Jim Tobin writes:

>...  What other composers have famously destroyed their own works?

Brahms, for one.  Sometimes he merely reworked the pieces extensively,
but I dimly recall that he destroyed a few things and all the subsequent
hand-wringing that has gone on since, from at least Clara Schumann to
the latest musicologist who's finally given up looking.

Vaughan Williams may have done so.  At any rate, a bunch of early
orchestral pieces, professionally premiered, have gone missing.  The
Norfolk Rhapsody, for example, was originally one of four Norfolk
Rhapsodies.

There's an ironic example.  The Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt for
some reason literally tore up the score to Prillar due to the frustration
of failing to get a performance.  Most of his scores went up in a house
fire (this was a composer of whom it was said that "music poured out of
him like a flood"; he wrote at least 29 piano sonatas, for instance).
After the composer's death, his son was cleaning out the barn, which had
been untouched by the fire, and came across among the trash a bag of
manuscript paper torn into strips.  You guessed it: it was the score to
Prillar.

Steve Schwartz