Unfinished works have long fascinated music lovers. After all, a composer surprised by death will often have been contemplating his or her most advanced work, delving further than before into the depths of his or her genius. Musicians tend not to play incomplete scores, so an intermediary is needed to assess the fragment and bring it to fruition as sensitively and as closely as possible to what can be discerned of the composer’s style and intentions. Whether it be reconstructing a motet from a missing part-book – fairly common practice among the early music fraternity – or projecting large-scale orchestral or choral works, often from the scantest sketches, the completion of unfinished works has become something of a thriving cottage industry over the past half-acentury or more.
Ever since the revelation that Mozart hadn’t fully completed his Requiem – sparking a bitter and protracted war of words in the 19th-century German music press – the final incomplete utterances of a range of composers, or even the abandoned ideas from earlier in their careers, have excited all manner of curiosity and comment. Mozart’s Requiem and the C, Berg’s and Bartók’s Viola Concerto are all major repertoire works that often now appear under two names separated by a rubric such as ‘compl’, ‘reconstr’ or ‘elab’.
