So much great music has been written that it seems almost perverse to consider might-have-beens. Yet many fascinating possibilities came close to becoming realities. Even we who have the treatments of Goethe’s Faust by Spohr, Berlioz, Schumann, Gounod and Boito can’t help wishing that Beethoven had written at least some of the music for that great literary monument he kept talking about in his last years.
The last years of composers, indeed, left many projects unrealised. Did Sibelius put down on music paper any of his rumoured Eighth Symphony, amidst the long compositional silence of his last 30 years? Does what has been reconstructed as Elgar’s ‘Symphony No.3’ really represent his ideas? Should we regret that Verdi never added a King Lear, as he often talked of doing, to his Shakespeare-inspired Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff? These are things whose shapes we will never be able to define – as we can, however partially, the long list of unfinished works: Mozart’s Requiem, Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, Mahler’s Tenth, the third act of Berg’s Lulu…
Not all the might-have-beens come from the composer’s last years. Schubert is a case in point: no major composer left so many symphonic projects unfinished – so that we should be grateful that he did finish the Great C major Symphony (in 1825-6, as we now know, three years before his death), and that we have the performable torso of another great symphony, in two completed movements, the ‘Unfinished’. All these incomplete yet projected works tell us something important about the interests and the development of their composers.
In at least one case, an unfinished work’s subject was a mystery in itself. Manuel de Falla, born in Cádiz on the south-western tip of Spain, was fascinated by Jacint Verdaguer’s poem about the myth of the drowned continent of Atlantis, the exploits of Hercules on the Iberian peninsula, and the voyage of Columbus across the Atlantic which carried the Catholic faith to the Americas. Falla himself was displaced by the Spanish Civil War from his home in Granada, spending the last years of his life in Argentina, where his epic Scenic Cantata on Verdaguer’s text, L’Atlántida, remained unfinished at his death in 1946.
An Australian ‘what-might-have-been’
Australia, too, was a mythical continent, not lost, but not found, either: ‘terra australis incognita’. The Catholic faith was carried there, but as we now know, was never to be the dominant religion. Drive inland from Perth, Western Australia, to the monastery community of New Norcia, and you experience one of the might-have-beens of Australian history. Our great national historian Manning Clark experienced the fascination of New Norcia. Clark seeks out the fatal flaws that vitiated our history, and on the face of it New Norcia was a failure.
The Spanish Benedictine monks who founded it in 1846 were influenced by the Romantic revival of the monastic ideals of the Middle Ages, expressed in the great Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries of their homeland, centres of devotion, of scholarship, but also of the communal economy of the surrounding countryside. It was utopian to attempt a planting of such an ideal in the unforgiving Australian bush, but Dom Rosendo Salvado and his monks tried. They were setting themselves against the economic individualism and profit motive of the nascent Australian culture. And their Christian compassion and intellectually informed curiosity also made them unusually sensitive to the culture of the Aboriginal people who became their flock.
It is a Romantic fancy to suggest, as I seem to recall Manning Clark did somewhere in his writings, that the New Norcia model stands as a symbol of a path not taken by Australia. But it does provide a counterpoint to the one-dimensional way Australia’s history is usually understood. And the musical metaphor is apt here – Peter Sculthorpe’s New Norcia stems from the moving fact of ancient Gregorian chant being sung in the wilderness by an ancient people from a different culture. Composer Andrew Schultz and librettist Gordon Kalton Williams, in their Journey to Horseshoe Bend, have reminded us of another such religious and cultural transplantation, by the Lutheran missionaries who taught Central Australia’s original inhabitants to sing chorales, some of them by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Paths not taken – through the sea, through what Europeans considered a wilderness – the big picture. But life is made up of little paths as well; the kind evoked by titles like Janáček’s On the Overgrown Path, a collection of piano pieces composed at random. The wanderer down music’s path sometimes asks the question: ‘Why didn’t we go that way?’ Why, for example, did Berlioz never compose a concerto? Was he eccentric in that, as in so many other things? He came close, but not close enough.
The principal viola of an orchestra, slated to perform Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, phoned me a week before the concert to ask if he could add a cadenza. ‘No!’ I replied, with all the weight of one who cannot perform but writes about music instead. We were repeating, he and I, the contretemps which led to Paganini, for whom Berlioz had composed the piece, never performing it. Perhaps.
An abandoned expectation
Actually the reasons for Paganini dropping out of the project remain obscure. Berlioz in his Mémoires writes of meeting, after a concert of his music, ‘a man with flowing hair, piercing eyes and a strange ravaged countenance, a creature haunted by genius, a Titan among giants…who, seizing my hand, uttered eulogies that set my heart and mind on fire’. A few weeks later, Paganini (it was he) called on Berlioz at home and asked him to write a work he would play on his newly acquired Stradivarius viola. But by the time the work was near finished, Berlioz seemed to have abandoned the expectation that it would be played by Paganini, who ‘I think, will find that the viola is not treated enough in concerto style; it’s a symphony on a new plan and not at all a composition written with the aim of showing off a brilliantly individual talent like his.’
In fact, Harold in Italy shows off the ‘brilliantly individual talent’ of its composer. But the hypothetical of a Berlioz viola concerto for Paganini prompts the slightly depressing reflection that it would have enjoyed far more performances than Harold in Italy. This path-not-taken, however, does at least have a happy ending. Although Paganini was nowhere to be found when Harold was premiered, and the viola solo part was taken by Christian Urhan, an admired player, but no Paganini, the latter’s enthusiasm for Berlioz’s music had not diminished. He finally heard Harold in Italy in 1838 and came up on to the stage at the conclusion. Throat cancer had made Paganini’s voice almost inaudible, so his son turned to Berlioz: ‘My father says he is so moved and overwhelmed, he could go down on his knees to you.’ Berlioz protested, but, as the musicians were packing away their instruments, Paganini did just that.
Two mornings later, the son, Achille Paganini, brought Berlioz a note: ‘Beethoven being dead, only Berlioz could make him live again; and I, who have enjoyed your divine compositions, worthy of the genius that you are, beg you to accept as token of my homage 20,000 francs, which will be remitted to you by Baron Rothschild on your presenting the enclosed. Ever your affectionate friend, Niccolò Paganini.’
In those days before government grants for composers, Paganini’s generous gift made possible Berlioz’s composition of Romeo and Juliet. Both paths led to great music!
First published by Symphony Australia, 2005