Unfinished scores left by the great composers often represent the height of their creative development; so, asks David Threasher, is there any point to the thankless task of trying to complete such works?
Unfinished works have long fascinated music lovers. After all, a composer surprised by death will often have been contemplating his or her most advanced work, delving further than before into the depths of his or her genius. Musicians tend not to play incomplete scores, so an intermediary is needed to assess the fragment and bring it to fruition as sensitively and as closely as possible to what can be discerned of the composer’s style and intentions. Whether it be reconstructing a motet from a missing part-book – fairly common practice among the early music fraternity – or projecting large-scale orchestral or choral works, often from the scantest sketches, the completion of unfinished works has become something of a thriving cottage industry over the past half-a-century or more.
Ever since the revelation that Mozart hadn’t fully completed his Requiem – sparking a bitter and protracted war of words in the 19th-century German music press – the final incomplete utterances of a range of composers, or even the abandoned ideas from earlier in their careers, have excited all manner of curiosity and comment. Mozart’s Requiem and the C minor Mass from a decade earlier, Bruckner’s Ninth, Mahler’s Tenth and Elgar’s Third symphonies, Puccini’s Turandot, Berg’s Lulu and Bartók’s Viola Concerto are all major repertoire works that often now appear under two names separated by a rubric such as ‘compl’, ‘reconstr’ or ‘elab’.
In fact it was Mozart’s Requiem that kick-started the current trend for the interventionist completion of fragmentary works. The eventual publication – as late as 1965 – of all the manuscript material connected with the work caused musicians and musicologists to reappraise Mozart’s intentions and to make often vituperative critiques of his amanuensis Süssmayr’s shortcomings as orchestrator and surrogate composer. This resulted, during the 1970s, in a handful of ‘cleaned up’ versions of Süssmayr’s supposedly faulty work and then, around the time of the 1991 bicentenary of the composer’s death, a flurry of radical reinterpretations, stripping away anything considered to fall short of Mozart’s genius and embarking again upon new completions from first principles.
The Requiem was long out of copyright (if it was eve
