Tim Mahon writes:

>There seems to be a great deal of "I think this is what the composer must
>have meant" in completing 'unfinished' works of late and I'm curious as to
>whether this sounds Holstian or Mathews-like!

My understanding is that Matthews isn't attempting to pastiche Holst.
According to the article below (from The Times, Tuesday May 2nd) Pluto
begins where Neptune left off.

Many writers have been knocking Matthews for 'completing' a work which was
never unfinished.  Whilst I can understand Matthews' own ambivalence about
adding to a wonderful work by a composer he loves dearly, I think it is a
fascinating exercise and one that could yield surprising results.  And
after all, it isn't as if everyone will have to perform The Planets with
Pluto.

Anyway - below is the Times article:

   Holst is the latest composer to have had his work completed by another.
   But, asks Richard Morrison, would he have approved of an eighth Planet?

   STICKING YOUR NOTES IN UNFINISHED BUSINESS

   After 80 years of perfectly adequate service in the world's concert
   halls, one of the most popular orchestral works of the 20th century
   has been "enhanced" with a new ending.  Is that good or bad? Useful
   or superfluous? A sincere and worthy homage to the original, or a
   cheap publicity stunt?

   Opinions have been sharply divided since it was announced a few weeks
   ago that when the Halle Orchestra and its conductor, Kent Nagano,
   perform Gustav Holst's mighty suite The Planets in Bridgewater Hall
   next week, they will be premiering a new finale.  Pluto has been
   written by the English composer Colin Matthews at the invitation of
   the Halle.  "I had mixed feelings," Matthews admits.  "The Planets
   is a very satisfying whole which makes perfect musical sense." Quite.
   So why tamper with it?

   The obvious answer is that we now know of the planet Pluto's
   existence, whereas Holst didn't when he was writing The Planets
   between 1914 and 1917.  But this excuse does not quite hold water.
   The ninth planet was indeed discovered in 1930.  But Holst didn't
   die until 1934.  If he had been concerned about the "completeness"
   of his most celebrated work, he would have had plenty of time to add
   Pluto to the existing seven movements (he didn't write "Earth" either,
   because it didn't fit his astrological scheme).  "I am certain that
   he never once thought to write an additional movement," says Matthews
   honestly.  In any case, Pluto's status as a planet is looking a bit
   shaky these days.  If hard-hearted astronomers get their way, it may
   soon be demoted to the rank of asteroid.  So there is even less reason
   to add it to The Planets.

   Then there is the awkward matter of Pluto's eccentric orbit, which
   means that it is sometimes nearer than Neptune to the Sun (as it was
   for 20 years until 1999) and sometimes further away.  So where should
   it be placed in The Planets? The dilemma is made even more difficult
   because Holst made Neptune one of the most memorable endings in all
   music: an offstage women's chorus singing two chords over and over
   again, then fading into a silence as deep as infinite universe itself.
   How do you follow that?

   Matthews believes he has the answer.  "It would be pointless," he
   says, "to write a movement that was even more remote than Neptune,
   unless the whole orchestra were to join the chorus offstage." Instead,
   his Pluto will begin while Neptune's last chords are still sounding.
   It will also, apparently, be very fast in tempo, to reflect the
   velocity of the solar winds, and then disappear "almost as if Neptune
   had been quietly continuing in the background".  So the knotty matter
   of whether Pluto is further away than Neptune is cleverly left
   unresolved.  But of course Matthews's biggest challenge is to write
   music that is worthy of The Planets.  The work's reputation for
   originality is, admittedly, slightly diminished these days, now that
   we know what Debussy and Stravinsky were composing in the years
   immediately before Holst wrote his masterpiece.  Even so, it does
   contain at least two of the most stunning movements in late Romantic
   music: Mars, with its pounding militaristic rhythms (so evocative
   of relentless carnage, yet written before the First World War had
   started); and Jupiter, a rumbustious whirlwind from which emerges a
   tune so noble, English and memorable that the venerable Elgar must
   have doffed his hat in admiration.

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   Why should any composer want to tamper with another's work, especially
   if it is as much loved as The Planets?

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   Matthews does at least have the right credentials for this daunting
   task.  As a student he helped the British scholar Deryck Cooke on
   his masterly completion of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.  He
   also studied with Holst's daughter, Imogen, who died in 1984.  She
   would have been "both amused and dismayed by this venture", he thinks.
   Even more to the point, he has orchestrated Holst's song-cycle, The
   Dream City.

   But the basic question remains: why should any composer want to
   tamper with another's work, especially if it is as much loved as The
   Planets? Your answer probably depends on how cynical you feel.  All
   one can say for sure is that there is nothing new about the practice.
   The urge to "improve", update or complete someone else's music dates
   back at least to the Renaissance.

   And all the best composers did it.  Mozart spiced up Handel's Messiah
   by adding startlingly incongruous clarinet parts.  Mahler beefed up
   the orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony because he felt it
   didn't quite work.

   Rimsky-Korsakov thought that he was doing his deceased alcoholic
   friend Mussorgsky a favour by "tidying up" the latter's compositions.
   Only now that scholars have reconstructed the original manuscripts
   can we see that Mussorgsky's unaided work was infinitely bolder.
   Similarly, nearly every conductor used to "adjust" the unusual
   orchestrations of Schumann's symphonies, until Bernard Haitink's
   recordings revealed that Schumann's scoring worked perfectly well
   if you took the trouble to balance it properly.

   So, in music at least, a friend in need can be a blinking nuisance.
   And that applies especially to scholars who attempt to reconstruct
   pieces left unfinished when a composer dies.  In recent years this
   trend has grown into a ghoulish industry.  Music-lovers have already
   heard such fictions as Beethoven's Tenth Symphony and Tchaikovsky's
   Seventh.  Schubert's Unfinished is unfinished no longer; at least,
   not if you trust the instincts of a Hull music professor.  Mozart's
   Requiem has been completed more times than The Times crossword.  And
   a couple of years ago, Elgar's fragmentary sketches for a Third
   Symphony were "elaborated" by the British composer Anthony Payne into
   a performable work, even though the great man expressly forbade anyone
   from "tinkering" with them - and in fact requested (with almost his
   dying breath) that they be burnt.

   I felt that Payne's completion was ethically wrong, but found myself
   in a tiny minority, especially when Payne made such an accomplished
   job of it.  It's certainly true that we would be deprived of some
   wonderful music if no unfinished works were completed after a composer's
   death.  Think only of Turandot, completed by Franco Alfano after
   Puccini died (though Toscanini insisted on stopping the opera
   melodramatically at the point where "the master laid down his pen");
   or Alban Berg's steamy masterpiece Lulu - completed by Friedrich
   Cerha secretly against Berg's widow's wishes, and performed after
   she died.  Or more recently, Alexander Goehr's Arianna, a delightful
   new opera inspired by the only surviving fragment from a lost Monteverdi
   stage work.

   Of course The Planets is a different case; it was not left incomplete
   by Holst.  Nevertheless it's clear that Matthews can claim plenty of
   distinguished precedents for his audacious addition.  And, because
   he has a lively musical mind, one is curious to hear the result.
   Even so, I shall make two sour observations.  The first is that,
   before we start writing new endings to Holst's music, why don't we
   explore more of the real stuff? Superb pieces like Egdon Heath, the
   Hymn of Jesus and Savitri show the astounding breadth of Holst's
   musical and philosophical imagination, yet they are rarely programmed
   today.  We have turned Holst into a one-hit wonder, which he certainly
   wasn't.  And the second? Well, don't you think it's a bit rum that
   admirable composers such as Payne, Matthews and Goehr, who spend
   decades in relative obscurity turning out beautifully crafted pieces,
   find that the world only rushes to hear them when they rattle the
   urn of some long-departed genius? It's as if, in the orchestral and
   operatic fields at least, the only new music that our age is prepared
   to celebrate is new old music.  Sociologists, please discuss.

Robin Newton