Finishing composers' unfinished works an industry unto itself

Completion without finality is the curious fate of the Mozart Requiem.

Left unfinished at the composer's deathbed, this touchstone choral work has been the ultimate unfinished masterpiece - which hasn't stopped many from trying, over the centuries. The latest completion, by Gregory Spears, is also among the boldest. It will be performed Thursday at St. Clement's Church by Seraphic Fire, the Florida-based choral group.

"It doesn't pretend to be what it can never be. We will only get Mozart's music from Mozart," says Seraphic Fire artistic director Patrick Dupre Quigley. In that spirit, he commissioned three new movements from Spears, a composer who has developed a strong personal voice over several operas and his own Requiem.

The field grows crowded as the world tries to squeeze one more complete masterpiece from the greatest of composers, whether it's Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Bruckner's Symphony No. 9, Mahler's Symphony No. 10, or Elgar's Symphony No. 3.

When Paul Rardin took over the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia this season and suggested commissioning a new Mozart Requiem ending, he was told they'd been there and done that - twice.

British composer Anthony Payne, whose successful 1997 completion of Elgar's Symphony No. 3 has now been recorded six times, worries about the trend he has enabled: "If you said this to someone 200 years ago, they would be astonished. Art and music is of your own time. Third-rate pieces are [now] being dredged up when we should be concentrating on our own composers."

Completions inevitably inspire ambivalence. We can enjoy unfinished paintings - such as, ironically, Joseph Lange's portrait of Mozart - but a fragmentary piece of music requires some sort of outside intervention to be heard at all. How much editing - and what kind - is a different challenge with every piece.

Take the Schubert and Bruckner symphonies, which stop after their ethereal slow movements. Should we touch them, just for the feeling of completeness?

"I'm very romantically attached to the idea that these are a perfectly beautiful bodies of work in themselves," says Yannick Nézet-Séguin. "They open up into eternity in a very spiritual way."

"In the 20th century, this notion of incompleteness is a dramatic tool," Spears says. "It evokes crisis, death being the most obvious and extreme crisis. Kafka's The Castle ends in midsentence.. . . It's very powerful."

In a few cases, such as with Mozart's Requiem, unfinished works can even become canonical, ending or no. Mahler's Symphony No. 10 is a rich masterpiece that beckons large orchestras. Nézet-Séguin couldn't resist recording the entire Mahler 10th with his L'Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal and will repeat it with the Philadelphia Orchestra on May 11 through 14.

"There's so much gorgeous stuff, you hate not to have it played. I'm not surprised that it has entered the repertory," says musicologist Steven Coburn, a Mahler 10th specialist. "But no matter how it's done, there's no completed 10th. . . . In many pages of the last movement, the orchestration is 100 percent speculative."

Completions can get a bad name, if only because the first attempts get published first, and become most convenient to obtain and perform - one reason Deryck Cooke's finishing of the Mahler 10th (popularized in Eugene Ormandy's 1966 Philadelphia Orchestra recording) - is, despite all the controversy surrounding it, still the most played. Any new ending to Puccini's incomplete Turandot would require a new production at the Metropolitan Opera, says general manager Peter Gelb, and that won't happen anytime soon.

Often an intriguing backstory - particularly if it involves marital infidelity - escalates interest in completion. During the composition of his Symphony No. 10, Mahler was traumatized by the discovery that his wife, Alma, was having a love affair with architect Walter Gropius. Could that shock have slowed his progress in finishing the symphony?

Alban Berg's widow, Helene, claimed her husband told her in a dream to forbid anyone from completing the final act of his unfinished opera Lulu - though her feelings about the composer's extramarital affair, which partly inspired the opera, could also have been a factor. Only after Helene Berg's passing was Lulu completed - by Friedrich Cerha, and heard complete at last in 1979 - 44 years after Alban Berg died.

The labor required for completions can involve forensics of the highest order.

Coburn talks about learning Mahler's composing habits - when he was discarding an idea or just shuffling it away for possible use later. Often, such minute study can only really be done with the actual pages on which Mahler wrote.

Payne, now 79, had been playing around with Elgar's difficult-to-read but published sketches for decades when the composer's estate gave him the permission for a full completion. Nearly half of it is his own composition.

"I felt like an actor taking on a really big role like Hamlet and actually being that person onstage night after night," he said. "I felt that I was being Elgar." Like some actors, he worried that his own personality would be permanently subsumed. (It wasn't.)

It's especially tempting to complete a work when the music represents a breakthrough, something beyond what the composer wrote before. The first movement of the Mahler 10th has a famous harmonic scream that reached beyond his past works and, by 1910 standards, was decades ahead of its time. Then there's the stark funeral drums in the final movement - unlike anything else in Mahler.

After so many urbane, elegant, charming works, Mozart created his most terrifying music in the "Dies Irae" section of the unfinished Requiem. But posthumously, because Mozart's widow, Constanze, needed money, his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr rounded out the piece with the pedestrian "Sanctus," "Benedictus," and "Agnus Dei" movements. They are like "cold water is being splashed in our face," Quigley says. "It doesn't have the beauty and effortlessness . . . that you hear in everything that preceded it."

They also fall at a critical point. The Requiem should be reaching a climax, says composer Spears, that would have been pretty intense in Mozart's late style. Therein lay the challenge: "Raw emotion is not something that I do often," he says. All the more reason to do it, he says, though in his voice, creating a stylistic juxtaposition with Mozart.

"When we first performed it," Quigley says, "it was wildly loved. But two people were very vocal about hating it. And to me, that's the sign of a good piece."

Seraphic Fire performs the Mozart Requiem at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at St. Clement's Church, 2013 Appletree St. Admission is free, but tickets are required. Information: www.seraphicfire.org.

dstearns@phillynews.com