Of all the masterpieces we never got from composers' deaths, some really sting. Haydn never got around to his Paradise Lost Oratorio, Verdi never got to write King Lear, Wagner never got to write the symphony he planned or his opera on the life of Christ, Beethoven never finished his Tenth - or the opera he wanted to make from Macb*th, Debussy never got to make his opera from Fall of the House of Usher, Prokofiev never finished his Oscar Wilde opera, Britten never began his based on a Jane Austen novel nor Ligeti his on Alice in Wonderland, Ives never finished his Universe Symphony, Scriabin barely made a dent in his 'Mysterium', Bernstein never even began his Holocaust Symphony nor Boulez his Waiting for Godot opera, Elgar never got to do the fourth oratorio in his 'Choral Ring Cycle,' and before the Ring of the Nibelung was a Wagner project, it was Mendelssohn's. And let's not even get started on Schubert or Mussorgsky or Mozart....
But one of the most painful of all is that had Tchaikovsky lived another year or ten, we probably would have gotten a Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet OPERA. On the third published draft, Tchaikovsky finally got his R&J overture right, and it's just about a perfect piece of music. But getting it right didn't mean that the project ever left him, because after his death, sketches were found for the famous love music with lines for Soprano and Tenor to declaim the Balcony Scene in Russian translation.
It was completed by Tchaikovsky's younger contemporary and close musical friend, Sergey Taneyev, a composer to whom we will soon return no doubt. The sketches were vague, and this must be counted as being by Taneyev, not Tchaikovsky, but just listen, dear listeners and lovers, and weep at what might have been.
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