One of Igor Stravinsky’s early orchestral works thought to be irretrievably lost was recently discovered. He composed the 12-minute piece, Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (Funeral Song), in honor of his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, around June 1908. It was thought the work was most likely destroyed in the 1917 revolutions of civil war that followed, though Russian musicologists had hoped it could still be among the mass of uncataloged music in the archives of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic or the Conservatoire. Last autumn the entire Conservatoire had to be emptied in preparation for a long-delayed overhaul. Piles of previously hidden manuscripts emerged from behind rows of stacked piano and orchestral scores where they’d sat for decades. An alert librarian discovered the missing orchestral parts.
