Unfinished Symphony (disambiguation)

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Symphony No. 8 (Schubert) symphony by Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D 759, commonly known as the Unfinished Symphony, is a musical composition that Schubert started in 1822 but left with only two movements—though he lived for another six years. A scherzo, nearly completed in piano score but with only two pages orchestrated, also survives.

<i>Unfinished Symphony</i> (film) 1934 film by Anthony Asquith, Willi Forst

Unfinished Symphony is a 1934 British-Austrian musical drama film directed by Anthony Asquith and starring Mártha Eggerth, Helen Chandler, Hans Jaray, and Ronald Squire. The film is based on the story of Franz Schubert who, in the 1820s left his symphony unfinished after losing the love of his life. The film's alternate German-language version was called Gently My Songs Entreat. This title refers to the first line of the Lied "Ständchen" (Serenade) from Schubert's collection Schwanengesang, "the most famous serenade in the world", performed by Mártha Eggerth in the film.

An unfinished symphony is a fragment of a symphony, by a particular composer, that musicians and academics consider incomplete or unfinished for various reasons. The archetypal unfinished symphony is Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, written in 1822, six years before his death. It features two fully orchestrated movements. While it seems clear from sketches that Schubert set out to create a traditional four-movement symphony, this has been the subject of endless debate. Schubert wrote the symphony for the Graz Musical Society, and gave the manuscript to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in his capacity as its representative. However, Hüttenbrenner did not show the score to the society at that time, nor did he reveal the existence of the manuscript after Schubert died in 1828, but kept it a secret for another 37 years. In 1865, when he was 76, Hüttenbrenner finally showed it to the conductor Johann von Herbeck, who conducted the extant two movements on 17 December 1865 in Vienna, adding the last movement of Schubert's third symphony as the finale. Music historians and scholars then toiled to "prove" the composition was complete in its two-movement form, and indeed, in that form it became one of the most popular pieces in the late 19th century classical music repertoire, and remains one of Schubert's most popular compositions.

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Franz Schubert 19th-century Austrian composer

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 , the Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 , the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

In musical composition, the opus number is the "work number" that is assigned to a composition, or to a set of compositions, to indicate the chronological order of the composer's production. Opus numbers are used to distinguish among compositions with similar titles; the word is abbreviated as "Op." for a single work, or "Opp." when referring to more than one work.

Rosemary Brown (spiritualist) Self proclaimed spiritual medium

Rosemary Isabel Brown was an English composer, pianist and spirit medium who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. She created a small media sensation in the 1970s by presenting works purportedly dictated to her by Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Marc Blitzstein American composer

Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.

Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder was a Spanish Catalan composer and musical scholar and writer, generally known outside Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.

Ildebrando Pizzetti Italian composer

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Unfinished creative work creative work that has not been finished

An unfinished creative work is a painting, novel, musical composition, or other creative work, that has not been brought to a completed state. Its creator may have chosen not to finish it, or may have been prevented from doing so by circumstances outside of their control, such as death. Such pieces are often the subject of speculation as to what the finished piece would have been like had the original creator completed the work. Sometimes artworks are finished by others and released posthumously. Unfinished works have had profound influences on their genres and have inspired others in their own projects. The term can also refer to ongoing work which could eventually be finished and is distinguishable from "incomplete work", which can be a work that was finished but is no longer in its complete form.

<i>Andante and Finale</i> musical composition by Sergei Taneyev

The Andante and Finale is a composition for piano and orchestra that was reworked by Sergei Taneyev from sketches by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for the abandoned latter movements of his single-movement Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 75.

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Georges Hugon was a French composer. He is the father of actress Sophie Daumier. His compositional output includes several chamber works, the ballet La Reine de Saba, two completed symphonies, and the unfinished symphony Prometheus.

The Big Lightning is an unfinished opera sketched in 1932 by Dmitri Shostakovich. The manuscript was found by Olga Digonskaya. Some of the musical material was borrowed from the earlier composition, Hypothetically Murdered, Op. 31. The music for the Big Lightning was eventually scrapped and reworked into Orango, because of his lack of confidence in the libretto. Shostakovich only managed to write the overture and 8 following pieces, which lasts about 17 minutes. The original title may have been Nail in the Powder. The opera contains parodies of Glière's Red Poppy, and Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny.

Franz Schubert completed seven symphonies; nonetheless, one of his incomplete symphonies, the Unfinished Symphony is among his most popular works.

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Stiles 1.3.4.1 Sy1, the so-called Maori Symphony, is the first symphony by Alfred Hill. Its first three movements were completed by 1898, but the last movement remained unfinished. This may have been the second symphony composed in the Antipodes. The first two movements of this symphony are the only symphonic movements by Hill not to be arranged from his earlier chamber music. The Finale was reconstructed by Allan Stiles, and the whole symphony got its first performance in 2007. The approximate duration is 40 minutes.