Ashley Sterne Some More "Lost" Finds

From World-Radio - December 17, 1937
by Ashley Sterne

I think I may say with perfect safety, and without first consulting my solicitors (Messrs. Rowly, Powly, Gammon, and Spinwich), that the outstanding event of the past year in Continental concert-programmes was the recent broadcast from all German stations of Schumann's "Lost" Concerto for the violin.

For my own part, I was bitterly disappointed in not being able to pick up any of the German stations concerned.  Adjusting my set for Berlin, I got a Cookery Talk from Cardiff by a Mrs. Ursula Meadle.  Shifting to Breslau, I heard an illuminating Gale Warning, followed by a Haddock Fishing Bulletin from Stagshaw; while all I could extract from Cologne's wavelength was a Celtic Poetry Reading From Northern Ireland.

Thus I am regrettably precluded from offering my own humble opinion for what it is worth (or I would even take less for spot cash) on the merits both of the work itself and of its performance on this memorable occasion.  But I have learnt my lesson, and if there should come a "next time" when a found "lost" composition is kindly handed to us music-lovers on a plate via ether (a highly probably contingency, as I am about to reveal), I shall take every possible precaution to ensure its getting a fitting and adequate "reception."

  

I do not think that it is generally known that since the locating of Schumann's Concerto in the Berlin State Library — it was found on the third shelf of the bookcase underneath the Librarian's lunch — there has been a positive boom in searching of other lost musical MSS. all over Europe.  Seekers therefore have been ransacking not only State Libraries, but State Pawnshops, State Rubbish-Dumps, State Curio-Shops, and State Jumble Sales, with the result that some very remarkable finds have already been made.

For example, there has turned up the long-missing Trio for Ear-Trumpet, Ice-Cream Cornet, and Soudanese Nose-Flute, the work of the onetime famous Lapp composer, Pritij Pusskatz.  He contracted the unfortunate habit of his contemporary, Schubert, of composing his music upon any odd scraps of writing-material which, when the divine afflatus rose to the top, chanced to be lying ready to hand, thus adding enormously to the considerable difficulties of tracing and recognising his MS.

After arduous search, however, the complete work has now been rounded up, and is found to have been written upon six sheets of pink blotting-paper, nine luggage-labels, the parchment lid of a marmalade-jar, the backs of two hotel-bills, and a Football Pools coupon.  It is to receive its first performance in Archangel at the forthcoming Show of Bloodstock Reindeer, and negotiations are in progress with the Archangelic Broadcasting Hierarchy (Inc.) to have the broadcast of the work, or at least a running commentary thereon, relayed to Nyiregyhaza, Schecetady, Star-Zagora, Freibig-im-Breisgau, Mexico City, and Western Regional.

Serge Safetypin's Symphony

 Another noteworthy discovery is the MS. of an early symphony by Serge Safetypin, who seems to have shared with his compatriot Tcaikovsky all the latter's well-known obsession for tearing up early MSS.  It would appear that after the first production of Safetypin's work, and despite the rapturous and unanimous éclat with which it was received by all three members of the audience, the composer was so embittered by the performance of the gentleman playing the B-flat tenor triangle (who, at an intensely dramatic junction in the work, forgot to put the mute on his instrument), that on returning home he borrowed his wife's cuticle-scissors, and forthwith proceeded to cut up into tiny pieces the entire score and parts.  These he subsequently sold to a confetti-merchant for a mere song.

It was at the last annual stock-taking in the merchant's warehouse that the long-forgotten sack containing the disintegrating symphony was discovered in a dark and obscure corner, and its contents examined.  The foreman, an intelligent and discerning fellow and an ex-member of the famous Don Cossack Choir, immediately recognised the fragments as being literally morceaux de concert [literally translated as concertpieces—and which act as small-scale concertos], and thereafter devoted all his leisure time to piecing the bits together an pasting them on to sheets of plate-glass so that both sides of the MS. might be rendered legible.

The full score and parts are now completely restored, but as in their present condition they weigh close upon 300 tons, a second performance of the work seems impracticable at the moment of going to press.  Yet it is a foregone conclusion that the symphony (christened by its restorer with the title of "Paste-thetic," in memory of his strenuous labour with the gum-pot) will sooner or later be put "on the air," and I therefore conjure all musical readers of World-Radio to keep a carefully skinned eye upon future concert-programmes transmitted from Dniepropetrovak.

A curious incident has occurred in the matter of the search for the missing MS. of a short Christmas carol composed by another once-famous Russian composer, Oopinkoff.  A recent post-mortem search among his personal effects revealed, carefully put away in a store cupboard, what at first sight indubitably appeared to be the four vocal parts of the "lost" carol.  Anyway, a quartet party was invited to co-operate, the alleged parts were distributed, and the carol tried through.

A Carol by Oopinkoff

The eminent musicians present upon the occasion were nonplussed.  The little work, though undoubtedly euphonious at times, sounded in the main too cacophonous to be pronounced as the composition of Oopinkoff.  Which it certainly wasn't.  Subsequent investigation showed the supposed small sheets of MS. music to be nothing of greater musical moment than four thin slices of lightly-buttered currant loaf.

The sequel is likewise curious.  The serving maid, on being told to consign the unappetising pabulum to the dustbin, misinterpreted her instructions, took the slices round to the chemist's handed them across the counter, and, after waiting a few minutes, received in exchange a bottle of liver-tonic, a box of gout-pills, a pot of chilblain ointment, and a 2-lb. jar of bath-salts.

Nor is the case of the recovery of the lost Suite in A flat (fully furnished with h. & c. running water in all bedrooms) by the celebrated Hungarian composer, Teeketl, any less sensational.  Teeketl himself lost the MS. some seventy years ago when returning home late one night from a Darts Match at a local mjilkba, or, as the peasants call it, pjublikhaus.  It was found next morning floating in a horsetrough by a naval architect, who conscientiously took it round in a takzy, or Hungarian ox-wagon, to the nearest police station.

On arrival there, however, he discovered that he had left the MS. in the vehicle which had brought him, and which had at once departed.  Nothing more was heard of the missing composition for twenty years, when the Abbe Liszt, in the course of making his toilet one morning, was astounded to find it in his trousers-press.  He promptly did it up into a newspaper parcel, addressed it to Mrs. Teeketl, and despatched it by a District Messenger boy.

On his way the miserable lad was kidnapped by a band of gipsies, who badly needed an apprentice to learn the balalaika for their inevitable Magyar orchestra, and so once more the MS. disappeared.  It was not until this last summer that it again turned up, discovered by an eminent London musical critic in a second-hand music-shop in Tin Pan Alley, where it occupied a lowly position in a receptacle full of beer-and-tobacco-stained banjo-music labelled "All in this tray, 2d."  Purchasing the precious relic, the eminent critic bore it home, tried it over on his piano, and decided that it would be all to the good, considering the universally lofty position and reputation which Hungarian music had always and deservedly enjoyed, if he lost it again.

Finally, a report reaches me, even as I write, that Mr. Dyer Pason, the centenarian organist who had the misfortune to mislay Miss Adelaide Proctor's famous "Lost Chord," has found it again after very many years of concentrated search.  He is much disappointed, they say, that the chord no longer resembles in the least the sound of a Grand Amen.  Rather does he claim that it sounds more like the final "sour" chord of a "swing" dance number.  However, I intend to make early personal investigation upon this point, and my complete analysis of the chord will appear in an early issue of this journal.

[I think not!  — Ed.]