Unfinished symphony

This article is about the musical term. For the 2001 documentary film, see Unfinished Symphony.

Several (classical) composers left fragments of symphonies that for various reasons could be considered incomplete or unfinished.

The archetypal unfinished symphony is Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, written in 1822, six years before his death. It features two fully orchestrated movements. While it seems clear from some sketches that Schubert had intended to create a traditional four-movement symphony, this has been the subject of endless debate. Schubert wrote the symphony for the Graz Musical Society and gave the manuscript to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in his capacity as its representative. However, Hüttenbrenner did not show the score to the society at that time, nor did he reveal the existence of the manuscript after Schubert died in 1828, but kept it a secret for another 37 years. In 1865, when he was 76 (three years before his death), Hüttenbrenner finally showed it to the conductor Johann von Herbeck, who conducted the extant two movements on 17 December 1865 in Vienna, adding the last movement of Schubert's 3rd Symphony as the finale. Music historians and scholars then toiled to "prove" the composition was complete in its two-movement form, and indeed, in that form it became one of the most popular pieces in the late 19th Century classical music repertoire, and remains one of Schubert's most popular compositions.

The rediscovery of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony led to a flurry of interest in other lost, rejected, or unfinished works, such as those by:

• Ludwig van Beethoven:
  • Symphony No. 10: A hypothetical work, assembled by Barry Cooper in 1990 from fragmentary sketches left by Beethoven.
  • There was also a reconstruction attempted of an early incomplete symphony.
• Alexander Borodin
  • Symphony No. 3: Borodin drafted only two movements of this work, which were completed for publication by Alexander Glazunov.
• Anton Bruckner:
  • Symphony No. 9: Only the first three movements survive in completed form, though sketches for the fourth movement exist. There have been a number of completions made of the fourth movement, but most conductors opt to perform and record only the first three.
• Norbert Burgmüller
  • Symphony No. 2: Only the first two movements were finished. The third movement, a scherzo, was finished and orchestrated by Robert Schumann.
• Edward Elgar:
  • Symphony No. 3: Elgar left a mass of sketches for the four movements of this potentially major work, with a few passages fully scored. A highly creative performing version was achieved in 1997 by Anthony Payne.
• Gustav Mahler:
  • Symphony No. 10: Mahler left a continuous draft of this five-movement work, with the first and third movements more or less fully scored. These two movements (Adagio and Purgatorio) were prepared for publication by Franz Schalk and Ernst Krenek in 1924. Various orchestrations and performing editions of the entire symphony have been made since the 1960s, including that of Deryck Cooke (1960–64), subsequently revised with input from Berthold Goldschmidt, Colin Matthews and David Matthews and a sparer, brass-prominent version by Joseph Wheeler.
• Carl Nielsen
  • Symphonic Rhapsody: Nielsen made an attempt to compose a symphony in F major 1888, when he was 23 years old. However he only completed the first movement, which later got the title Symphonic Rhapsody. It was performed twice, but Nielsen never composed the rest of it. Instead he started composing what would become his first symphony in G minor, which is famous for being the first symphony in history that changes key and ends in C major. See progressive tonality.
• Franz Schubert, (apart from the archetypal 8th):
  • Symphony No. 7: This was composed in 1821 in full-score format though only the opening of the first movement is fully scored and much of the work is a single line. Completions by John Francis Barnett, Felix Weingartner and Brian Newbould exist.
  • A "grand symphony" was announced by Schubert in 1824. Scholars long suggested other compositions as "outlines" of this elusive grand symphony, which was also referred to as the "Gastein Symphony". Since the 1970s it has been known that Schubert was in fact referring to starting work on his 9th Symphony.
  • Yet another symphonic sketch from 1828 has been reconstructed as a three-movement work and is often referred to as his "Tenth" or "Last" symphony. (It is believed to be the work that is indicated by a reference to the 'Last Symphony' (Letzte Symphonie) in a contemporary obituary of Schubert.)
• Jean Sibelius:
  • Symphony No. 8: Heroic searches for the sketches of Sibelius's 8th, announced during his life several times, have been made, but any sketches were probably destroyed by the composer.
• Wilhelm Stenhammar:
  • Symphony No. 3: Stenhammar worked on his Third Symphony in 1918-19 and achieved a draft of a first movement (including a seven-page fragment in full score) and sketches of three other movements. The full-score fragment of the first movement was edited with a concert ending by Tommy B. Andersson and first performed in 1991.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:
  • 7th symphony: What is now generally known as Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3 was based on sketches for a symphonic work, that would have become his 6th symphony, if the composer had not abandoned the work and commenced a completely different symphony, the Pathétique. Sergei Taneyev built the Piano Concerto version on these sketches – more faithful to the original, Semyon Bogatyrev produced the Symphony version, now sometimes called "Symphony No. 7".
• Eduard Tubin
  • Symphony No. 11: Tubin was working on an Eleventh Symphony at the time of his death in 1982. He had completed and partially orchestrated the first movement; the opening 10 bars of a second movement also exist. The orchestration of the first movement was completed by Kaljo Raid in 1987 and this movement has been performed and recorded several times.

Other "unfinished" "symphonic" works that came into the spotlight from the late Romantic era on, include:

• Johann Sebastian Bach
  • The Art of Fugue, Bach's ultimate and unfinished work, left many questions, despite having been published by his sons shortly after his death. Until the late Romantic era it was seldom heard: it was considered an "unplayable" theoretical exercise - there even was no certainty which instrument(s) it ought to be played on; but it was brought to public attention in the early 20th century performed by a symphonic orchestra, the score being "completed" and "orchestrated" by Wolfgang Graeser.

Postmodern ("PoMo") composers have also contributed to the "genre" with deliberately "unfinished" works:

• Boudewijn Buckinx
  • In the years 1991-1992 this Belgian composer "completed" nine unfinished symphonies (premiered 1993).

Georges Bizet's Roma Symphony is sometimes described as "unfinished", but this is misleading. After eleven years of tinkering (1860–1871), with a partial performance in 1869, Bizet could still not produce a version that truly satisfied him. However, the latest version of the symphony was published posthumously in 1880, and is a complete work in the sense that all the movements are fully scored.

On a humorous note, Peter Schickele, instead of writing an unfinished symphony, wrote what has become known as the Unbegun Symphony; he was "born too late to write the first two movements."

See also

• Curse of the ninth
• List of symphonies by name