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World Premiere of the Unfinished Variations Unv. 14

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World Premiere of the Unfinished Variations 14

Emanuele Stracchi – Young Artists Piano Solo Series 2020–2021
Teatro Palladium – Rome
Tuesday, 29 December at 9:30 PM

On Tuesday, 29 December 2020 at 9:30 PM, a concert was held at the Teatro Palladium in Rome as part of the “Young Artists Piano Solo Series 2020–2021,” streamed live on the Roma Tre Orchestra Facebook page. It was the 484th concert since the foundation. At the piano was Maestro Emanuele Stracchi, collaborator of the Music Research Centre (www.lvbeethoven.org). The programme included:

  • J. S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in D major (from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I), BWV 850
  • L. v. Beethoven: Variations in A major, Unv. 14 (reconstruction by Graziano Denini, world premiere)
  • J. S. Bach: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903
  • L. v. Beethoven: Rondo in A major, WoO 49
  • B. Bartók: Suite, Op. 14 (Allegretto, Scherzo, Allegro Molto, Sostenuto)
  • L. v. Beethoven: Rondo a Capriccio, Op. 129

Sketched at the end of 1794 or the beginning of 1795, the drafts of the variations are contained on three pages of the Fischhof sketchbook, probably comprising a theme, eight variations, and a coda. On folio 25 recto of the sketchbook, immediately after the variations, there is a brief draft for the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 2 No. 2; this has also led to the suggestion that Beethoven may have considered a set of variations as a finale for this sonata. Both this hypothesis and the idea of an independent set of variations remain plausible.

Further variations in A major, therefore in the same key and with the same tempo indication, are found in the “Kafka” miscellany (GB-Lhl, Add. Ms. 29801, Bl. 158v), although these probably refer to “La ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which is certainly not the subject of the variations in the Fischhof sketchbook.

All details of this work, its reconstruction, and the process leading to the world premiere are contained on our page:

Unvollendete 14 – Fragment of Variations for Piano

All concert videos are available on the YouTube channel of

The Unvollendete 14 Variations are part of the project “Research Becomes Art.”

A New Life for the Unknown Works of Ludwig van Beethoven: An Artistic Exploration by Maestro Emanuele Stracchi

Born in 1990, he is a pianist, composer, and conductor. Graduating cum laude in Piano and Composition, he studied at the “Briccialdi” Higher Institute in Terni and the “Santa Cecilia” Conservatoire in Rome, subsequently obtaining a Second-Level Diploma cum laude in Musical Disciplines, with a thesis on György Ligeti (Experimental Biennium).

He has recently recorded Contemporary Piano Works for the Diapason label, available on iTunes and Spotify. A student of Guaitoli, he further refined his studies with Marvulli, Micheletti, and Bellocchio; he has studied Orchestra Conducting and Gregorian Chant, and at the prestigious Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena he studied with the renowned pianist Lilya Zilberstein.

He graduated cum laude in Philosophy at Roma Tre University (thesis in History of Medieval Philosophy, supervised by Prof. Benedetto Ippolito) and is the author of several musicological publications. Some of his compositions have been awarded prizes and performed by important institutions such as the Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual Heritage (Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori e Audiovisivi).

A versatile musician, he has an extensive concert career spanning chamber music and jazz. As a soloist and with orchestras, he has performed works by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Gershwin. Active in contemporary music, he has curated several world premieres and is a specialist in the music of George Gershwin.

In the educational field, he currently holds a piano teaching post at middle schools and is completing advanced studies in Composition for Music Applied to Images (Ordinamental Biennium). Selected for various projects, such as “Soloists with Orchestra” in Rome and the “Call for Young Performers” in 2018 and 2019 in Milan, he has won several international music competitions, including the Premio Novecento 2015 at the Luigi Nono Competition in Venaria Reale (Turin). More recently, he won the Stresa International Competition and the Grand Prix at the “Melos” International Competition at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome.

A study of Francesco Trocchia’s Recast (Kleine Fuge), based on Beethoven’s fragmented fugue from Biamonti 250 and the Landsberg 7 sketchbook.

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Recast (Kleine Fuge) for orchestra

(2015) – Ludwig Van Beethoven – Francesco Trocchia.

Beethoven, still talking to us

Unlike Giuseppe Verdi, who wanted a sizeable part of his “secret” papers and sketches to be burned after his death, Ludwig van Beethoven preserved for posterity a great deal of his albums, sketchbooks and notebooks, where he wrote down his thoughts and observations, sketches and composition projects. Paradoxically, Verdi’s unplanned legacy was jealously guarded by his heirs at Villa Verdi in Sant’Agata until a few years ago, while Beethoven’s voluntary bequest was subject to dispersion after the composer’s demise, for several decades.

Through Beethoven-Trocchia RECAST (Kleine Fuge), completed in 2015, the Milanese composer aims to recuperate – if one may say so – and re-elaborate one of Beethoven’s early sketches, which survived in fragmentary form on manuscript papers that passed through various owners after the musician’s death: from the Viennese publishing firm Artaria to German musician and collector Ludwig Landsberg (1807-1858), finally ending up at the Royal Library in Berlin in 1862.

The fugue sketch – three pages datable to circa 1800, included in the sketchbook known as Landsberg 7 – was reviewed for the very first time by Karl Lothar Mikulicz, who made a complete transcription of the sketchbook, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 19271. Such a process is by no means a neutral one: as palaeographers never fail to stress, each transcription entails a loss of some sort of the contents that the original object tries to convey through its visual appearance.

While in this case we are not dealing with an ancient witness preceding modern notation, Mikulicz’s transcription, intended to provide a faithful, at the same time readable version of the sketches, certainly involved a few choices by the editor, so that a manuscript written over a century earlier, and meant for the writer’s personal use, could become more comprehensible to the modern reader. The final result normally entails neutralizing someone’s very own writing, which reflects the writer’s attempt to capture an idea in its fundamentals, leaving on paper only what is deemed necessary. Because of their indefinite nature, notes and sketches can reveal clues of a psychological sort, hidden in a number of details – writing in a hurry can betray a creative urge and that is no small thing for the scholar who strongly relies on the biographical information that documents can provide.

Almost a century after that very first review of the sketches, Francesco Trocchia has found the necessary inspiration to build something new upon them. The Milanese composer explains he was not guided by merely philological, restoration-oriented criteria in his work. «I used – we read in the Author’s note published in this score – all the composition material by Beethoven, bridging gaps and creating unity in a new composition».

The stylistic and aesthetic problems involved are partly the same as those faced by Luciano Berio – an eloquent example amongst many – when he composed his finale for the unfinished Turandot, based on Puccini’s original fragments. Berio had to fit his work into a pre-existing score, which made a revisitation of the style of the early 1900s unavoidable. Composing decades after the sketching of those fragments – decades that were crucial for the analysis and evaluation of Puccini’s idiom, although work was still in progress -, Berio was able to highlight key elements which only the passage of time shows in their absolute clarity, such as the unmistakable modernity of that late work of Puccini’s.

Another work by Berio, composed upon Franz Schubert’s sketches for the planned Tenth Symphony in D major (D. 936A), provides the subject for a fascinating comparison. In writing Rendering for orchestra (1988-1990), Berio approached Schubert’s sketches through modern restoration criteria whose purpose, he explained, is to bring back the original colours without effacing the damages and gaps brought about by

time2. Berio completed the fragments by orchestrating them in a Schubertian fashion – the instrumentation chosen is the same as that of the “Unfinished” Symphony no. 8. He then linked the fragments, by inserting between them specially composed brief sections, reminiscent of Schubert’s later style, to be constantly played pianissimo. According to American musicologist David Metzer3, Berio’s effort was after all a creative restoration, one that succeeds in making the listener perceive the remoteness and fragmented nature of those sketches. Sketches which, despite the attempts to do so, will never bring to life the Tenth Symphony such as Schubert had devised it.

A similar starting point – looking at the sketches through a contemporary perspective –, but quite a different result, we find in Beethoven-Trocchia RECAST (Kleine Fuge). The composer’s aim and attitude in approaching the fragments are of quite a different nature, compared to Berio’s.

By evoking different periods, styles and genres, Trocchia’s work becomes a reflection on the timeless significance of a time-honoured musical form, the fugue. Through this work of his, the composer strives not only to integrate Beethoven’s musical text into the present, but also to allow Beethoven’s work to instil its vital breath into today’s music – the powerful gesture pictured in Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo.

The remoteness of those fragments from the contemporary idiom and expression can be clearly heard but, despite their incompleteness, the sketches can still inspire the composer. The fracture is not without repair, the loss is not irreversible. The fragments stand witness to a past which cannot be repeated; at the same time, they constitute an everlasting legacy to seize, with no time limit to do so.

The orchestration is the preferred medium used by the composer to blend together past and present, allowing tradition to play a key role in today’s musical scene.

Paola Teresa Rossetti



1 KARL LOTHAR MIKULICZ (ed. by), Fin Notierungsbuch von Beethoven aus dem Besitze der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927, pp. 56-58.
2 See the Author’s Note published with the score, also available on the web page provided by the Centro Studi Luciano Berio: www.lucianoberio.org/node/1447?1113584796=1 .
3 DAVID METZER, Musical Decay: Luciano Berio’s “Rendering” and John Cage’s “Europera 5”, «Journal of the Royal Musical Association» (2000), vol. 125, n. 1, pp. 93-114. Consulted online 23.04 2020: www.jstor.org/stable/3250683 .

Biamonti 250 – Fugue (fragments not very legible), pages 60 and 62 of the Landsberg 7 notebook, corresponding to pages 56 and 58 of Mikulicz. The theme on page 60 (Mikulicz page 58) is similar to that of the sketch Biamonti 50 ‘Nenne nicht das Schicksal grausam’. The sketches are found in the Landsberg 7 Sketchbook on pages 60, 61, 62 in full. It is not known why Beethoven, while studying the Violin and Piano Sonata op. 24, the Piano Sonata op. 26, the Second Symphony op. 36 and The Creatures of Prometheus op. 43, felt the need to sketch and develop this fugue in D–, nor why the beginning of the fugue itself is not found on the first of these three pages but on the third (page 62). It is nevertheless evident that in these three pages all of Beethoven’s attention was focused on the development of a fugue.

Author’s note to the Beethoven fragments

by Francesco Trocchia

Author’s note to the Beethoven fragments

Recast (Kleine Fuge) contains all the fragments found on pages 60-62 of the Landsberg notebook (by the name of the first owner: Paul Landsberg of Breslau), corresponding to pages 60-62 in Mikulicz. Period: 1799-1800.

Below are the three pages containing the original fragments, reproduced in the order in which I have used them, with some additional colored notes:

  • green: “graphic” changes designed to make the fragments more readable;
  • red: bars in which the fragments were used;
  • blue: detailed indications on how the fragments were actually used.

Some clarifications on the blue notes, which refer to:

  • clefs that I used to indicate the pitch of the notes;
  • alterations omitted in the fragments[i] but used in my composition;
  • notes deleted in the fragments but used in my composition;
  • notes or alterations crossed out, and not used in my composition;
  • changes in note values;
  • ties for those notes in the fragments that I joined to those already present in my composition;
  • 8va and 15ma  for fragments that are transposed in my composition;
  • square brackets for fragments not quoted in their original form, but further developed in my composition.

[i] I refer to the B flat missing from the key signature, not indicated even where clearly necessary.

Collection of Sketches, Single Sheets and Reconstructions

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Pangelingua for Voices – circa 1820 Reconstruction by Prof. Barry Cooper.

Reconstruction by Prof. Barry Cooper.

Pangelingua for Voices – circa 1820 Reconstruction by Prof. Barry Cooper. Prof. Barry Cooper surprises us again with his new discovery: a “Pangelingua” (Pangelinqua) discovered in some papers from 1820. Here is the article that you can read at this address: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20070588. But let’s hear from Cooper:

A previously unknown Beethoven arrangement for an ancient hymn has been uncovered after 192 years. The composer wrote a harmony for the Gregorian chant Pange Lingua and modified its tune, said the University of Manchester’s Professor Barry Cooper. The passage was written in a sketchbook but had previously been regarded as an exercise or a sketch for another piece. Prof Cooper recognised the hymn’s tune and identified the two-minute piece as a previously unknown Beethoven work. The leading expert on the composer said it was a rare example of the composer writing religious music. “I was very surprised when I found this – I didn’t think he’d written anything like this,” he said. The sketchbook, which is held at the Berlin State Library, dates from around 1820. It was transcribed and published in 2010. Prof Cooper said Beethoven scholars had not identified the piece earlier because “it just looked like a series of notes”. “When I looked at it, I thought, hey, that’s not just a series of notes, that’s a hymn tune with Beethoven’s harmony. “It seems that people who are experts in plainsong don’t look at Beethoven sketches very much and people who are experts in Beethoven sketches don’t look at plainsong very much. But I happened to know both.” Beethoven made slight changes to the tune of Pange Lingua, a 1,000-year-old Gregorian chant, Prof Cooper said. It may have been played at the ceremony where Beethoven’s patron Archduke Rudolph of Austria was made Archbishop of Olmutz in March 1820, when the composer was 49, he added. ‘Extraordinary’ find Experts in Berlin had assumed the piece was a sketch for his celebrated mass Missa Solemnis, which was written around the same time. “He never composed any functional music at all – the only liturgical music he wrote was for the two great masses,” Prof Cooper said. “So to find him writing simple functional music for an ordinary church service is extraordinary.” Professor William Drabkin from the University of Southampton, who published the sketches, described it as a “very rudimentary piece”.”When I did the sketch transcriptions, I thought it was some sort of exercise in counterpoint,” he said. “I couldn’t place it.” He added: “It’s certainly a piece that we’ve not come across. It adds a small contribution to our knowledge of what Beethoven was doing in the 1820s.” The hymn will be performed at the University of Manchester at 14:30 BST on Thursday.The performance comes 14 years after Prof Cooper stirred controversy in the classical music world by creating a 10th Symphony based on unfinished Beethoven sketches.

Fragment (Perhaps of a Sonata?) for Viola and Piano, in C Major.

1820–1825.

Fragment (Perhaps of a Sonata?) for Viola and Piano, in C Major. 1820–1825.

This eight-measure fragment would have been lost had it not been for Karl Holz, second violinist of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, who acted as Beethoven’s secretary for a year toward the end of the composer’s life, effectively ousting Anton Felix Schindler. In 1847, he copied these two lines of music from one of Beethoven’s sketchbooks. The sketchbook was later lost, but this copy is still preserved in the library of the University of Frankfurt. The music is lively and forthright, but unfortunately, it stops abruptly after a dominant cadence in the eighth measure. The MP3 on the website was played by directly auditioning the piece recorded on the Toccata Classics CD TOCC0108.

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