Reassembled Beethoven Piece Added to Concerts

Move over, Mozart: Pacific Symphony music director Keith Clark is dropping Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony from the orchestra’s concerts on Feb. 1 and 2 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center to accommodate a Scottish professor’s recent 15-minute reconstruction from desultory jottings and sketches of the first movement of Beethoven’s so-called “10th Symphony.”

The reconstruction is by Barry Cooper, professor of music at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Cooper, 39, worked from unidentified musical fragments that Beethoven jotted down in his sketchbooks between 1812 and 1825 for a proposed second work for the Philharmonic Society of London, which had commissioned two symphonies.

One of these was the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven died, however, before he had accumulated much more than a series of sketches for the other work. He did acknowledge, in a letter to the society written 8 days before his death in 1827, that “sketches” for a 10th Symphony were “already in my desk.”

It is likely, however, that these remarks were less a statement of fact than an oblique expression of thanks for the 100 pounds that the society had forwarded to him to ease his final days.

After his death, Beethoven’s sketchbooks were ransacked for souvenirs of his handwriting and widely distributed, not to be re-collected, in so far as was possible, until late in the 19th Century. Pages remain missing.

Cooper’s reconstruction received its premiere by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under the direction of Walter Weller on Oct. 18. New York heard it on Oct. 23 by conductor Jose Serebrier and the American Symphony Orchestra.

The West Coast first heard the work in November by the San Jose Symphony under music director George Cleve. A recording also is available by the London Symphony conducted by Wyn Morris.

Times music critic Martin Bernheimer gave the reconstruction a “Much-Ado-About-Little Award” in his list of Beckmesser Awards of 1988, calling it “one feeble movement of something that might--but probably wouldn’t--have become Beethoven’s 10th Symphony.”