Let us continue with our exploration of unfinished classical masterpieces.

Robert Schumann: Symphony in G minor “Zwickau”

Josef Kriehuber: Robert Schumann, 1839

Robert Schumann had a number of talents. Growing up in the city of Zwickau, it is reported that he played the piano beautifully as a child and that he wrote poems and theatrical plays. He wasn’t a particularly bright student at school, but by the age of 13, he began to collect poems, dramatic fragments and biographical sketches of famous composers. He founded a literary club with ten fellow students, and they read monuments of German literature. During this period, Schumann became active as an author, and he produced metric translations of Greek and Latin verse, wrote more than 30 lyrical poems, a drama on the Coriolan story, and various essays on aesthetic topics.

Concurrently, he cultivated his musical interests and studied works by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, and he worked on an abandoned E minor piano concerto in 1827. We also find a splattering of songs and incipient stabs at works for piano solo. A couple of years later he tried his hands at a first work for orchestra. That symphony in G minor is known as “Zwickau,” but it remained incomplete. The young composer probably wasn’t ready to emerge from Beethoven’s shadow, and he turned his attention elsewhere.

Antonin Dvorák: String Quartet Movement in F Major, B. 120

Antonin Dvorák, 1882

Antonin Dvorák, when inspiration took hold of him, was known to compose rapidly. In a mere nine days in 1881, he composed a quartet movement in F major. However, his work was interrupted when a Vienna newspaper, unbeknownst to the composer, reported that a new quartet was to be performed on 15 December. Dvorák hurriedly completed his Quartet in C major, Op. 61 in the period of two weeks. That work premiered in Berlin and not in Vienna in November 1882. Concurrently, however, Dvorák was working on his opera Dimitrij, and he somehow never continued work on the F major movement. That movement remained in manuscript, and it received its first performance in Prague only in 1945. Some commentators suggest that Dvorák abandoned the quartet because “it lacked tension,” while others consider it “inferior.” Sounds like perfectly good Dvorák to me, don’t you think?

Camille Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonata in F Major “Unfinished”

Camille Saint-Saëns, 1846

Camille Saint-Saëns might easily be the poster child representing musical aptitude and genius. He first took piano lessons at the age of three and, by the age of ten, made his formal début at the Salle Pleyel. Playing from memory, he performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C minor and Mozart’s Concerto in B-flat major K450, for which he wrote his own cadenzas. He had previously been composing works for both piano solo and for various chamber music combinations, and that includes a complete three-movement Violin Sonata in B-flat major completed before his 7th birthday. He later recalled that he played through the piece with the young Belgian violinist Antoine Bessems, who apparently was also interested in the young composer’s widowed mother. Once he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1848, Saint-Saëns studied composition and orchestration with Halévy. He composed a scherzo for small orchestra, a Symphony in A, a choral piece, two romances, and he started work on a Violin Sonata in F major in 1850. For reasons unknown, the composer broke off composition in its second movement, and it would be several decades before he returned to that particular genre.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem, “Lux aeterna”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem, K. 626

At the time of his death on 5 December 1791, Mozart had left his Requiem, as is well known, incomplete. Only the first two movements, “Requiem aeternam” and “Kyrie,” were completed in all of the orchestral and vocal parts. The “Sequence” and “Offertorium” were completed in musical shorthand, while the “Lacrymosa” terminated after the first eight measures. Vocal parts and continuo are fully notated, and occasionally, we find indicated orchestral parts like the first violin in the “Rex tremendae,” and “Confutatis,” and the trombone solos of the “Tuba Mirum.” Count Franz von Walsegg, an amateur chamber musician, had commissioned the work, and he clearly had hopes of passing off the Requiem as his own composition.

However, since the Count had only made a down payment of 50%, Mozart’s widow, Constanze, wanted to secretly have the work completed by someone else in order to collect the remaining payment. She contracted Joseph von Eybler, and he worked on the movements from the “Dies irae” up until the “Lacrymosa.” Since Eybler wasn’t entirely sure how to continue, he gave the manuscript back to Constanze, who passed it to Franz Xaver Süssmayr. He borrowed from Eybler’s work, added his own orchestration and several new movements. For the concluding “Lux aeterna,” Süssmayr adapted music from the opening two movements. Is it likely that Mozart would have re-used the music from the opening two sections? We will probably never know, but both Süssmayr and Constanze were adamant that it was “done according to Mozart’s directions.”

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