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Published: Thursday, 28 November 2024 at 09:21 AM
The pianist who’s unearthed a lost Mendelssohn masterpiece… and five other magical musical discoveries
Far too often, I hear from colleagues, friends, and students the statement: “There’s no point in making an effort to search for unknown ‘classical’ works; after all, anything of real value has already been discovered, and whatever was forgotten was likely forgotten for a reason…”
It’s probably true that the “verdict of history” filters have generally worked quite effectively over the centuries, and most of the “worthy” works are indeed performed, recorded, and only a click away from any of us. But sometimes these filters’ holes were simply too large, and some valuable works and composers slipped through. and so, those of us who nonetheless insist on searching for, and presenting, musical treasures hidden from view manage to enrich our world, making it more diverse and interesting.
Rediscovering a lost classic from Mendelssohn’s peak period
But even amongst the numerous ‘lost’ works I have been involved with, I never imagined that I would have the privilege of helping to bring back to the stage a hidden treasure by Felix Mendelssohn himself! And not juvenalia or a trifle, but an important work from his best, mature period.
The work in question is the original version of Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles’s Fantasie and Variations on a theme by Weber. This missing piece, co-written by two of the era’s greatest piano virtuosi and based on a work by another celebrated pianist-composer (Carl Maria von Weber), was created for a charity event held in 1833, under the auspices of the British Royal Court.
The highlight of the occasion was to be a composition for two pianos and orchestra, which the two musicians were invited to prepare together. This piece was based on Weber’s March Bohemienne (Gypsy March) from his incidental music to the play Preciosa, a highly popular piece in London during the 1830s.
Due to their hectic schedules, the two men could only meet a few days before the event, so they based the work on joint improvisations, somewhat like a “jam session” in a modern-day jazz club. The performance was an uproarious success and led to a second event a few months later, for which they prepared a more refined version based on their original improvisations.
The manuscript disappeared after the second performance
And that’s where the story was interrupted. The manuscript disappeared after the second performance, never to be retraced in their lifetimes. Sixteen years later, Moscheles decided to write a new, significantly different version of the work, which he published in a limited edition. The publisher, however, mistakenly (or perhaps deliberately…?) labelled it as a collaborative work by both composers, a misattribution that lasted for generations.
For almost 200 years, the original manuscript was considered lost – until it finally, amazingly, resurfaced, in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 21st century. It was later discovered that Felix Moscheles, Ignaz’s son, had given the manuscript to the legendary Russian-Jewish pianist Anton Rubinstein when he visited London.
Rubinstein had brought it to Russia, where it eventually disappeared into his personal archives. Professor Daniil Petrov of the Moscow State Conservatory has reconstructed the work, using the most advanced forensic tools of ink analysis and paper analysis, dismissing later additions and layers added to the original manuscript post factum.
‘These musical gifts don’t come along often’
After a laborious process, the newly constructed version was authenticated by the Saxon Academy of Sciences and given the number MWV-O9 in Mendelssohn’s catalogue, created for his 200th birthday in 2009. And we, the world, had a ‘new’ major work by Mendelssohn!
These musical gifts don’t come along often, but when they do, there is a truly major find that sets the music world abuzz, and inspires those of us who love to hunt for these hidden gems. Keeping this in mind, here are five of my favourite amazing finds from the last hundred years…
Five more amazing musical discoveries
1. Vivaldi’s back catalogue
In 1926, a treasure trove of 15 volumes filled with Antonio Vivaldi’s compositions was discovered in a monastery in the Piedmont region near Turin. These included 300 concertos, 19 operas, and around 100 vocal works. It was a discovery that shook the music world and led to a complete reassessment of Vivaldi – the scope of his work and his significance in the history of music.
Vivaldi, who during his lifetime was a famous and admired figure in vast parts of Europe, died penniless, with most of his music unpublished (much of the time by preference: he simply preferred to keep the scores close to his chest on his extensive travels as a violinist and Kapellmeister, fearing unauthorised distribution and forgeries — a common practice at the time).
Thus, he sank into oblivion after his death, and the vast majority of his works disappeared. It’s hard to imagine what the Baroque repertoire would look like without the immense wealth of Vivaldi’s compositions, many of which were rediscovered in that single event that completely changed our understanding of this giant and his era.
Here is Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus, RV 807. This exciting composition was identified as recently as 2005! The voyage of rediscovering Vivaldi is still going on…
2. Works from the Theresienstadt Ghetto
The Theresienstadt Ghetto was a concentration camp where a large portion of Austrian and German Jews were sent and where they remained for relatively long periods (sometimes two-to-three years) until their eventual transport to Auschwitz for extermination. During this time, the elite of Central European Jewish culture was concentrated in this camp, including some of the greatest musicians, writers, poets, actors, and painters of the era.
They managed to maintain an astonishingly vibrant cultural and intellectual life there, under the most horrific physical and emotional conditions imaginable — initially in secret, and later openly, once the Nazis realised the tremendous propaganda value this could provide. Through cultural activities, the Nazis transformed Theresienstadt into a “model camp,” bringing delegations from around the world to see how beautiful life supposedly was in “Hitler’s city for the Jews”… It was a horrific show, that ended with all participants in this surreal play being sent to their deaths.
The scores of works composed in Theresienstadt were meticulously hidden: in walls, basements, attics. They were gradually gathered and sent to closed archives in the Eastern Bloc, as the official policy in these countries was to hide the Jewish Holocaust. Only in the last years of the Soviet Bloc did individual works by Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann, and (from another camp), Erwin Schulhoff, start to emerge.
The trickle turned into a flood after the Bloc’s fall, opening the door to a whole stream of composers termed “composers in exile.” Today, the music world is filled with festivals, symposia, books, research papers, and exhibitions focused on the phenomenon of composers from the era who were silenced and suppressed. Much of it thanks to the revision that swept through the music world around the rediscovery of the Theresienstadt Ghetto composers.
A fine example of one of these rediscovered works is the Piano Sonata by Gideon Klein. This tantalising work was first published as late as in 1976. The Yad Vashem holocaust museum gave it to my mother, the pianist Naomi Lev, who recorded it for Israeli Radio soon thereafter, in 1979 – probably one of the first recordings in the West, if not the first of all, so I had the privilege to discover Klein already as a child:
3. The rediscovery of Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga
Arriaga, who in his painfully short life was known as the “Spanish Mozart” or “Basque Mozart,” was born exactly fifty years after Mozart (on the very same date!) and died ten days before his twentieth birthday. Immediately after his death, his family collected his manuscripts and returned them to his hometown, Bilbao, where they were buried in archives.
- Arriaga features in our article on great composers who died young
Only with the rise of Basque nationalism and the search for Basque national heroes in the 1970s was there a renewed interest in his works. Yet even then, his character remained enigmatic, with few materials available about him and his oeuvre. Only in 1989, thanks to an academic research project conducted at, of all places, the University of Nevada’s centre for Basque Studies, was the path opened for the rediscovery of Arriaga’s works and a reassessment of his importance.
String quartets, symphonies, the opera The Fortunate Slaves, vocal music: all of these revealed to us a fresh new voice in music history, at the intersection between Classicism and Romanticism, and told the extraordinary story of one of the greatest child prodigies of all time.
Here is Arriaga’s Symphony in D minor. It may be written by a teenager, but it already shows complete mastery of the orchestral form:
4. Shostakovich’s satirical cantata
Shostakovich was one of the most intriguing yet controversial composers in the West during his lifetime, largely due to his association with the Communist regime and his apparent cooperation with the oppressive totalitarian authorities in the former Soviet Union. Gradually, researchers began to point to hidden subversive elements in his works. Was he a collaborator? A dissident in disguise? Perhaps both?
Just before the fall of the Soviet Bloc, Shostakovich’s work Anti-Formalist Rayok was smuggled to the West. He composed it in 1948, close to his public denouncement by Stalin and his culture chief Andrei Zhdanov.
Publicly, Shostakovich beat his chest and sought forgiveness. But privately, secretly, and at great personal risk, he composed his true response to Stalin and his cronies: a satirical cantata, depicting a parody of a party meeting where Stalin, Zhdanov, and other officials pretend to instruct the Soviet league of composers on how music should sound in the workers’ and peasants’ paradise of USSR.
The work, filled with symbolic musical quotations mocking the Bolshevik reign of terror and Stalin in particular, provided the long-sought “smoking gun” proving Shostakovich’s true views, opening the door to a reinterpretation of many of his works and the messages encrypted within them. The work was first performed 41 years after having been well-hidden IN the composer’s archive, at a public concert at Washington D.C, conducted by the legendary cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich — a prominent regime opponent himself.
5. Haydn’s first, great cello concerto
Sometimes a single yet exciting discovery can make the repertoire of particular instruments look so much better! This was the case with one of the most prolific composers in music history, many of whose manuscripts were scattered across Central Europe – Joseph Haydn.
The existence of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C was known from his own catalogue drafts, but the score was considered lost. Then, in 1961, 200 years after it was composed and 152 years after the composer’s death, a copy of an unknown cello concerto was discovered in the archives of the National Museum in Prague. Initially, the concerto was thought to be a forgery or imitation, but after comparing it to Haydn’s thematic catalogue its authenticity was confirmed, and today it is a staple repertoire piece for every cellist!
- The MultiPiano’s new album, “Unplayed Stories…in 40 fingers”, featuring first recordings by Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Liszt and Schubert, is available now on Hyperion – listen here.