Raiders of the Lost Composers

[john_christopher]

Saint-Saens, it would appear, had a tendency to lift ideas from other composers.  The grand tune from the first movement of the 2nd Piano Concerto is said to have come from an unpublished Tantum Ergo of Faure.  The big waltz at the end of the 4th Piano Concerto has drawn comment for its similarity to a popular waltz of the day by Offenbach.  So much for possibly lifting from sung composers.  Did he do it to unsung composers?

Well, consider the famous organ hymn that opens the final section of the 3rd Symphony.  A few years ago our own California Jim commented that it sounded suspiciously like the opening theme of Anton Rubinstein's Fantasy in C, Op. 84, a work long consigned to the dusty, unused shelves of a few music libraries.  The work has, however, been graced by a single recording.  Checking this (I've yet to locate a score), I found Jim was right.  The Saint-Saens is simply the parallel third above (or minor 6th below) the Rubinstein: same key, same note durations for the most part. 

   The familiar Saint-Saens, from...what was it...1883?...has the following, all in quarter notes except as noted:

e'' d'' e'' c'' d'' e'' g'' a''   g''  (this last a dotted whole note), followed by
g'' a'' f'' e'' f'' d'' e'' f'' g''   d'' (the last again a dotted whole and final E-F as eighth notes).

Now the Rubinstein, from 1869, is as follows, again all in quarter notes:

c' b c' a    b c' d' e'    e' g' e' d'    e' b c' d'

Transpose the Saint-Saens down a major third and you have the Rubinstein.

Isnt' that a bit uncanny?

   Now we know that Rubinstein and Saint-Saens were friends.  It was at Rubinstein's request that Saint-Saens wrote, in 1868, his 2nd Piano Concerto.  April of 1870 has Rubinstein in Paris for the French premiere of his new Fantasy, followed by concerts in other major French cities.  Then in May Rubinstein returns to Paris where he plays the Schumann concerto under the direction of his friend, Saint-Saens.

   Given this chronology and the friendship of the two principles, it seems to me inconceivable that Saint-Saens would have been unaware of Rubinstein's new work.  And, given Saint-Saens reputation for allegedly lifting things...well, who knows?

[JimL]

The Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony is a study in thematic and motivic transformation, in the manner of Liszt (to whose memory the work was dedicated).  The theme in question, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is a variant on the Gregorian chant Dies Irae.  If you listen to the first movement/section of the Saint-Saëns 3rd, you will hear the theme in the exact same form as it appears in the Rubinstein Fantasy, only transposed up a minor 3rd, and harmonized in the minor of the tonality the two works share (C).

[mikehopf]

 Grainger's English Country Gardens is a direct steal from Louis Schindelmeisser's Sinfonia Concertante for 4 Clarinets & Orchestra.

Or did Louis nick the tune from a traditional English folksong?

[Archimus]

One of Kit and the Widow's songs pokes fun at Andrew Lloyd Webber, slyly pointing up all the tunes he filched.  The refrain goes: "Here's how to write a good West-End tune: steal it from somebody else!"

[regriba]

The opening of Lloyd Webber's "Memory" is exactly the same as the opening of the bass aria "Vedo sei placide lune" from the opera "L'Oracolo" by the little-known verismo composer Franco Leoni. It may not be a coincidence, since the Sutherland/Bonynge recording of the opera came out in 1975, six years before the premiere of "Cats".

A propos Saint-Saens' 2nd piano concerto: the second theme of the second movement is the same as the beginning of the serenade from the "Once Upon a Time" incidental music by P. E. Lange-Müller. But here the thief seems to have been the Danish composer, as his work was written almost 20 years after the concerto.

[Gareth Vaughan]

I once saw an amusing card in a shop in Islington. It had a cartoon of Andrew Lloyd Webber sitting at the piano with some MS paper in front of him and pen poised. One hand hovered over a large book propped up on the music stand of the piano. Its title was "Other People's Tunes". Ouch!!

[kolaboy]

The first two bars of the Woody woodpecker theme are taken from Schumann's choral ballad Der Königssohn, Op.116.

[TerraEpon]

Grainger's English Country Gardens is a direct steal from Louis Schindelmeisser's Sinfonia Concertante for 4 Clarinets & Orchestra.

Or did Louis nick the tune from a traditional English folksong?

Are you serious? Like a large amount of Grainger's work, it is indeed based on a folksong.

The opening of Lloyd Webber's "Memory" is exactly the same as the opening of the bass aria "Vedo sei placide lune" from the opera "L'Oracolo" by the little-known verismo composer Franco Leoni. It may not be a coincidence, since the Sutherland/Bonynge recording of the opera came out in 1975, six years before the premiere of "Cats".

Oddly enough, when I first heard Ravel's Bolero, I though there was a Disney song based off it. It turns out I was thinking of Memory, which indeed does have a very similar line. Even MORE oddly, a couple years later in high school, I heard another school's marching band playing Memory....and I thought it was Bolero (and kinda boggled that a marching band would play such a piece)

[Gareth Vaughan]

The opening bars of "Phantom of the Opera" are a direct crib from Vaughanm Williams' London Symphony.

[Sharkkb8]

When I was in a production of West Side Story (many hundreds of years ago), at the end when Maria and we gang-members all sang "There's a Place for Us..." (from the song "Somewhere"), I couldn't help but think I was playing the opening of the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto....

(For the record, I was a Shark.  We kicked Jet ***.) 

[Amphissa]

We've had this conversation before, but I'm not eager to dig back through the history of the site to find the thread.

As is usually attributed to Stravinsky, "Good composers borrow. Great ones steal."

Actually, it was not until around the turn of the century that the notion that music should be entirely original in order to be good came about. Up until then, everyone cribbed from everyone else constantly. Handel used music from many other composers, and then Beethoven, Brahms and even Schoenberg borrowed from him. Mozart stole from Beethoven. Strauss stole from Wagner and von Schilling. Wagner stole from Berlioz. Liszt stole from everyone. haha

You find instances throughout music where the same folk tunes get worked into the music of multiple composers from a given culture. Is there any validity to the idea of "I got there first" in such cases? An example is the dies irae, which appeared quite often in the music of Russian composers. Rachmaninoff used it in almost every piece he ever wrotew. Did he steal it from one of the composers who used it before he did?

Fact is, it's just about impossible to put together a string of notes that has not been used by some composer already. So, if a melody is similar to a melody in another work, is it automatically theft?

As for the Tchaikovsky 5th plundering Raff, sorry, but personally, I do not think any audience listener would ever confuse Tchaikovsky's achingly beautiful opening to the 2nd movement of his 5th with the passage written by Raff. They are in a totally different league.

I'm not suggesting it never happened. To the contrary, I'm suggesting it was very common up through the 1800s.

I'm trying to think of cases in which I remember thinking a bit of music by an unsung sounded like a familiar passage from a sung composer. I know I've run across some examples, but I'm drawing a blank right now.

[LateRomantic75]

I agree heartily with your Tchaikovsky/Raff comparison. While Raff was obviously a very talented composer, Tchaikovsky was a master through and through. His music grabs me by the throat with its great emotional power, something I can't say Raff's music does for me. So to say Tchaikovsky "plagiarized" Raff is a rather unfair statement IMHO.

[Alan Howe]

Tchaikovsky clearly did plagiarise Raff. But he made what he plagiarised his own, which is what great composers do. However, Tchaikovsky is Tchaikovsky and Raff is Raff: the former's version may grab you by the throat (it doesn't grab me that way, btw), but Raff's original aches gorgeously.

And Raff was a master-composer himself, not a merely talented one. That would be von Bülow.

[John H White]

I used to be puzzled by the fact that, to me, 8 year old Mozart's 2nd and 3rd symphonies, written on his visit to England as a boy prodigy, sounded inferior to his No.1 in E flat, until I read somewhere that he had, as an exercise,copied out the score of a symphony by the mature composer, Carl Friedrich Abel who was then settled in England and putting on concerts in collaboration with Johan Christian Bach who, for a short while, became mentor to the young composer. Of course, much later on in his career, Mozart wrote a slow introduction to a symphony by his colleague Michael Haydn, which later became catalogued as Mozart's Symphony No. 37.
    To me, there seems quite an affinity between the finale of Raff's 6th symphony and the scherzo of Parry's 3rd symphony.
      Lastly, the refrain of the Victorian music hall  song, "Two Lovely Black Eyes", sounds as if it could have been derived from the scherzo of Spohr's 5th symphony.

[mbhaub]

Can it be proved beyond question that Tchaikovsky ever heard the Raff 5th, or looked at a score? I know he made a comment comparing Raff to Brahms, but to accuse someone of plagiarism requires significant proof, at least for me.