PMFアーティスティック マネージャー、ニックによるエッセイ [from Nick] を公開しました。2回シリーズで、クラシックの未完成作品について語ります（第1回）。 ※英文のみ
In 2023 I was involved in presenting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 with the SPCM fourth movement completion to audiences in Sapporo and Tokyo. The circumstances were unusual and the people involved in the preparations were in various locations on 3 continents. It involved revisions from the conductor, Maestro Thomas Dausgaard, almost entirely to the last 90 seconds or so of the 19½-minute finale of a 73-minute symphony. Clarifying those 90 seconds and preparing performance materials turned into a complicated, months-long project.
The Bruckner 9 finale turned out to be a great point of entry for thinking on the presentation of unfinished works in general. There are lots of problems with trying to “finish” a piece after the death of its composer, obviously, and there is quite the range of unfinished pieces, from the “completely unrecoverable” to the “maybe actually finished?”
Among them there are several works powerful enough to have entered the mainstream repertoire, their inherent problems ever in tow. You need this music in your life: Mozart’s Requiem, Bach’s Art of Fugue, Bartok’s Viola Concerto, Schubert’s B minor symphony, Mahler’s 10th symphony (each has multiple posthumous completions). The scale of Mahler 10 and its condition at his death are maybe similar to the Bruckner finale; it’s a big ordeal to make it presentable, even though so much of it was in place. The Mozart Requiem was left less complete than the Bruckner, though the debates around Requiem completions don’t seem as heated. Bartok’s Viola Concerto was not yet orchestrated and some of the material was in shorthand, which has resulted in different completions having some strikingly different moments. Schubert’s Symphony in B minor (D. 759) is performed so often and is so beloved that this almost goes without mentioning, but it is literally known as “The Unfinished,” and though many completions exist, audiences are often happy with just the 2 completed movements, as they do happen to offer a satisfying experience on their own (this quality being a blessing and a curse – more on that in the next post). Regarding Bach’s Art of Fugue, though there are lots of wonderful completions, my favorite way to deal with this one is just to play the notes as they are, torn off at the end, leaving a silent cry for more hanging in the air.
A sort of dark horse example is Berio’s “Rendering,” which is mostly just Schubert’s incomplete 10th symphony (D. 936a). It’s a great piece for stretching the mind a bit, offering both a clearer and a broader view of how a completion can work, what it means for a composer to take one on, and most importantly what the world is missing without it. Instead of trying to fill in the gaps in Schubert’s work seamlessly, as with this symphony’s other completions, Berio accents the gaps with distinct material – ethereally layered motifs from Schubert’s sketches and more, colored with a celesta (an instrument not invented until after Schubert’s death). Moments of shift from Schubert’s symphony to Berio’s anachronistic “filler” material, or maybe even more so from Berio to Schubert?, can be surreal. But this is exactly how he avoids the skepticism that can plague posthumous completions: how can we listeners know which notes are original and which were added? By showing us his work, so to speak, Berio clears our minds of any such questions, and though the approach is modernist, it paradoxically creates a flow that allows us to experience something of the symphony as it might have been. Overall the piece leaves a sort of kintsugi impression – kintsugi being the Japanese practice of accenting the cracks in a reconstructed broken bowl (etc.) by filling them in with gold, creating a new thing altogether, though it is still almost entirely “the bowl.”
There are works you can listen to that are probably forever beyond actual reconstruction, like Beethoven’s 10th symphony, the most recent completion attempt being done with AI in 2021, though there also exists a “hypothetical” reconstruction by a human, which necessarily takes a lot of imaginative liberties (there’s just not enough original material). It is unknown how much Sibelius had written of his 8th and final symphony when he burned it in his fireplace, but some sketches surfaced long after his death and have been performed as they are, beguiling little fragments, like Sapphic poetry. As with Sappho, Sibelius’ fragments have amassed a dedicated following, yours truly among them, though speculation on more material being credibly discovered/identified/stitched together into an actual symphony feels, to me, like hopeful fantasy. But to be clear, even such unrecoverable pieces – there are many many more – can be worth hearing, and if nothing else they help to develop a sense of the outer limits of completing such works.
On the other end of the spectrum there are works such as Schnittke’s 9th symphony, a personal favorite, which I have come to think may have been basically finished, the work of its “completion” being largely the act of transcribing the score. Before writing this final symphony, Schnittke had been hospitalized due to a stroke and was eventually declared dead, before a rather miraculous-sounding resuscitation. It was not his first stroke, nor his first death declaration. He was left physically incapacitated, and though right-handed was now forced to write with his shaky left hand. The resultant score is so nearly illegible that multiple composers failed to complete what they each considered the honorable work of transcribing it. Having seen photos of a few pages of the manuscript, the shake of his hand visible on the page, I would have called its transcription either “practically impossible” or “a lifetime project,” and I cannot imagine that the eventual successful transcriber, Alexander Raskatov, never did any highly educated and loving guesswork. It is also possible that Schnittke had planned to write another entire movement, though my personal guess is that maybe he did not. Anyway, we will never be able to say with confidence that what we have is in fact its complete form. But the symphony as we have it is a powerful, otherworldly journey. Thank goodness for the dedication of so many people in bringing it to life.
So then, we have this spectrum of completion, with the scattered fragments of Sibelius 8 on one end and the plausibly complete Schnittke 9 on the other. To which end is the Bruckner 9 finale closer? Very much the latter, without question.
My next post will be “On the Bruckner 9 finale.”