In classical music, it is relatively rare for a work to be written in collaboration by multiple composers. This contrasts with popular music, where it is common for more than one person to contribute to the music for a song. Nevertheless, there are instances of collaborative classical music compositions.
Collaborations
The following list gives some details of classical works written by composers working collaboratively.
Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde Durán collaborated on a number of zarzuelas. Chueca provided most of the melodies and Valverde provided the orchestral polish. Their collaborations included Un maestro de obra prima (1877), La Canción de la Lola (1880), Luces y sombras and Fiesta Nacional (both 1882), Cádiz (1886), El año pasado por agua (1889), and other operas. Their masterpiece was La gran vía (Madrid, 1886). Valverde Durán also collaborated with Ruperto Chapí, Tomás Bretón, his own son Joaquín "Quinito" Valverde Sanjuán, and other composers. Quinito Valverde Sanjuán also collaborated with other composers, such as Tomás López Torregrosa, Ramón Estellés, Rafael Calleja and José Serrano, however, his contribution to these works was more significant than his father's had been to his.
Other zarzuela composers collaborated in some important works: Amadeu Vives with Gerónimo Giménez in El húsar de la guardia (1904), La gatita blanca (1905) and other; Giménez with Manuel Nieto in El barbero de Sevilla (1901) and with Ruperto Chapí in La eterna revista (1908); Pablo Luna with Tomás Barrera or Rafael Calleja; etc.
in 1913, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky together wrote a completion of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina for a production by Sergei Diaghilev. Stravinsky's ending is sometimes still heard, but this joint realisation is otherwise unknown.
From 1919 to 1930, Juan Vert and Reveriano Soutullo collaborated on 21 zarzuelas, both providing music. These collaborations include some of the most known instances of the genre: La del soto del Parral (1927), La leyenda del beso (1924) or El último romántico (1927).
In 1929, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill collaborated on the opera Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh's Flight), based on the writing of American pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh. This was later changed by removal of Hindemith’s contribution, renaming it to Der Ozeanflug (The Flight across the Ocean), and removal of Lindbergh’s name. The opening line was changed from "My name is Charles Lindbergh" to "My name is of no account".
In 1937, Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert wrote the opera L'Aiglon. Ibert wrote Acts 1 and 5, Honegger the rest. In 1938, they again collaborated on an opera, this time Les petites cardinal.
La source (1866) is a ballet with music by Léo Delibes and Ludwig Minkus. Minkus wrote Act I and Scene 2 of Act III; Delibes wrote Act II and Scene 1 of Act III.
In 1956 appeared Don Perlimpin (also seen as Perlimpinada), a collaboration between Federico Mompou and Xavier Montsalvatge. Most of the work was by Mompou, but Montsalvatge helped with the orchestration and linking passages, and added two numbers of his own.[2]
In 1937, shortly after they first met at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona, Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley together wrote Mont Juic, a suite of Catalan dances. It was named after the Barcelona hill on which they had heard some popular tunes. For many years, it was not known which composer wrote which movement,[6] but Berkeley later revealed he had written only the first two movements. It was published as Berkeley's Op. 9 and Britten's Op. 12.[7]
In 1953, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett, and William Walton jointly wrote Variations on an Elizabethan Theme. The theme (Sellinger's Round) was arranged by Imogen Holst from a keyboard harmonisation by William Byrd. Each of the composers also quoted briefly from one of their own earlier compositions. At the first two performances, the audience was not told which composer had written which variation, but were invited to take part in a competition to match the variations to the composers, to raise funds for the Aldeburgh Festival.[10][11] Nobody correctly guessed all six composers.
Variations on a Theme of Zoltán Kodály, a 1962 orchestral work, was written by Antal Doráti, Tibor Serly, Ödön Pártos, Géza Frid and Sándor Veress, Kodály's composition pupils, for his 80th birthday celebration. The theme is taken from Kodály's String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2. The score is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
In 1833, Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles collaborated on a work for two pianos and orchestra, Fantasy and Variations on the "Gypsy March" from Carl Maria von Weber's 'La Preziosa'. Moscheles later made an arrangement for two pianos alone. The manuscript score of this arrangement, inscribed by both Moscheles and Mendelssohn, was presented by Moscheles's son to Anton Rubinstein, and is in the library of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
Ungarische Zigeunerweisen is a piece for piano and orchestra, dating from 1885. It has a curious and still uncertain origin. The piano part was written either by Sophie Menter or Franz Liszt or possibly both had a hand in it. The piece was orchestrated by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892, and premiered under his baton in Odessa in 1893, with Sophie Menter as the soloist.
Vocal and choral
In the early 1830s, Felix Mendelssohn published two sets of 12 songs each, as Opp. 8 and 9. Three songs in each set were written by his sister Fanny Mendelssohn.[3] While each song was the product of one composer alone, as sets, they were collaborations.
In 1840, around the time of their marriage, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann published a set of 12 songs called Gedichte aus Liebesfruhling (Love's Spring). Clara wrote numbers 2, 4 and 11, while Robert wrote the rest. It was published as Robert's Op. 37, but Clara's songs were also given the opus number 12 in her own catalogue of works.
In 1881, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager collaborated on Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (Mass of the Fishermen of Villerville). Messager wrote sections 1 and 4 (Kyrie and O Salutaris), and Fauré wrote sections 2, 3 and 5 (Gloria Benedictus, Sanctus and Agnus Dei). The first performance was accompanied by a harmonium and a violin. For the second performance with orchestra the following year, Messager orchestrated the first four sections, and Fauré the last.
In 1992, a group of Italian composers including Lorenzo Ferrero, Giovanni Sollima, Marco Tutino and others wrote a Requiem per le vittime della mafia, which is a collaborative composition for soloists, choir and orchestra, on an Italian text by Vincenzo Consolo. The requiem was first performed in the Palermo Cathedral on 27 March 1993.
In 1887, Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a string quartet called "Name Day" (Jour de Fete).[3]
In 1899, ten Russian composers wrote Variations on a Russian Theme for string quartet. They were Artsybushev, Blumenfeld, Victor Ewald, Glazunov, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, Sokolov, Wihtol and Alexander Winkler.[3]
In 1908, the Hambourg String Quartet commissioned York Bowen, Frank Bridge, Eric Coates, J. D. Davis (John David Davis) and Hamilton Harty to each compose a movement of a work for string quartet which incorporated the Irish melody Londonderry Air. The resulting Suite on Londonderry Air was performed by the Quartet at Aeolian Hall the same year. The Davis contribution was published in expanded form as his Some variations on the Londonderry Air, Op. 43 (1910). Bridge's movement was published as An Irish Melody in 1915.[15]
In 1819, the publisher Anton Diabelli invited a large number of Austrian composers to each write a variation on a little waltz (or ländler) he had composed, to go into an anthology to be called Vaterländischer Künstlerverein, and 51 of them responded. Ludwig van Beethoven composed not one but 33 variations, which were originally published as his Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, and later as Part I of the anthology. Part II comprised the single variations by each of the 50 other composers. These people are mostly now forgotten, but they include such names as Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Part II has long since become a musical footnote, while Beethoven's set quickly acquired a life of its own and is considered one of the greatest achievements of the piano literature.
In c. 1888, remembering their 1883 trip to the Bayreuth Festival to hear Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager wrote a piece for piano four-hands called Souvenir de Bayreuth (subtitled Fantaisie en forme de quadrille sur les thèmes favoris de L'Anneau Du Nibelung de Richard Wagner). It was not published during their lifetimes and appeared in print only in 1930.[22]
Electroacoustic music
Collaboration has been a constant feature of Electroacoustic music, due to the complexity of the technology. Since the beginning, all laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse but intertwined competencies. In particular, the embedding of technological tools into the process of musical creation resulted in the emergence of a new agent with new expertise: the musical assistant, the technician, the tutor, the computer music designer, the music mediator (a profession that has been described and defined in different ways over the years) – who can work in the phase of writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performance.[23] He or she explains the possibilities of the various instruments and applications, as well as the potential sound effects to the composer (when the latter did not have sufficient knowledge of the programme or a clear idea of what he or she could obtain from it). The musical assistant also explains the most recent results in musical research and translates artistic ideas into programming languages. Finally, he or she transforms those ideas into a score or a computer program and often performs the musical piece during the concerts.[24] Examples of collaboration are numerous: Pierre Boulez and Andrew Gerzso, Alvise Vidolin and Luigi Nono, Jonathan Harvey and Gilbert Nouno, among others. Composers remain the sole authors of this music works, whereas musical assistants are mentioned within the musical documentation (scores, press, program notes) as music assistants or computer music designers.
Other forms of musical collaboration
Another case of note was that of Eric Fenby, who worked as amanuensis for the blind Frederick Delius. Delius would dictate the notes and Fenby would transcribe them. While Fenby was himself a composer, these works on which he and Delius worked together were a collaboration in terms of the labour involved in writing them down, but not in terms of the musical ideas, which were entirely Delius's own.
Film scores over the years have tended to be collaborative projects in various ways, from the simple matter of orchestrators working with the sketches by the composer, to multi-composer collaborative efforts. Originally, with the studio system, composers often contributed parts of a score assigned by the head of the music department. Sometimes this was music not specific to that film for lower budget movies. In modern times, collaboration is seen in such groups as Remote Control Productions. True collaboration has also occurred, with such varied examples as Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman, who together composed the music for The Egyptian (1954); and Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who wrote the music for two Batman films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).
There are various cases where a later composer has transformed an existing work or group of works into a new form, but this would generally be considered an arrangement by another hand, rather than a collaboration. Examples of this would include:
Edvard Grieg wrote additional piano parts for a number of solo piano sonatas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to be played simultaneously with the original music, on piano four-hands. Mozart's original score was untouched. The resultant work is certainly music by both Mozart and Grieg, however they did not collaborate in the ordinary sense of the term, Mozart having died 52 years before Grieg was born.
Arthur Benjamin took a number of unrelated harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Cimarosa, arranged them for oboe and orchestra, and grouped them into a work he called "Oboe Concerto on Themes of Cimarosa". Concert promoters and record companies often gave it the misleading title Oboe Concerto by Cimarosa, arr. Benjamin, but in this form it was perhaps more Benjamin's work than Cimarosa's.
In a similar but slightly different vein, Alan Kogosowski arranged three solo piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin for piano and orchestra, and grouped them into a work that he himself gave the misleading title "Piano Concerto No. 3 in A major by Chopin".
There are also instances where a work was left unfinished at the composer's death, and was completed by another composer. In such cases, the later composer generally strives to ensure the finished product is as close as possible to the original composer's intentions, as revealed by their notes, rough drafts, or other evidence. One of the best known examples is the completion by Franco Alfano of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. There may also be a case for describing Sir Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 3 as a work by both Elgar and Anthony Payne. However, these types of works cannot properly be called collaborations.
References
^Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed, 1954: Vol. 1, Bizet, Georges, p. 734
