another most famous "unfinished" symphony is Sibelius's Eighth, which apparently is either lost or was destroyed. The musical community wishes the former, and that the piece will be recovered someday. But you might find an interesting story in the Sibelius final symphony which has gone missing.

Let me add one more: Eduard Tubin, Unfinished Symphony No. 11


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

Elgar *third* falls in to the "had to be finished by others" category.. Bruckner Ninth, Glazunow Ninth, Tchaikovsky in E flat Symphonies, Scriabin's "*Mysterium*" qualifies in this category as well!

There are a few of us who consider Schubert's *Eight* a perfectly finished symphony, he just stopped when he saw that adding a third movement (as convention would have it) would not make the it any better!

One of those unfinished works that never cease to boggle my mind is Charles Ives *Universe Symphony*, it has been finished and put on disc, but after hearing it I can't help but thinking that the completion was not fully successful (Centaur Record/Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra u, Gerhard Samuel)

/ptr


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

- Pettersson 1st (finished by Lindberg, only recorded as such)
- Bruckner 9 (the finale fragments have been recorded, likewise various versions by other composers)
- Sibelius, presumably 8th Symphony: the fragments have now been recorded
- "Shostakovich 16th" - a fake
- Schubert 7th, fragments 
- Stenhammar 3rd
- Beethoven 10th
- Borodin´s 3rd

Also:
Berg Wozzeck-Sonata for piano, fragment (Pöntinen)


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

SONNET CLV said:


> Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
> 
> There is much to digest there in the way of drama. Mahler's last completed symphony, the Ninth, ends with a devastatingly beautiful "farewell" to what seems like not only life but his music (the tonal European tradition) itself. The Ninth was composed just as Schoenberg was taking over. But on his deathbed, Mahler seems to have rethought his final words, and he hastily sketched out a Tenth Symphony which seems to recant his final words from the Ninth and present a more optimistic look forward (and backwards at his legacy).


This is so incredibly wrong, so factually distorted in every detail that I barely know where to begin. I only wish that I didn't see the same misconceptions so often.

Mahler's Tenth is a completed work in structure. All evidence points to the fact that he would _not_ have revised it further, except to add orchestration and some counterpoint as he wrote the full score. Let it be known also that he would have altered the orchestration of the Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde if he had lived to give their premieres.

The Ninth does not end with a farewell to life, nor anything else. This is nonsense that has been grafted on by Bernstein and others who reinterpret Mahler as prophet. Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony in the summer of 1909, nearly two full years before he died. It is true that Mahler was aware of his health problems, but the closest he had come to death was in 1900, in an episode which apparently prompted the funeral march that opens his Fifth. In 1909, he was not aware that he would die only two years later. Period.

There are important events in Mahler's life which precipitated the change in his style, of course. The death of his daughter affected him very deeply, as well as the loss of his position at the Vienna State Opera and his unwillingness to go back to his old summer retreat (where he had composed the last several symphonies). This, combined with his poor health, would be enough to explain the different color given to his late works, Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, and the Tenth, without resorting to over-the-top speculation about a farewell to life. The Ninth ends in D-flat major, and if the movement strikes some as sad, well, so does the Adagietto from the Fifth, which I also fail to understand.

As for a farewell to music, it is true that Mahler was slightly baffled by the music of his younger friend Schoenberg (e.g. the famous comment about the D minor quartet), but he in no way saw this as being the "end" of anything. When on one of his walks with Brahms, he had famously expressed his belief that music was able to evolve and live on in the face of the older composer's pessimism. We know that Mahler was familiar with the score of Schoenberg's infamous Second Quartet, the last movement of which is sometimes called the first "atonal" piece, though he was not in Vienna to attend the premiere. He sent a letter to the composer, telling him that he read the score with fascination, though he found it difficult to understand. Lest this be thought to be mere polite courtesy extended to a friend whom he wanted to flatter, consider that he refused to extend the same to Bruno Walter, whom Mahler respected more than any other as a conductor, but thought nothing of as a composer (which caused a rift in their friendship at one point). While he attended Schoenberg premieres and defended his music in public, he would not encourage Walter's attempts at composition at all, in any way.

Furthermore, there is no "tonal tradition" as separate from an "atonal tradition". There is one tradition only that contains both. Remember that the _word_ atonality didn't even exist until nearly a decade after Mahler's death, at which time it was used to apply to Mahler's music, as well as that of Schoenberg, Reger, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Strauss.

And Schoenberg was not "taking over" in 1909 or 1911 or any other time around then. His influence was next to nil aside from the music of his students and possibly Mahler. He would have been thought of simply as a crackpot who wrote a piece every once in a while that would inevitably cause a scandal (such as the D minor quartet, Pelleas und Mellisande, or the Chamber Symphony). He had never been performed outside of Germany and Austria (I think the first performance he received elsewhere was that in in 1913 in Paris of his Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, which didn't cause a riot of any kind and which a critic referred to as "musical cubism"). I would say Schoenberg's influence was limited to his immediate circle until after Pierrot lunaire at the least, at which time he attracted the interest of Stravinsky and Ravel.

The Tenth Symphony was not written on Mahler's deathbed, it was written at his new summer home, the same place where he had written the Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde. Nor was it sketched hastily, although it was written relatively quickly over the course of a few months (which was not necessarily unusual for Mahler, who tended to be able to work quickly once his inspiration started). The complicating factor is that it _was_ written during a time of great emotional crisis, with the latter three movements in particular apparently coming after the revelation of Alma's infidelity.

But after finishing his work on it for the summer and overcoming his crisis, he did not suddenly collapse and die, but rather went off to Munich to rehearse and conduct the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, then back to New York to conduct the Philharmonic's next season. It was the following March that he collapsed and degenerated slowly until his passing in May.

I would also take issue with the idea that the Tenth is a more optimistic work than the Ninth. To me, on the contrary, it seems far more afflicted than the earlier work.



SONNET CLV said:


> By the way, you'll learn that the Mahler Tenth has been completed by other composers, but there are also completions of the two pieces you list. The same goes for Schubert's two unfinished symphonies, the Seventh and the (famous _Unfinished_) Eighth.


The difference between Mahler's Tenth and these is that any completions of Schubert, Mozart, and Bach (Bruckner's Ninth, as well) require conjecture on the part of the editor extending to the structure of the composition itself, whereas Mahler's work is complete from start to finish.


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## Guest (Jun 22, 2014)

Wagner never even finished his 2nd symphony. Lazy sob.


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