What Happened to These Five Lost Works of Classical Music?

Every piece of classical music has a unique composition story.

Inevitably, some of those stories ended early after, say, a composer left a score unfinished, or destroyed it, or never wrote anything down in the first place.

These lost works of classical music are deeply intriguing, and they serve as some of the big “what-ifs” in music history.

Here are five notable lost works of classical music that might have become mainstays of the repertoire…if only they’d survived.

St. Mark Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Many music lovers are intimately familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions.

These musical works tell the story of the Passion of the Christ (i.e., the last few days of Jesus’s life, as recorded in the Gospels in the Bible). They are often performed during Holy Week, the week before Easter.

The two most famous Passions by Bach are his St. Matthew Passion and his St. John Passion, based on the Gospels of Matthew and John, respectively.

But not many people know that Bach wrote a third Passion: the St. Mark Passion, performed in 1731.

Today, the St. Mark Passion is considered a lost work. However, historians believe that this Passion reused some of his earlier music, including a secular cantata from 1727 titled Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl (or “Let, Princess, let still one more glance”) and a church cantata from the mid-1710s called Widerstehe doch der Sünde (“Just resist sin”).

The St. Mark Passion was premiered in Leipzig during Holy Week 1731.

Since the 1960s, many musicians have attempted to reconstruct the Passion, but it’s still considered to be a lost work.

A performance of “Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl”

Symphony No. 8 by Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius

Between 1898 and 1924, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote seven symphonies.

In 1926, he started work on his eighth symphony, promising the premiere to conductor Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony.

He claimed he got a decent way through the process, writing out two movements and composing the rest in his head. Then, in 1928, he backtracked, claiming that he’d never written anything out.

Nevertheless, he kept chipping away at it. There were several moments when it seemed like the premiere was imminent, but those moments came and went, and no score was ever produced.

As Sibelius aged and the political situation in Europe deteriorated, he grew depressed. In 1945, he brought a stack of his manuscripts to the dining room table and lit the fireplace with them. His wife, Aino, watched with despair as her husband fed the paper into the flames.

It is believed that whatever survived Sibelius’s mysterious eighth symphony was destroyed that day.

Sibelius’s seventh symphony

Music for an Aquatic Ballet by John Cage

John Cage

In 1938, avant-garde composer John Cage was commissioned by the Physical Education Department at UCLA (the University of California – Los Angeles) to write music in honour of the National Aquatic Show in Los Angeles.

We don’t know much about this work, but what we do know is intriguing. Apparently the performance involved synchronised swimming, as well as submerged gongs and tom-toms. Underwater percussion helped the swimmers stay synched up to the work’s rhythms.

The ballet’s first and only performance occurred on July 3, 1938.

Perhaps because its origins were so unique, and it seemed unlikely there would ever be another reason for performing it, Cage didn’t preserve any notes or scores related to the work. All we have is a title, “Music for an Aquatic Ballet”, which was mentioned in his 1961 book Silence: Lectures and Writings.

Although no score exists, the concept of submerging instruments in the water proved inspirational, and Cage revisited the idea in First Construction (in Metal) the following year.

Since Cage’s death in 1992, some musicians have tried to re-assemble or re-enact the ballet. In 2011, flautist Roberto Fabbriciani and percussionist Jonathan Faralli assembled a version for flute, percussion, and tape. However, it’s more of a tribute than a historically accurate reconstruction.

John Cage appearing on the game show I’ve Got a Secret in 1960, using water

Trumpet Concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In November 1768, Leopold Mozart – father of Wolfgang Amadeus – wrote a letter to a friend.

The new church of Father Parhammer’s orphanage will be consecrated on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. For this feast, Wolfgang has composed a solemn mass, an offertorium, and a trumpet concerto for a boy.

Historians have found other references to this consecration ceremony but nothing about a trumpet concerto.

At the time, Wolfgang was twelve years old, and Leopold was the person who was keeping track of Wolfgang’s compositional output. However, no records of any trumpet concerto exist there, either.

A Mozart trumpet concerto is especially tantalising to imagine because it would have been Mozart’s only one. Maybe someday someone will discover the manuscript in an archive…maybe it was lost…or maybe Leopold was mistaken, and it never existed at all!

A performance of Leopold Mozart’s trumpet concerto, dating from 1762

Various Waltzes by Frédéric Chopin

After Chopin died in 1849, his beloved sister – pianist, composer, and writer Ludwika Jędrzejewicz – took on the grim but deeply important task of sorting through her brother’s papers.

Many of his works remained unpublished at his death. Before he died, Chopin made Ludwika promise to burn whatever works hadn’t been published yet, but she didn’t keep her word.

In the decades after his death, many of these works appeared in print posthumously. Her instincts were correct: some of these pieces turned out to be Chopin’s most popular.

Chopin wrote waltzes throughout his career, from the time he was a fourteen-year-old piano prodigy up until the final year of his life. Eight of them were published during his lifetime, and five were published after he died.

More waltzes have since popped up in friends’ collections and friends of friends’ collections. Not all of them have been authenticated.

However, we know that at least six more stayed in Jędrzejewicz’s possession. A trained pianist and composer herself, she carefully copied each waltz’s first few measures into a separate ledger.

Tragically, in 1855, Jędrzejewicz died unexpectedly in a cholera epidemic. Then, in 1863, the manuscripts of the six waltzes were lost in a fire…somewhat ironically, perhaps, given Chopin’s final instructions.

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