# Lost and found



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

There are quite a few works that were lost, or at least forgotten. Later they were found, or resurrected, and became valuable parts of the repertoire.

If you know of such, please post here with a brief story of the circumstances.

One found item per post, thanks!


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Prokofiev's 4th piano concerto, for the left hand, was written for Wittgenstein of Ravel left hand fame. But Wittgenstein wrote to Prokofiev that he didn't understand it and would never play it, and so it sort of fell off the edge of the world for awhile. The score disappeared for some time, but some pianist--I don't recall who--turned up with a score, playing the piece, some 25 years after it was written. First performed in 1956 in West Berlin.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Just a note on Prokofiev/Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein insisted on retaining sole performing rights, whether he played the work or not. So if he didn't perform a work he commissioned, tough luck for the composer. The Wiki article on him has more details.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Paganini's 4th Violin Concerto was long lost until 1936 when a bunch of papers from the Paganini estate was sold to a rag dealer. He happened upon the original orchestral score, but no violin part was found. A collector called Natale Gallini bought the score and carried out a search for the violin part eventually finding it among a collection of a composer, Gioanni Bottesini, who had died in 1889. Gallini presented the complete score to his son Franco, a conductor and soon after, in 1954 Arthur Grumiaux made the first recording of the work.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Bruch's Concerto for Two Pianos was born as a reconstruction of a Suite for Orchestra and Organ. He presented the 2-piano score to the American pianist Sutro sisters, who premiered the work with Stokowski and the Philadelphia in 1916. The Sutro sisters began to rework and simplify the concerto to suit their modest skills, and then copyrighted their version as a new composition and turned over the score to the Library of Congress. Shortly after, it was mysteriously withdrawn and disappeared for 50 years. When the last Sutro sister died in 1970, her effects were auctioned off and a trunk of items was purchased for 11 dollars by a pianist. When he discovered the manuscript in the trunk, he summoned another pianist and they played through the piano parts. They then bought the orchestral parts from others who had been at the auction, and reconstructed Bruch's original concerto from the marked-up Sutro version. This from the CD notes of the Labeque Sisters/Bychkov/Philharmonia version on Philips.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Sibelius - _The Wood Nymph _- composed in 1894. It was premiered the next year but never published and only had a few performances between then and 1936. Because it not been published it was forgotten about and only rediscovered in 1995 when it was given its first modern performance and recording.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Haydn's 2 Cello Concertos, for different reasons. The Concerto in D was only presumed to be Haydn's until 1951 when someone finally found an autographed score. The Concerto in C, however, was lost until 1961 when its score was found. I'm not sure which is more famous today, but it seems to me the Concerto in C is more performed.

So before 1951, no one was sure if Haydn wrote _any _Cello concerto, let alone 2.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

There's one composer whose entire corpus of works was lost. Jan Dismas Zelenka, a fine Czech Baroque composer, was a contemporary of Bach, who much admired his music. He was at one point a guest in Bach's house and Bach had his music performed at his church.

Zelenka died in 1745, and the Dresden royal court (where he was employed) refused to release his music. Telemann asked to publish one of his major religious works but was turned down by the court. As his contemporary composers died, he was forgotten.

Smetana rediscovered some of his works in the Dresden archives in 1863 and had one performed, but that sort of music was out of fashion then and didn't get any traction. Much later, it was thought that his works had been destroyed in the Dresden bombings in WWII, but they were found intact some years later. They've gradually gained popularity and now all have been published and there are multiple recordings of most.

Anybody interested in Zelenka and his unique and vigorous brand of counterpoint can do worse than start with his Trio Sonatas (sometimes called Quartet Sonatas) Nos. 1-6. There are several fine recordings.

http://www.amazon.com/Zelenka-6-Tri...id=1463630496&sr=1-1&keywords=zelenka+sonatas


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

The Aria/Cantata "Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' ihn" BWV 1127 surely is one of the most recent findings.
Written in October 1713 for the birthday of the Saxe-Weimar Duke Wilhelm Ernst, it was lost & unknown till 17 May 2005, when Michael Maul, a researcher from the Bach Archive, discovered it in Weimar.
That was indeed a great day for Mr Maul! It's easy to imagine his emotion when, with trembling hands, he browsed through the precious manuscript for the first time since Bach's times.
It was then recorded by Koopman, Gardiner and Suzuki. 
One of the most liveliest works by the young Johann Sebastian.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor (his only violin concerto) was composed for Joseph Joachim in 1853 towards the end of Schumann's life, but it was never given an opus number (and so is known as WoO 23). Joachim thought the work unworthy of the composer and likely the result of his developing 'madness' and so conspired with Clara to have it never see the light of day for the rest of the 19th century. Interestingly, Schumann forgot that he had previously composed the theme that he had used for the Langsam/Largo to the extent that he used it to compose some variations thinking that it had come from the spirits of Mendelssohn & Schubert.

In 1937, a copy of the score was sent to Yehudi Menuhin, however events occurred that prevented him from giving the first performance of it. As well, it required substantial editing to make it playable. Its first full performance with orchestra was in 1937, 84 years after its composition!

Fwiw: IMO, the concerto is overall a work worthy of being in the active violin concerto repertoire, though not necessarily a masterpiece. On the other hand, the Langsam/Largo is a standout over and above the other movements. Exquisitely beautiful!


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

Possibly one of the most well-known (at least for the renaissance music lovers) lost & found in recent years is the case of the _Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno,_ for 40 and 60 voices, by Alessandro Striggio (father).

The only survived copy has been laying in the Bibliothèque nationale de France for almost 3 centuries, where the work was attributed to a certain "Alessandro Strusco" and the "40 voices" was amended to "4 voices" (the copyist was possibly thinking the "40" was a mistake)

Here's the whole story.


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## Guest (May 19, 2016)

The *Bach* "cello suites were definitely forgotten until *Pablo Casals* stumbled upon them in some music shop or other.


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## Johann Sebastian Bach (Dec 18, 2015)

One of the choirs I conduct has a tradition of resurrecting forgotten Renaissance works and performing them in the country in which they were written.

When I was appointed to the choir, a visit to Prague was just a few months away, so I was under great pressure to find an unpublished Czech work for the choir to learn.

I was delighted to find a 19th century transcription of the Renaissance period mass _Ich stundt eine Morgen_ by Andreas Hammerschmidt, which he'd written in Prague. There were no contemporary editions and the version I found was in a scholarly, rather than a performing, edition.

So I began the transcription (a process conducted in great haste due to the deadline of our travel date). Normally, transcribing a work involves the music being read from the original page, then being heard in the brain and then going onto the manuscript paper. I didn't have time to "audition" the work, so I simply dashed through the 40-page score without any critical evaluation.

I felt a sense of achievement when I presented the work to the choir at rehearsal - but that feeling lasted for just a few moments. When we started to learn the music, the dreadful truth dawned on me - the work had stayed dormant for 200 years simply because it deserved to. It was unremittingly dull.

The opening imitative melody of the Kyrie produced a chord of F major, which remained for the rest of the next couple of pages (with a brief excursion to the dominant chord). Hoping that later movements would produce more interest was futile - it was a _cantus firmus_ mass and the raw material (the cantus firmus itself) was a dreary, repetitive melody.

My new choir members were kind about my error - the remaining repertoire for the tour was by Victoria, Byrd and Tallis, so there was plenty of juicy music to sing.

Bizarrely, the mass was received with some interest in Prague. A group of musicology students from the university were keen to record every work written in the city, so they questioned me at length about its origins (it was completely unknown to them). One student tentatively enquired whether I might leave a copy with the university when our tour finished. In a gesture of great generosity (and pragmatism), I left the entire set of scores with them.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Speaking of Prokofiev, his whole Second Piano Concerto was lost during the tumult of the Revolution, so he had to re-write it from scratch -- in Chicago!


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

As noted by someone in another current thread, Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, which had to be reconstructed from the parts because the composer destroyed the score after its disastrous premiere.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Although violating the OP, here's a quick two-fer of near-losses with a lot in common.

Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto was first performed in March 1807. Despite a good initial review in the press, it was seldom if ever heard again in Beethoven's lifetime.

His Violin Concerto was premiered in December 1806. The performance was not considered a success and it shared the piano concerto's fate.

Fortunately, the piano concerto was brought back to life in 1836, after which it never left the repertoire. The violin concerto was similarly revivified in 1844, with 12-year-old Joseph Joachim as soloist.

So, both works were restored to us. And who did this? Felix Mendelssohn of course.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

My musicologist friend, I will call her Elvira for now, _resurrected _a Glazunov score that was never performed again for about 100 years, a small cantata that was premiered in 1898 for the centennial of the Pavlovsk Institute (which no longer exists today) for women's choir and piano 8-hands. Those kinds of works for anniversaries and stuff usually are only played once anyhow and are not for any other purpose later. Its always been registered in his oeuvre as Op. 63, but it basically was non-existent, disappeared, never recorded by any later Soviet performers. Why of all his works this one was never recorded I cannot guess why, because literally everything else was done (except for unpublished works like his incidental music for _Masquerade_ and that's now been recently unearthed and performed/recorded too). Anyhow, Elvira got some assistance from musicians at the St. Petersburg Conservatory to premiere it in March 2015:


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Despite severe official criticism of his musical direction, Shostakovich completed his 4th Symphony in 1936. However, he withdrew it from performance for reasons that are still discussed but certainly had to do with the general atmosphere. The manuscript was subsequently lost in the war.

After Stalin's death, there was a renewed interest in the symphony. It was restored from surviving orchestral parts used in the 1936 rehearsals and finally performed at the end of 1961 under the direction of Kyril Kondrashin, some 25 years since its completion.

It was premiered at about the same time as Shostakovich's 12th Symphony, which was unfavorably compared with it, at least in the West.


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