"Composers Who Couldn't Finish What They Started"

Wow.  It's been a long time, but here goes:  An attempt to resume regular blogging.

I was motivated to write something after reading a blog post entitled: "Top 5 Composers Who Couldn't Finish What They Started."

Having started, but not finished, several blog entries over the past 8+ months, I thought I could certainly relate to this topic, but it turned out to be not quite as advertised.

The blog's title is probably deliberately provocative — being unable to finish what one started is usually a criticism, but the fact that this was presented as a "top 5" list suggested to me the possibility that it might be about composers who were so spectacularly bad at finishing what they started that they became famous for it, or it was possibly about some "top" composers (whatever that means) that struggled with completing works at times.

I doubted it would be the former — how could composers have achieved greatness if they were chronic procrastinators? — and hoped it would be the latter, because compositional struggles are a familiar experience to me, and I find it reassuring to read that even great composers can experience them.

But it was neither.

Instead it was one of those "top [any number] lists" that are rampant on the Internet these days, usually consisting of a numbered slideshow of pics with pithy descriptions/explanations for each. Some are clever, some are amusing, some are contentious, but this one was simply annoying.

The first thing you see in the blog entry is a graphic with these words: "UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES — Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar"

Okay, that's four names… Four is pretty close to five, but didn't the blog title promise five?  And those guys finished LOTS of works… Why is the anonymous blogger claiming they "couldn't finish what they started?"

Moving on, here is the text accompanying the first slide:

This week on Exploring Music we've discovered quite a few famous composers who left great works incomplete. Click on to discover our top 5 composers who didn't get the chance to finish what they started.

Whoah! Didn't get the chance? What the heck does that mean? Bullies stole their pens and manuscript paper? They were abducted by composer-hating street gangs and forcibly prevented from completing compositions? The U.S. military played deafening rock music outside their compounds 24/7, thus making composition extremely difficult? Zombies ate their brains?

Sadly, the topic turned out to be considerably less dramatic, of course; it lists five "top" composers who died before completing a particular composition. For what it's worth, I doubt there was ever a composer who didn't leave behind at least some unfinished work — sometimes, in the course of composing a work, we abandon huge chunks of music, perhaps because we decide it's not good enough, or it doesn't go in the direction we (or the commissioner) wished — but, by the logic of the blog post, this would apparently make us all "composers who couldn't finish what they started."

Beethoven, incidentally, is not on the list even though he is thought to have been working on a tenth symphony when he died.  And I like to think of him as a "top" composer.  An enterprising musicologist (Barry Cooper) has even gone so far as to "complete" (i.e., compose) Beethoven's Symphony No. 10 based on Beethoven's sketches, although it cannot be proven that these various sketches were actually intended for his 10th symphony, or, if some were, that Beethoven wouldn't have rejected them, because frankly, Cooper's "completed" work sounds pretty lame (there are recorded versions of this on YouTube, if you would like to judge for yourself).  But I digress…

Did you know that about 150 of Mozart's surviving works are incomplete (roughly a quarter of his total count of surviving works)? And yet, Mozart is also not on the list, even though he was working on his Requiem Mass in D minor (K. 626) at the time of his death (some portions had been completed, but others were fragments or sketches). He too was a "top" composer, according to many (but not Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, or Frederick Delius… Read more about his detractors in this entertaining blog post, if interested!).

There were probably many composers (perhaps most?) who died while composing something, and this may or may not be interesting — in the case of Mozart it has engendered considerable mythology (aided greatly by the play and movie, Amadeus) — but it seems a pretty silly exercise to select the "top 5" composers for whom this applied.

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Okay, here we go… In case you're wondering, the blog post lists the following composers' unfinished works:

     5. Mahler / Symphony No. 10 (the accompanying text cites Schoenberg, but misspells his name);
     4. Sibelius / Symphony No. 8;
     3. Elgar / Symphony No. 3;
     2. Bruckner / Symphony No. 9; and
     1. Schubert. No specific symphony of Schubert's is cited, but here is the entire accompanying text:

Schubert composed not one, but three unfinished symphonies. Perhaps because of his battle with syphilis and his diminishing sanity, Schubert is the most famous composer of incomplete symphonies!

La!  Let's just dance merrily on Schubert's grave while dismissing him as a syphilitic crazy man!

For what it's worth, syphilis has been proposed as the most likely cause of Schubert's death, while mercury poisoning (a common treatment for syphilis at the time) has also been suggested, but, to the best of my knowledge, we do not know the actual cause of his tragic and untimely demise (age 31); his death certificate indicates typhoid fever as the cause.

The reference to Schubert's "diminishing sanity" seems a cheap shot; there are reports of the composer drifting in and out of lucidity in his final days, as illness overtook him, but it seems flippant to characterize this as "diminishing sanity." From multiple accounts, the final stages of his illness came relatively swiftly. A friend, Josef von Spaun, wrote:

"I found him ill in bed although his condition did not seem to me at all serious. He corrected my copy in bed and was glad to see me and said, 'there is really nothing the matter with me, I'm so exhausted I feel as if I were going to fall through the bed'. He was cared for most affectionately by a charming thirteen-year-old sister whom he praised very highly to me. I left him without any anxiety at all and it came as a thunderbolt when, a few days later, I heard of his death."

More to the point, Schubert wrote his 8^th symphony in B minor, the "unfinished," six years before his death and wrote many other works in the intervening years, so it seems unlikely that "diminishing sanity" or "his battles with syphilis" were the causes of there being only two completed movements to this magnificent work.

Some have suggested that his 8^th symphony is complete as is, a two-movement symphony, but this seems unlikely to me. He had composed most of a third movement (scherzo and trio) in short score, although very little had been orchestrated; since no previous symphony had ever finished with a scherzo movement, it seems likely that his original plan was to add a fourth and final movement, typical of classical symphonies. My best guess as to why it was never finished is that, after completing what are arguably the best two symphonic movements he would ever write, he realized that the scherzo paled by comparison, and so he set it aside while other compositional work overtook him. Possibly he intended to finish it one day, but we may never know this for sure.

Further muddying the waters is the fact that Schubert gave the manuscript to his friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in his capacity as representative to the Graz Musical Society, for whom the work was written. "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 [Hüttenbrenner] 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" (this quote from Wikipedia article, "Unfinished Symphony").

Some friend!

But enough ranting about someone else's blog post! I'm actually glad I read it, because it spurred me to write my first blog entry in eight and a half months, and I am hopeful that a more regular blogging habit will ensue.

I may write about procrastination one day, since I am rather good at it, but not just yet…