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such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, and these duly include
the childhood compositions. There are also partially complete editions of the
works of Hummel, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Strauss, for example, and these
contain at least some of the works of the composers in question. For composers
regarded as of lesser significance on the basis of their later works, however, the
situation is not so good, regardless of how successful they were as child com-
posers. Many childhood works by composers such as Wesley, Crotch, Franck,
Ouseley, Saint-Saëns, Rheinberger, Paladilhe, Busoni, Bloch, Furtwängler, and
Tcherepnin have so far never appeared in print or in recordings, and are likely
to be unfamiliar to anyone except perhaps one or two specialists. The same ap-
plies to works that were published shortly after they were written but not since
The Marginalization of Children s Compositions of the Past 27
then, as these will be equally unfamiliar today except to the occasional special-
ist. Works by composers such as Darcis, Welsh, Weichsell, Berwald, Blahetka,
Moscheles, Fibich, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco come into this category, as do
works by many of the composers in the previous list. With so much material
not readily available for study, it is hardly surprising that there has been almost
total neglect of these works in general histories of music, and even, in most
cases, in specialist studies of the individual composers.
Surviving manuscripts of works left unpublished have generally found
their way into public collections eventually, but it has often taken many dec-
ades. Thus unpublished works by earlier composers are generally accessible in
libraries, and there may even be a catalogue of them, but those from more
recent years are often in private hands, and access is sometimes impossible. A
particular problem arises where a composer has decided to discard or withdraw
a work, or simply refuses to acknowledge it. This has been a very common
occurrence in the twentieth century, as indicated earlier; composers often
refuse to recognize anything they wrote before the age of about twenty-one.
These works are consigned to a kind of limbo. They may eventually reemerge,
as happened with a group by Grieg that he instructed to be destroyed at his
death and certainly never intended to be published, but their absence in the
meantime gives the impression that childhood composition is a far less com-
mon activity than it actually is. Childhood composition consequently receives
even less attention than would otherwise be the case. Works dismissed by
their own authors within about ten years of their composition stand almost no
chance of being reappraised by others.
In a few cases, an adult composer has recognized that an early composi-
tion contains some merit, but has simply extracted some material a theme or
two and reworked it in a new way. This conscious appropriation of earlier
material often passes unacknowledged, and is probably much more widespread
than is generally realized. Beethoven, for example, borrowed two themes from
his early piano quartets, written at the age of thirteen or fourteen, when com-
posing his Piano Sonata Op. 2, and there could easily be many other unrec-
ognized borrowings by various composers from works now lost. Sometimes
the borrowings are even acknowledged openly, as in Elgar s Wand of Youth
and Britten s Simple Symphony. Almost always, however, the earlier work is
suppressed and treated as a quarry for useful ideas rather than as an artistic
creation in its own right.
The implication of such practices is that a composer s output forms a
kind of unified whole, almost like a journey of exploration, in which early
works are regarded as preparatory. Such works can then automatically be as-
signed lesser significance mere steps on the road to an accrued mastery of
composition. These works are then liable to be judged anachronistically by
28 Chapter 3
the aesthetic norms of later works, and their failure to live up to later sophis-
tication can be regarded as a defect. There can be an automatic assumption
that a composer s skills gradually improve toward a final goal; from here it is a
short step to assuming that the works furthest from that goal, namely the early
works, have no intrinsic value, and that their only possible interest might be
in how far they anticipate what came later.
Such attitudes can be exacerbated by the modern preference for complex-
ity as aesthetically desirable. If a modern work is not complex, it tends to be
considered weak and artistically deficient; twentieth-century critics have placed
undue value on complexity, which is often regarded as an aesthetic goal (though
this may be less so in the twenty-first century). Yet complexity is not a universal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]