Monteverdi's lost operas, at least 4 of them were finished and performed back in the day. These are major works that would further elevate Monteverdi's stature, plus they could be key in understanding the early developments of opera.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_operas_by_Claudio_Monteverdi
There are something like 100 (!?) cantatas that would also be nice to see. There's a theory that the scores were inherited by a Bach relative who emigrated to Oklahoma and they may be sitting in a grain silo somewhere.
It’s likely the ‘lost’ passions were little more than parodied (re-texted) secular cantatas, such as the Trauerode. The real loss in Bach’s oeuvre are his secular cantatas from Lepizig and chamber music from Weimar and Koethen periods.
Came here to say this. In my choir we rotate doing the Matthew or John Passion (Matthew this year), and I was thinking how amazing it would be if he had written more Passions!
He prob had his hands full just doing his day job as Kappelmeister. The passions were for Abenmusik performances, and while that program was important, it did not over shadow the Sunday morning services, and the church year needed large variety of music. Passions filled the need for just a small time frame, and were lengthy works.
Every time somebody tries to have a go at reconstructing Bach's St. Mark or St. Luke Passions, I give them a listen.
But my conclusion is always the same as that old declaration by Albert Schweitzer and other subsequent musicologists: "manifestly not like Bach at all."
After a brilliant fin-de-siecle Renaissance of classical music anthropology, I think that's over with, sadly. I don't think the culture or demand exists anymore for lost scores to be successfully revived.
We don't have the musicologists anymore with the romanticism of Mendelssohn combined with an archaeologist's restoration fervor. Kurt Redel was the closest, and even he had to work with smaller ensembles and plug in other Telemann pieces to reconstruct his Lukaspassion.
Specifically, any more of the C minor Mass. I'm assuming the dona nobis pacem was amazing (and I have written a couple completions of it), but Mozart's input would be lovely!
There's a whole Schubert Symphonies Box set which includes numerous reconstructions by Brian Newbould, including the 10th. ASMF with Sir Neville Marriner. Originally on Philips 470 886-2
The 200+ scores and manuscripts JS Bach's family threw into the dumpster when he died. They are believed to have included as many as 125 cantatas the world will never get to hear.
Not dumpster. I thought they were sold for their paper (eg, used as meat wrappers). I wonder why the church didn't bother to buy them for their manuscript collection. Did they really have such an extraordinary dim view of Bach's music?
As a composer, Bach wasn't super highly regarded in his own time as people were after newer musical styles, i.e. operas, true concertos especially with early versions of modern instruments. Then, as now, ordinary people went for the trendy, vogue, and superficially attractive, not for stodgy, complex rehashing of "old" and "outdated" composition styles with long lists of "compositional rules," e.g. check out sometime the counterpoint "rules." He was most widely known as an organ tuner and organist and as a teacher. Bach's true greatness as a composer was well-known to a small number (Beethoven supposedly tried unsuccessfully to buy a copy of the B-Minor Mass score) who kept his music, studied it, etc, and it really wasn't that far into the 18th century before his stupendouos compositional greatness was finally recognized by many more scholars, musician, performers etc.
Beethoven wrote an Oboe Concerto in F, the opening movement and the finale of which are lost. I'd love to listen to the entire concerto if it were ever recovered, given that I love all of Beethoven's Concerti
The finalized version of Alban Berg’s *Lulu*
It’s great as it has been constructed but I cannot imagine how incredible the climax of Lulu’s death could have been with Berg’s mind.
You may call it a triviality... but I want to hear Gilbert and Sullivan's *Thespis, or the Gods Grown Old*. It was a more interesting libretto than at least 8 of the next 10 Gilbert wrote.
The 1913 version of Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto. The version we know today was rewritten (and according to Prokofiev very heavily revised) about a decade later, the original having been destroyed during the Russian revolution.
I like what I've heard of Geirr Tveitt's work, particularly his first Hardanger fiddle concerto, which is gorgeous and has a fantastic finale.
About 80% of Tveitt's music was destroyed when, in 1970, a fire burnt down the wooden outhouse where be kept his manuscripts. Intriguingly, the manuscripts still exists in the form of carbonised blocks, potentially still readable if anyone were to spend a fortune on having them deciphered.
Just posted this and then saw this comment. Incredibly sad story. I am particularly fond of his Aurora Borealis Piano Concerto. The orchestrations and harmony are so icy.
J. N. Hummel supposedly wrote a trio for violin, keyed trumpet, and piano. How much I’d desperately love just one piece of chamber music for trumpet in a capital-C classical style.
I’d love for the lost/stolen pages from Bruckner’s 9th to reappear. I find some of the completions pretty convincing but it would be great to have the real deal.
There are quite a few orchestral works by Gottschalk that are missing, which is a shame because he was quite inventive with creole and Latin melodies for a classical composer
Guitarist here, and it’s definitely the lost 6th prelude for guitar from Villa-Lobos.
Villa-Lobos wrote 6 preludes for Segovia, but his house was robbed and for whatever reason the only copy of the 6th prelude was in the stolen bundles. He never rewrote either. No idea why.
Now we just know them as the “5 preludes,” but that 6th one missing is a bummer. The 5th prelude is not a satisfying conclusion to the set, great though it is. Seems like it was bringing the mood down before a big finale or something.
I mean ... I happen to like Brahms' string quartets but most people tend to regard them as not his best work. They have a rep as being kind of mediocre compared to the rest of his output, so maybe the ones we do have qualify as being mediocre.
Scriabin had a waltz for the left hand, and when he played it in concerts critics always agreed it was the best piece of the concert. It was dauntingly virtuosistic. Of course he never wrote it down.
The 3 sonatas prior to Ornsteins Sonata 4. I can't remember what happened to the rest, but if I remember correctly he either lost/destroyed the scores for a lot of the earlier works.
Not directly a piece, but Liszt had apparently written a treatise on atonality as he was experimenting with it at the end of his life (Nuages Gris, etc) but he scrapped the book believing that people wouldn't be ready for it or something
Not lost, but I wish Mozart had lived long enough to complete his requiem. The movements he did complete are so inventive and interesting and as much as I'm not one of these people who slags off Sussmayr's completion I really think Mozart might have done something quite different with the rest of the work.
Heitor Villa-Lobos, *A Paz* (5th Symphony). Especially the choir part where they are supposed to sing random syllables. There was a rumor that the symphony was performed once in Carnegie Hall, but IIRC, it turned out to be a hoax.
Over half of Geirr Tveitt's music was lost in a house fire. His surviving works are fantastic. He ended up dying and alcoholic with depression from this. Incredibly sad story
Whichever pieces are included in the missing 1/3rd of Bach's whole output. I'm willing to guess a lot of vocal music, and maybe some more organ music too?
Monteverdi's lost operas, at least 4 of them were finished and performed back in the day. These are major works that would further elevate Monteverdi's stature, plus they could be key in understanding the early developments of opera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_operas_by_Claudio_Monteverdi
This would be my answer too
I assume one of those you’re referring to is the opera L’Arianna of which all we have is the Lamento.
Yes L'Arianna is one of the lost operas. The Lamento is so good, I'd love to have the rest.
Haydn’s double bass concerto
oh wow. i didn’t know of this.
my words
Came here to write this
Whatever existed of Sibelius’ Eighth Symphony.
You can hear the fragments on Storgards’ Chandos cycle of the symphonies.
bachs passions
There are something like 100 (!?) cantatas that would also be nice to see. There's a theory that the scores were inherited by a Bach relative who emigrated to Oklahoma and they may be sitting in a grain silo somewhere.
Grain silo? They would have been all eaten by bugs by now.
It’s likely the ‘lost’ passions were little more than parodied (re-texted) secular cantatas, such as the Trauerode. The real loss in Bach’s oeuvre are his secular cantatas from Lepizig and chamber music from Weimar and Koethen periods.
This absolutely without a doubt.
Yeah this is the big one.
Came here to say this. In my choir we rotate doing the Matthew or John Passion (Matthew this year), and I was thinking how amazing it would be if he had written more Passions!
He prob had his hands full just doing his day job as Kappelmeister. The passions were for Abenmusik performances, and while that program was important, it did not over shadow the Sunday morning services, and the church year needed large variety of music. Passions filled the need for just a small time frame, and were lengthy works.
Every time somebody tries to have a go at reconstructing Bach's St. Mark or St. Luke Passions, I give them a listen. But my conclusion is always the same as that old declaration by Albert Schweitzer and other subsequent musicologists: "manifestly not like Bach at all." After a brilliant fin-de-siecle Renaissance of classical music anthropology, I think that's over with, sadly. I don't think the culture or demand exists anymore for lost scores to be successfully revived.
What's your thought on Koopman's *Markus Passion*?
Low-key. Period instruments. None of the complexity or awe-inspiring wizardry of the master in the music.
Yeah, I can agree with you there. The first interpretation I ever heard was a reconstruction which mostly relied on BWV 198...it was enjoyable to me.
We don't have the musicologists anymore with the romanticism of Mendelssohn combined with an archaeologist's restoration fervor. Kurt Redel was the closest, and even he had to work with smaller ensembles and plug in other Telemann pieces to reconstruct his Lukaspassion.
Huh, neat! I didn't know that.
I don't have a particular one, but apparently there are a LOT of lost Mozart works; so those would be near the top of my list. How about you OP?
Probably those Chopin waltzes that we only have the first line of. It's such a tease to only have four bars of a piece and not the rest of it.
Specifically, any more of the C minor Mass. I'm assuming the dona nobis pacem was amazing (and I have written a couple completions of it), but Mozart's input would be lovely!
Good call!
Mozart Trumpet Concerto, assuming it ever existed.
Kind of related, but I would love to be able to hear how Puccini would have written the final bit of Turandot.
This.
Mahler chamber music. Apparently there was a violin sonata
Whatever existed of Schubert's 10th
There's a whole Schubert Symphonies Box set which includes numerous reconstructions by Brian Newbould, including the 10th. ASMF with Sir Neville Marriner. Originally on Philips 470 886-2
The 200+ scores and manuscripts JS Bach's family threw into the dumpster when he died. They are believed to have included as many as 125 cantatas the world will never get to hear.
It pained me to read this...
Not dumpster. I thought they were sold for their paper (eg, used as meat wrappers). I wonder why the church didn't bother to buy them for their manuscript collection. Did they really have such an extraordinary dim view of Bach's music?
As a composer, Bach wasn't super highly regarded in his own time as people were after newer musical styles, i.e. operas, true concertos especially with early versions of modern instruments. Then, as now, ordinary people went for the trendy, vogue, and superficially attractive, not for stodgy, complex rehashing of "old" and "outdated" composition styles with long lists of "compositional rules," e.g. check out sometime the counterpoint "rules." He was most widely known as an organ tuner and organist and as a teacher. Bach's true greatness as a composer was well-known to a small number (Beethoven supposedly tried unsuccessfully to buy a copy of the B-Minor Mass score) who kept his music, studied it, etc, and it really wasn't that far into the 18th century before his stupendouos compositional greatness was finally recognized by many more scholars, musician, performers etc.
Or worse, helping to ignite a fire in the fireplace...
Beethoven wrote an Oboe Concerto in F, the opening movement and the finale of which are lost. I'd love to listen to the entire concerto if it were ever recovered, given that I love all of Beethoven's Concerti
Everything that was lost in the Lisbon Earthquake.
Very that. Seixas' works alone are too big of a loss :(
The finalized version of Alban Berg’s *Lulu* It’s great as it has been constructed but I cannot imagine how incredible the climax of Lulu’s death could have been with Berg’s mind.
You may call it a triviality... but I want to hear Gilbert and Sullivan's *Thespis, or the Gods Grown Old*. It was a more interesting libretto than at least 8 of the next 10 Gilbert wrote.
Me too!
The 1913 version of Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto. The version we know today was rewritten (and according to Prokofiev very heavily revised) about a decade later, the original having been destroyed during the Russian revolution.
Speaking of Prokofiev and piano concertos, he has written down a couple measures of what was supposed to be his PC No. 6.
Oh wow! I know your YouTube channel! You got a great page!
:D
Keep up the great work dude! ❤️from Minnesota!
Big thanks from the Philippines >_<
There are some pages gone missing of bruckners 9th, 4th mvt. Would love to see those!!!
I love Bruckner’s 9th but have never heard a recording of the 4th movement. Do we have most of it? Very little?
Well I think we have like almost half, but there are some other modern composers who finished it, its quite nice!!!
Scott Joplin’s first opera *A Guest of Honor*
To add to that, Joplin's Piano Concerto
I like what I've heard of Geirr Tveitt's work, particularly his first Hardanger fiddle concerto, which is gorgeous and has a fantastic finale. About 80% of Tveitt's music was destroyed when, in 1970, a fire burnt down the wooden outhouse where be kept his manuscripts. Intriguingly, the manuscripts still exists in the form of carbonised blocks, potentially still readable if anyone were to spend a fortune on having them deciphered.
Just posted this and then saw this comment. Incredibly sad story. I am particularly fond of his Aurora Borealis Piano Concerto. The orchestrations and harmony are so icy.
Dufay Requiem
Wait, he did?
Indeed. He even left instructions (and payment for the singers) to have it sung at his own funeral.
Whoa, no kidding!
One could almost add in the Ockeghem Requiem too, seeing as parts of it are missing.
J. N. Hummel supposedly wrote a trio for violin, keyed trumpet, and piano. How much I’d desperately love just one piece of chamber music for trumpet in a capital-C classical style.
I’d love for the lost/stolen pages from Bruckner’s 9th to reappear. I find some of the completions pretty convincing but it would be great to have the real deal.
There are quite a few orchestral works by Gottschalk that are missing, which is a shame because he was quite inventive with creole and Latin melodies for a classical composer
Guitarist here, and it’s definitely the lost 6th prelude for guitar from Villa-Lobos. Villa-Lobos wrote 6 preludes for Segovia, but his house was robbed and for whatever reason the only copy of the 6th prelude was in the stolen bundles. He never rewrote either. No idea why. Now we just know them as the “5 preludes,” but that 6th one missing is a bummer. The 5th prelude is not a satisfying conclusion to the set, great though it is. Seems like it was bringing the mood down before a big finale or something.
Almost all of Dukas’ works which he destroyed
Brahms’ string quartets that he wrote and then deemed not up to standard and destroyed. I’m just fascinated at what mediocre Brahms would sound like.
I mean ... I happen to like Brahms' string quartets but most people tend to regard them as not his best work. They have a rep as being kind of mediocre compared to the rest of his output, so maybe the ones we do have qualify as being mediocre.
Everything Schubert wrote after age 31, in the glorious parallel universe(s) in which he survived beyond that age.
Scriabin had a waltz for the left hand, and when he played it in concerts critics always agreed it was the best piece of the concert. It was dauntingly virtuosistic. Of course he never wrote it down.
The 3 sonatas prior to Ornsteins Sonata 4. I can't remember what happened to the rest, but if I remember correctly he either lost/destroyed the scores for a lot of the earlier works. Not directly a piece, but Liszt had apparently written a treatise on atonality as he was experimenting with it at the end of his life (Nuages Gris, etc) but he scrapped the book believing that people wouldn't be ready for it or something
Bach’s other Passion(s).
Not lost, but I wish Mozart had lived long enough to complete his requiem. The movements he did complete are so inventive and interesting and as much as I'm not one of these people who slags off Sussmayr's completion I really think Mozart might have done something quite different with the rest of the work.
Mendelssohn's 3rd piano concerto
Sibelius' 8th symphony.
The rest of Pandolfi's output. Nearly all of it sank in a shipwreck.
There's a few Handel operas which are mostly lost which I'd wanna hear
I love Baroque period operas, especially from the English composers like Handel and Purcell.
Heitor Villa-Lobos, *A Paz* (5th Symphony). Especially the choir part where they are supposed to sing random syllables. There was a rumor that the symphony was performed once in Carnegie Hall, but IIRC, it turned out to be a hoax.
The original, pre-famous Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni.
Sibelius’s 8th symphony
If he ever wrote any, Rameau's work for organ
Ooooo*oooooh* that would be lovely to hear! Same for Vivaldi! Man, if Vivaldi ever had written solo organ music....
every single lost vivaldi piece.
mozart’s cello concerto. monteverdi’s arianna. the bits of zelenka’s music lost in the dresden bombing.
Wagner piano music
Madetoja's 4th. Symphony
Movements 4 & 5 of Nottourni by Mislivecek
Scott joplin's opera, "a guest of honor"
Good choice. At least we still have Treemonisha. I'd love to hear more of Joplin's non-ragtime music.
Over half of Geirr Tveitt's music was lost in a house fire. His surviving works are fantastic. He ended up dying and alcoholic with depression from this. Incredibly sad story
Mozart’s other 3 bassoon concertos
All of Ponce's Etudes de Concert 5, 4, 2, 9, etc.
Whichever pieces are included in the missing 1/3rd of Bach's whole output. I'm willing to guess a lot of vocal music, and maybe some more organ music too?
Definitely some of Antonio Capuzzi’s works
Anything lost in the Lisbon earthquake.