Unfinished symphony

List of unfinished symphonies

XVIII Century

• Joseph Haydn's Symphony in D major was composed circa 1769 to 1770. Only the first movement survives, often used as the overture for the opera Le pescatrici.
• Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony in C minor was sketched around 1791–93, leaving a small fragment of the first movement before being abandoned. In addition, musicologist and Beethoven specialist Barry Cooper has identified several attempts and sketches of projected symphonies before Beethoven finished his Symphony No. 1 in C major. No completion attempts have been made.

  XIX Century

• Etienne Méhul's Symphony No. 5 in A major was begun in 1810, but left unfinished when he died on 1817. Work on the piece was interrupted by commissions from the wedding between Napoleon and Marie Louise. Afterwards the failure of the 1811 opera Les amazones and tuberculosis took substantial toll on the composer, who probably lacked enough energy to complete a score. The only fragments that remain are of a single movement, an allegro preceded by an andante introduction. This movement was completed by Eric Juteau, and premiered in Nuremberg on 2 November 2013, performed by the Kapella 19 ensemble conducted by Juteau. It was recording the following year alongside other symphonies by Méhul.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony in D major, D 2B, was begun in 1811, leaving it as an incomplete 30-bar orchestral score. The sketch includes the whole slow introduction and the first theme of the Allegro before breaking off. No performing version is yet available.
• Muzio Clementi's four late Symphonies were sketched between 1816 and 1822 but left unfinished in various states of completion. They were first identified in 1921 by Georges du Parc Poulain Saint-Foix. The first two were completed by Italian composer Alfredo Casella in 1935. He felt that not enough survived of the others to enable their reconstruction, but forty years later, Pietro Spada realised completions of them.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony in D major, D 615, it was begun in May 1818, with initial sketches made for the opening sections of the first movement and finale. It was left as an incomplete four-page, 259-bar sketch written for solo piano. Although conductor and composer Brian Newbould has made a performing version of the fragments, a full completion has not yet been attempted.
• Franz Berwald's Symphony in A major, was apparently complete when finished in 1820. It was premiered in Stockholm on March 3 of 1821, being badly received. Only the first movement remains of the piece with some lost sections, most notably the coda. English composer Duncan Druce completed the movement for a recording by Hyperion Records in 1995.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony in D major, D 708A, was sketched between 1820 and 1821, with initial sketches made for the opening sections of the first, second, and fourth movements, and an almost complete sketch for the third movement. In 2012, Newbould was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to complete the symphony.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 7 in E major, was composed in August 1821. Although the work is structurally complete, Schubert only orchestrated the slow introduction and the first 110 bars of the first movement. The rest of the work is continued on 14-stave score pages as a melodic line with occasional basses or counterpoints, giving clues as to changes in orchestral texture. Completions were made by John Francis Barnett, Felix Weingartner, Brian Newbould and Richard Dünser.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor "Unfinished" was sketched in 1822, left as two complete movements, a scherzo nearly completed in piano score but with only two pages orchestrated, and no finale. It has been theorized by some musicologists, including Brian Newbould, that Schubert may have sketched a finale that instead became the big B minor entr'acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde, but all evidence for this is circumstantial. Several completions have been made through the years, perhaps being the piece of classical music with the most attempts at being finished.
• Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 10, a work sketched between 1822 and 1825, and left unfinished when Beethoven died in 1827. Musicologist Barry Cooper made a completion of the first movement. In 2019, artificial intelligence was used to reconstruct the third and fourth movements of the symphony, which premiered on 9 October 2021, titled Beethoven X: The AI Project.
• Mikhail Glinka's Symphonies. Glinka began and left two unfinished single-movement symphonies: A Symphony in B-flat major, and the more known Symphony in D minor, subtitled "On Two Russian themes". The first was completed by Pyotr Klimov, the second by Vissarion Shebalin. Both have been performed and recorded.
• Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 10 in D major, D 936A, was sketched between October and November 1828, during the last weeks of the composer's short life. The manuscript contains sketches of three movements. Scholars agree that the second movement is virtually completed, while the two outer movements are more fragmentary. According to Brian Newbould, the second and third movements are complete in the sketches, with the first only lacking the recapitulation. It has been orchestrated by Brian Newbould in a completion that has subsequently been performed, published and recorded.
• Robert Schumann's Symphony in G minor "Zwickau" was sketched between October 1832 and May 1833. Schumann finished the first two movements and wrote sketches for a scherzo and a finale before abandoning work on the piece. The first movement was premiered on November 10 of 1832 at Zwickau, conducted by Friedrich Wieck. The piece was not published until 1972 in an adaptation by the Swiss conductor Marc Andreae.
• Norbert Burgmüller's Symphony No. 2, sketched between 1834 and 1835. It was conceived in four movements, only the first two being completed when the composer died in 1836. The third movement was finished and orchestrated by Robert Schumann, who also tried to add a finale of his own. Fragments of the original fourth movement were found in 1983.
• Richard Wagner's Symphony in E major was begun in 1834, being an orchestration of his Grand Piano Sonata in A major. He sketched out the first movement and part of the second before abandoning the work. The manuscript was lost, being found in a second-hand bookshop in Berlin in 1886. His wife Cosima asked Wagner's assistant Felix Mottl to orchestrate the sketches. In addition, several unfinished sketches for at least two other symphonies exist, dating from between 1846 and 1847.
• Robert Schumann's Symphony in C minor, was sketched between 1840 and 1841 but quickly abandoned. The first movement is partly orchestrated but unfinished, the scherzo movement is complete, the other two movements are only in rough draft form. The scherzo was later published in Bunte Blätter, Op. 99, as No. 14.
• Camille Saint-Saëns's left two unfinished symphonies as part of his juvenilia. The Symphony in B-flat major was sketched in 1848, at the age of thirteen and in the same year he joined the Paris Conservatoire. A completed first movement remains consisting of an adagio introduction followed by an allegro molto. An andante in E-flat major was left incomplete with 27 bars. These fragments have not been published and no completion has been realised. The Symphony in D major dates from 1850, consisting of an unfinished single-movement andante con moto followed by a vivace assai. As the previous one, no publication nor completion are available.
• Georges Bizet's Roma Symphony, is sometimes described as "unfinished", but this is misleading. After eleven years of tinkering, with a partial performance in 1869, Bizet could still not produce a version that truly satisfied him. However, the latest version of the symphony was published posthumously in 1880, and is a complete work in the sense that all the movements are fully scored.
• Modest Mussorgsky's Symphony in D major was sketched between 1861 and 1862, left in a fragmentary state and eventually lost.
• Anton Bruckner's Symphony in B-flat major, sketched in October 1869 in two-stave score only. Only the first sixty-eight measures of the opening movement were drafted. An arrangement for chamber orchestra was made by Ricardo Luna.
• Hans Rott's Symphony for Strings in A-flat major was composed between 1874 and 1875, finishing the first three movements but leaving the finale uncompleted, with some sketches being extant. the symphony has been recorded, but so for no attempts to complete the finale have been made.
• Joachim Raff's Symphony No. 11 in A minor was composed in the spring of 1876, but was left without being published nor performed when he died in 1882. In 1883, Raff's friend the conductor Max Erdmannsdörfer, took the manuscript, edited and published it. Raff supposedly left the work finished and Erdmannsdörfer only edited it for publishing. However, since the original score disappeared, we can not be completely sure.
• Hugo Wolf's Symphony in B-flat major was sketched between 1876 and 1877. Apparently the work was written in four movements, but the first and third were lost at the train station in Graz in 1877. The now two-movement piece remained unpublished and unperformed until 1940, 37 years later after Wolf's death.
• Hans Rott's Symphony No. 2 was sketched between 1 January and 4 August 1880, but his mental collapse in October of that year left the work unfinished. No completion attempts have been made.
• Claude Debussy's Symphony in B minor was written between 1880 and 1881 for four-hands piano, he intended to write it in four movements but completed only the first. Debussy sent the manuscript to Nadezhda von Meck and the score was kept in a Russian archive after her death. It was published posthumously by Muzgiz in 1933. The work was never orchestrated by Debussy himself, being arranged for orchestra by Tony Finno.
• Johan Svendsen's Symphony No. 3 was sketched between 1883 and 1884, being destroyed when his first wife Sarah had thrown the only copy in the fire in a fit of rage. However, some sketches were found by conductor Bjarte Engeset in 2007. They were elaborated and orchestrated by Bjørn Morten Christophersen and premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Engeset in 2011.
• Alexander Borodin's Symphony No. 3, was sketched between 1886 and 1887. It was conceived as a four-movement work complete on the composer's mind, but when he died, only fragments of two movements were found. Alexander Glazunov completed and orchestrated the piece, being published in 1889.
• Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 9, was composed between 1887 and 1896, leaving the finale unfinished when he died on 1896. There have been a number of completions made of the fourth movement, but most conductors opt to perform and record only the first three.
• Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 5 in G major, he gave up this project and made use of the themes to complete his String Quintet No.2 in G major, Op. 111.
• Carl Nielsen's Symphony in F major, sketched in 1888, from which only the first movement was finished, which later got the title Symphonic Rhapsody FS 7. It was performed twice, but Nielsen never composed the rest of it. Instead, he started composing what would become his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, which is famous for being the first symphony in history that employed the use of progressive tonality.
• Charles Gounod's Symphony No. 3 in C major was sketched between 1890 and 1892, managing to finish the slow introduction of the first movement and the whole second movement. These fragments were recorded for the first time in 2014 for the CPO label.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 7 in E-flat major, was sketched between 1891 and 1892, but Tchaikovsky was dissatisfied and abandoned it. The material was reworked in 1893 as his Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 75 and Andante and Finale, Op. 79. A reconstruction of the original symphony from the sketches and various reworkings was made between 1951 and 1955 by Soviet composer Semyon Bogatyrev. In 2005, a second reconstruction, commissioned by the Tchaikovsky Fund, was completed by Russian composer Pyotr Klimov.