The discovery of a previously unknown work by Ralph Vaughan Williams has captured the attention of the music world this week.
It may not have shocked the entire globe, but it's certainly an interesting story. In a box in the archives of Morley College in London, Elaine Andrews found an unknown song by the British composer. The work, titled "Before the Mirror," is based on a poem by Swinburne, which itself was inspired by a painting by Whistler.
Heard on Radio 4's "PM" show, the song reveals a music of tonal boldness and expressive ambiguity, written shortly after Vaughan Williams married Adeline Fisher in 1897. Even the manuscript, with its corrections and erasures, offers a rare glimpse into the composer's creative process.
Yet a single song is only a fraction of the musical treasures that may still be hidden in libraries, archives, and attics around the world. One of the most important musical discoveries of all time occurred in 2009, when a vast archive of manuscripts was found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, once the summer home of composer Florence Price. Among them were two violin concertos, the Fourth Symphony, and dozens of other works.
This discovery not only brought wonderful music to light, but also exposed the priorities and prejudices of music history. Unknown manuscripts of the most famous composers, such as a page by Mozart, an exercise by Beethoven, or a sketch by Haydn, are often discovered because scholars know where to look and have searched for centuries for every trace of their lives. But this has not been the case for Price and many other composers left on the fringes of musicology. Their works are often considered “lost” not because they have disappeared forever, but because no one has seriously searched for them.
For this reason, some of the greatest gaps in the history of music are associated with women composers. They are works that are known to have been written and performed during the authors’ lifetimes, but which are now referred to in biographies as “lost.” Francesca Caccini wrote more than 13 stage works in 17th-century Italy, but only one of them survives today, “La Liberazione di Ruggiero.”
It is a work where gender roles are reversed and the female characters are the ones who save the men. Caccini’s other operas may still be “lost,” but the question is: have they been sought with the same insistence as a page of Bruckner or a letter of Mahler? The hope of music history is that this important corpus of early Italian opera will one day be discovered in some attic or dusty archive.
The same goes for at least three complete operas by Joseph Bologne, an extraordinary figure in 18th-century France: composer, violinist, conductor, swordsman, and military man. He became a colonel in the only regiment of black soldiers during the French Revolution.
However, Bologne's legacy was marred by the prejudices of a culture that reinstated slavery and that, after his death in 1799, erased his contribution to both the revolution and musical life. Now that his work is finally finding the place it deserves, there must be renewed efforts to recover these vital operas from the oblivion where they should never have ended.
Fortunately, there are hopeful exceptions. In 2022, Laurie Strass discovered vocal parts of five-part madrigals by the 16th-century composer Maddalena Casulana in St. Petersburg. But for her, as for Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Barbara Strozzi, Maria Theresia von Paradis and many others, much remains to be discovered.
Of course, there is also lost music whose absence has been known for centuries and about which we can only dream. Among them are Bach's "St Mark Passion" and many of his cantatas, Monteverdi's "Arianna" and other stage works, dozens of quartets and sonatas that Brahms rejected as unworthy, and Sibelius's Eighth Symphony, which was most likely burned by the composer himself.
Meanwhile, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has announced that Lithuanian conductor Giedrė Šlekytė will be the orchestra’s next music director, succeeding Thomas Søndergård from the 2027 season. The appointment comes after just two collaborations: an acclaimed week of Mahler’s First Symphony and a recording session. However, according to RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie, Šlekytė’s musical ideas and the way she works with the musicians spoke for themselves.
Šlekytė has conducted at the Vienna State Opera, conducted Humperdinck’s “Hansel und Gretel” at Covent Garden, and performed a complete Brahms cycle with the Staatskapelle Berlin in Toronto. Her programs include a wide repertoire, from Hannah Eisendle and Berlioz in Dallas to Martinů in Amsterdam, a variety that the RSNO is expected to continue.
Her appointment is also significant for another reason: she becomes, surprisingly, the only female conductor leading or scheduled to lead a major orchestra in the United Kingdom. Before her, one of the most notable cases was compatriot Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who had a transformative tenure at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. /GazetaExpress/
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