Is it right to revive works withdrawn by their composers?

[Lionel Harrsion]

It was a good try, but I'm afraid the Fiver has eluded you on this occasion, Lionel!

As a defender of traditional punctuation, I admit that I do sometimes slip into schoolmaster mode, but I wouldn't presume to correct fellow music lovers on this list, least of all Vandermolen! I was just seeking reassurance, as any lover of Parry would, that his omission of the comma was not a typographical error!

Drat!  However, I concur with your opinion of Parry.  His output didn't just add to the store of beauty in the world but it also exercised a positive influence on those who came after him.  To my mind, that makes him a very significant composer.

[Dundonnell]

It was a good try, but I'm afraid the Fiver has eluded you on this occasion, Lionel!

As a defender of traditional punctuation, I admit that I do sometimes slip into schoolmaster mode, but I wouldn't presume to correct fellow music lovers on this list, least of all Vandermolen! I was just seeking reassurance, as any lover of Parry would, that his omission of the comma was not a typographical error!

Drat!  However, I concur with your opinion of Parry.  His output didn't just add to the store of beauty in the world but it also exercised a positive influence on those who came after him.  To my mind, that makes him a very significant composer.

A much better composer than Stanford too.....says he controversially

[vandermolen]

It was a good try, but I'm afraid the Fiver has eluded you on this occasion, Lionel!

As a defender of traditional punctuation, I admit that I do sometimes slip into schoolmaster mode, but I wouldn't presume to correct fellow music lovers on this list, least of all Vandermolen! I was just seeking reassurance, as any lover of Parry would, that his omission of the comma was not a typographical error!

I'm only too happy to be corrected! Sorry, I usually type these messages in a rush before my wife or daughter demand to use the laptop ( you get a sense of the family dynamics here  I think that I meant 'bad Brahms (with a capital this time) or Parry'. But I meant no disrespect to either composer I am a great admirer of Parry (especially the Symphonic Variations and Symphony No 5) - but I like my Vaughan Williams to sound like Vaughan Williams!

[chill319]

Personally, I should put Sibelius's bonfire (a virtual auto da fé for the work he had given the most of himself to) in the same class as Hindemith's attending Moses und Aaron in disguise. Culture wars, like all wars, have little to do with creativity, and they scar their standard bearers, sometimes superficially, sometimes deeply.

[semloh]

chill319, that's a tantalizing taste of a view you seem to have worked out in some detail - can you explain it a bit more? What do you mean by a 'culture wars', for example, and what is their relationship to the behaviour of Sibelius and others who destroy or suppress their own compositions?

[giles.enders]

There are a number of issues to be addressed here.  Fashions change and many composers chose to discard earlier works because they were writing in a style which they were not happy with or which those who dictate taste would have disapproved.  Some student works were not meant for wide publication.  There are any number of prescriptive competition pieces which the composer may not have chosen write except as a means to an end.(Prix de Rome).  If a composer has specifically withdrawn a work and didn't want it to be heard then it would be easy to destroy it.
I don't feel it is for others to censor works that remain either unpublished or withdrawn. Finzi's wife is an example of this.  She destroyed a substantial amount of Ivor Gurneys works, feeling they were not worthy.  These destroyed works could have given much insight into Gurneys mental state at the time of composition.
Someone mentioned Sibelius eigth symphony.  I do not accept it was ever written.  There is no evidence that it was except the verbal ones of his wife and a friend.  I think it is a cantankerous old drunks way of teasing the Finnish government so that he could retain his substantial pension.
What I feel is so wrong, is when a composer has left a fragment and some one else completes it and passes it off as the work of that composer, the most glaring recent example is the so called Elgar piano concerto.

[chill319]

I have read records of courtly composers complaining, as long ago as the 14th-century, of being considered back numbers as a new generation followed their own with new sounds and musical manners. That will never cease. Culture wars, on the other hand, create false oppositions between contemporaneous composers. The basis for such false oppositions is usually the result of excessive abstraction, resulting in the mistaken belief that creative responses to one culture's circumstances are not situational but somehow universal.

Briefly (with oversimplifications): When we look back at, say, the culture war over Italian style in 18th-century France, or the culture war between the classicists and the New Music advocates in 19th-century Europe, or the culture war between "tonalists" and atonalists/serialists during much of the 20th century, stark divisions blur in hindsight and we tend to see how many musical permutations were in fact practiced. For us it comes down to the success or failure of each individual work as it overlaps our ever expanding but ultimately personal taste. On the other hand, for the persons writing those works, the pressure to conform to an abstraction in a culture war could be intense and could not help but be an impediment to creativity, which is always alive and never abstract.

Among the most damaged were composers like Draeseke and Hindemith with, as it were, inspiring muses capable of assimilating both sides of a culture war. With Sibelius I feel the back-number syndrome plays a part; but based on all that can be inferred from slim evidence about the 8th symphony (it was large -- in effect his Ninth), I think S could not accept what he imagined would be its critical rejection _for all the wrong reasons_. If, as the record suggests, this scenario became an enormous psychological burden to him, then in my view he burned his manuscript for all the wrong reasons. Not long before that fire Ormandy or Stokowski (I forget which) had passed when invited to give the premier of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances.

[chill319]

In response to Gilles: you may well be correct in your assessment of the Sibelius 8th. However, I'm under the impression that Sibelius had his alcoholism under control by the 1940s. Also, IIRC the company that bound the manuscript of his 8th symphony billed him for three volumes.

[britishcomposer]

Someone mentioned Sibelius eigth symphony.  I do not accept it was ever written.  There is no evidence that it was except the verbal ones of his wife and a friend.  I think it is a cantankerous old drunks way of teasing the Finnish government so that he could retain his substantial pension.

Giles, there is an article by Nors S. Josephson, published in 2004 in 'Archiv für Musikwissenschaft', Jahrgang 61, Heft 1, pp 54-67 'On Some Apparent Sketches for Sibelius's Eight Symphony'
Here is a preview:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4145409
The final paragraph, not shown, is worth quoting in full:

'Given the abundance of preserved materials for this work, one looks forward with great anticipation to a thoughtful, meticulous completion of the entire composition. A painstaking, conscientious undertaking would restore at least part of Sibelius's ultimate musical legacy, one the composer labored over for at least ten years before apparently completing it in 1938.'

I had some hopes for the last batch of the complete BIS edition - an 8th Symphony, possibly realised by Aho, would have been a 'worthy' ending. 
Now that the last release has been announced all hopes have vanished.

[Ilja]

What I feel is so wrong, is when a composer has left a fragment and some one else completes it and passes it off as the work of that composer, the most glaring recent example is the so called Elgar piano concerto.

Dutton calls it 'Robert Walker's performing realisation of Elgar's Piano Concerto from the composer's sketches, drafts and recordings', just like the Third Symphony is branded as a 'realisation' by Anthony Payne. Nothing wrong with that, although Dutton could have been clearer in pointing out that there is no such thing as 'Elgar's Piano Concerto'. However, I rather enjoy it.

[chill319]

The best _online_ source I know for info on Sibelius 8 is http://www.sibelius.fi/english/elamankaari/index.htm

If anyone knows a better link, please share it.

Among the details at the above link:

"A receipt confirms that the eighth symphony was already at the transcription stage in the summer of 1933. At the beginning of September, Sibelius's copyist Paul Voigt actually sent 23 pages of the score of the eighth symphony to Sibelius, who expressed his satisfaction and wrote: 'There should be a fermata at the end. The Largo continues directly. The whole work will be about eight times as long as this.' "

Also: "The composer Einar Englund heard from his tutor Martti Paavola that Paavola had visited Kammiokatu in 1940, and that he had been allowed to look into Sibelius's safe. Paavola recollected that the safe contained 'several scores, one requiem, one symphony, most likely the eighth, and also some symphonic poems'."

The bonfire burned more than a symphony.