Wilhelm August Rieder: Franz Schubert, 1875 after 1825 watercolour (Vienna Museum)
Knowing the D. numbers is important here! D. stands for Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967), an Austrian musicologist who created the first comprehensive catalogue of Schubert’s works (just as Bach‘s works have BWV numbers and Mozart‘s have K. numbers, the D. numbers are for Schubert’s works).
George Fayer: Otto Erich Deutsch, 1927
The problem stems from two places: Only one of Schubert’s last symphonies was truly completed, and, as publishers started to publish the works, they didn’t want gaps in the numbering.
Symphony No. 7 in E minor, D. 729, written August 1821, never went beyond a draft. It was never completed by Schubert, who sketched out the entire work but abandoned it in the middle of scoring the first movement. It showed a radical change from his earlier symphonies, which were very much based on Haydn and Mozart. D. 729 was originally not given a number, but when later scholars and performers started to make editions of it, it received a number, bumping D. 759 and the following symphonies.
With the addition of the now-completed D. 729, the earlier numbered Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D. 759, we now know as Symphony No. 8, with the nickname of ‘The Unfinished’ because there are only two completed movements of it (a third movement only exists in sketches). It was written in October 1822 and sent by Schubert to his friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, as a thank-you to Hüttenbrenner’s Graz Music Society, which had given Schubert an honorary diploma.
There’s a hypothetical D. 849 symphony that was written between June and September 1825, which was referred to in Schubert’s letters. It has been nicknamed the Gmunden-Gastein Symphony after the place where Schubert was located when he wrote his letter.
There’s a Symphony D. 936a that exists only in sketches and might have been written in mid-1828. This is now known as Symphony No. 10.
Then there’s the symphony in C major, D. 944. Now known as Symphony No. 9, this is the only symphony among his late works that Schubert actually completed. No matter what the number of the symphony might be, keeping track of the D. numbers will help you sort them all out!
Although originally thought to have been written in Schubert’s last year (1828), we now know that it was begun when he was in Gmunden-Gastein. D. 849, as numbered by Deutsch, actually does not exist. The Great C major, D. 944, was begun in 1824 (as evidenced by the letter dated March 1824, and as evidenced by the use of paper from that time). It was completed in the spring or summer of 1826, and it was sent to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Schubert couldn’t afford to have the orchestral parts copied, so he dedicated the work to the Gesellschaft. In response, they gave him a small payment, had the parts copied, and did a trial run-through sometime in 1827. They never did a public performance of the work, though, as they thought it too long and difficult for the orchestra on hand. It wasn’t until Robert Schumann saw the manuscript in 1838, 10 years after Schubert’s death, that a public performance took place. He brought a copy of the score, given to him by Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, back to Leipzig, where it was given its premiere at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 21 March 1839, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. Robert wrote an article of celebration for the work in his magazine, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, where he praised its ‘heavenly length’. When Mendelssohn took the symphony to Paris and London, orchestras refused to perform it because of its length and difficulty.
The work is considered Schubert’s finest work for orchestra, and the Scherzo movement is one of particular joy. The symphony is important in changing Schubert’s style from working solely on thematic development (as he learned from Beethoven) and focusing more on melody. The work is full of optimism and grand statements, starting from its opening horn call. The ‘joyous alfresco dance’ of the Scherzo develops from its opening statement to form a movement that is more monumental than scherzo movements were expected to be.
This recording was made in November 1957 in the Salle Wagram in Paris, with the Orchestre des Cento Soli under the direction of Ataúlfo Argenta.
The Orchestre des Cento Soli was a French classical orchestra based in Paris that began recording in 1953.
Ataúlfo Argenta
Spanish conductor Ataúlfo Argenta (1913–1958) studied at the Madrid Royal Conservatory and held his first positions with the Orquesta Nacional de España (Spanish National Orchestra), becoming the second conductor in November 1946 and, by January 1947, joint director. By 1950, he began conducting the Paris Conservatory Orchestra, appearing with them until his accidental death in 1958. He also started appearing with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from 1954. This recording brings out his energetic approach to Schubert’s music.
Performed by
Ataulfo Argenta
Orchestre des Cento Soli
Recorded in 1957
Official Website
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But did you know that he also composed music for the 1860 ballet Le Papillon (The Butterfly), his only work in this genre?
To celebrate Offenbach’s birthday on 20 June 1819, shall we revisit this often-overlooked chapter in his life?
Jacques Offenbach (photo by Nadar)
The idea of creating the ballet originated with Marie Taglioni, a Swedish-born Italian ballet dancer whose fragile and delicate dancing typifies the early 19th-century Romantic style. Yet, Taglioni didn’t want the leading role for herself, but for her young protégée, the French ballerina Emma Livry.
Emma Livry gave her triumphant début in La Sylphide in 1858, and she danced the leading role in a divertissement in the opera Herculanum in 1859. A new star was born, and a new ballet was commissioned with Taglioni as the choreographer, Saint-Georges as the librettist, and Jacques Offenbach as the composer.
For the new ballet, hoping to create a work entirely identified with Livry, Saint-Georges opted for a fairy tale that was lighter in character and devoid of complexities. Essentially, it would tell the story of good and evil fairies, an enchanted princess who is cursed by the evil fairy, and the lovestruck prince who sets out to rescue her.
Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges
According to petipasociety.com, the ballet’s title was decided at the last moment. “Saint-Georges favoured Zaidée, which he had intended to be the name of the heroine, but Marie Taglioni requested Farfalla, the Italian word for butterfly.”
“Royer, the Opéra director, preferred the title Le Papillon et la Fée (The Butterfly and the Fairy), but those who were guarding Emma Livry’s interests objected, arguing that such a title took the focus away from her and gave too much prominence to a secondary character. After some discussion, it was finally decided that the ballet would be simply called Le Papillon.” (Le Papillon)
The action is set in Circassia, a former country and historical region in Eastern Europe that spanned the western coastal portions of the North Caucasus, along the northeastern shore of the Black Sea. The first act takes place in a forest, and we meet the evil old fairy Hamza, treating her servant roughly.
Hamza has been turned into an ugly woman for once, abducting Farfalla, the Emir’s daughter, who now serves as her maid. As she looks in the mirror, Hamza’s only wish is to become young again and be eligible to marry, but she will only recover her beauty if someone kisses her.
The young Prince Djalma and his entourage enter the scene, and they come across Hamza’s cottage. After enjoying food and much wine, Hamza sees this as the opportunity she has been waiting for. However, when the prince sees Farfalla, he falls in love. He dances a mazurka with her and thanks her with a kiss.
Emma Livry as Farfalla in Le Papillon
Once the prince has left, the tipsy Hamza is teased by the others and flies into a rage. She lures Farfalla into a box and, with her magic crutch, transforms Farfalla into a beautiful butterfly. The cottage is soon filled with butterflies, which Hamza chases away.
With the prince resting in a forest clearing, a member of his party brings him a butterfly he has caught. But when the butterfly is pinned to a tree by the prince, it suddenly turns into Farfalla. She escapes from his grasp and rejoins the other butterflies.
Hamza now arrives in the clearing with her gardener. She locates Farfalla with her magic crutch and tries to catch her in a net. Yet, as she has left her magic wand unattended for a moment, her gardener Patimate recognises Hamza as the kidnapper of the Emir’s missing daughter.
He seizes the magic wand, and when Hamza loses her powers, he frees Farfalla. Patimate tells Djalma about Farfalla’s real identity, but he forgets to take the magic wand, and it is stolen by a leprechaun. While the leprechaun rushes away with the wand, the prince carries Farfalla to his uncle’s palace.
Louise Marquet in Le Papillon
The second act takes place at the Emir’s palace, and the happy Djalma and Farfalla arrive in a golden carriage. It is quickly established that Farfalla is indeed the Emir’s daughter and that she can marry his nephew.
Djalma is overjoyed, but when he tries to embrace Farfalla, she repulses him. Farfalla reminds him that not long before, he wanted to impale a butterfly on a tree. As he tries to kiss her anew, Hamza, who had been lurking nearby, throws herself between them and obtains the kiss meant for Farfalla.
The spell on Hamza is working, and she is turned into a beautiful young girl. Prince Djalma is confused by seeing two beautiful women, and he courts Hamza, hoping that Farfalla will throw herself into his arms.
Treacherous Hamza, however, turns Farfalla back into a butterfly and puts a spell on Djalma, conjuring up a vision of an enchanted garden before his eyes. Clearly, Hamza wants to marry Djalma herself.
In the last tableau, amid the grandiose gardens, Djalma awakens to find himself surrounded by a swarm of butterflies, including his beloved Farfalla. Hamza, accompanied by her sisters, the Diamond Fairy, the Pearl Fairy, the Flower Fairy, and the Harvest Fairy, arrives for the wedding.
At the rehearsal for her wedding, she summons a band of golden harps and a torch carrier. Farfalla is attracted by the glow of the torch, but in touching the lamp, she burns her wings, and the spell is broken.
She regains her human form, and Hamza’s sisters break the magic crutch and together transform Hamza into a statue. Farfalla and Djalma are reunited, and the fairies lead them into the enchanted Fairy Kingdom, where they are married.
Le Papillon, 1860 stage décor
Le Papillon was first presented, to high expectations, by the Paris Opera Ballet at the Salle Le Peletier on 26 November 1860. Even Emperor Napoleon III was in the audience, but the ballet received a mixed response.
“The plot was criticised for lacking simplicity and flow, and many felt that it had relied too much on the scenic effects. Offenbach’s score was also criticised, but this mainly came from music purists who were shocked that such a composer of popular music should be given a hearing within the walls of the Opéra.”
“The more open-minded, who listened without forming their opinions in advance, gave a more positive reaction, praising the skilful orchestration and the abundance of melodies. Some of the numbers that were particularly praised were the Valse des rayons, the mazurka entitled La Lezginka, the Bohémienne and a pastoral march.” (Le Papillon)
Marie Taglioni (1850)
Livry’s performance was a huge success, and Taglioni said about Emma, “it is true that I never have seen myself dancing, but I would like to think I did it like her.” Between 1860 and 1862, Emma Livry performed Farfalla forty-two times. However, she suffered fatal burns in a tragic theatre accident in 1862. She died in 1863 at the age of just twenty, and the ballet disappeared from the Paris Opéra repertoire.
Le Papillon was resurrected in 1874, but not in Paris, but rather in Russia. Marius Petipa, the dancer and choreographer who worked for nearly 60 years at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, extended the ballet from two to four acts, and Ludwig Minkus composed brand new music for Offenbach’s score.
Marius Petipa
Fast forward to 1979 and a production for the Houston Ballet, which adapted the scenario with the score re-orchestrated by John Lanchbery. The plot was pared down and reset in Persia, retaining many of the comic situations. Compared to Offenbach’s original 1860 score, however, Lanchbery integrated his own composition while changing the order of the numbers in the original score.
Today, Le Papillon is often considered a historical oddity, yet its story remains compelling. Conceived for the extraordinary Emma Livry and brought to life by Offenbach’s intoxicating melodies, it remains a relic of a vanished theatrical world.
While Le Papillon was Offenbach’s singular excursion into ballet, the score reveals many of the qualities that would later make him a great success. Above all, his unfailing gift for melody would subsequently light up the operetta stage, and some of the best melodies from Le Papillon found their way into later compositions.
Ethel Leginska (13 April 1886 – 26 February 1970) was one of them.
One of the most famous pianists in America in the 1920s, she conducted major orchestras on two continents and founded multiple symphony orchestras. She also composed two operas and a substantial body of orchestral, chamber music and solo piano works. Yet you have almost certainly never heard of her.
Leginska was born Ethel Liggins in 1886 in Hull, a working-class port city in the northeast of England – the kind of place where, at the time, a girl with a gift for the piano was more likely to end up entertaining at church socials than performing in the world’s great concert halls.
The daughter of a builder and a governess, Ethel was different. By the age of six, she was performing entire concert programmes from memory. The city took notice, and so did Mary Emma Wilson, the wife of a shipping magnate, who became Ethel’s patron and funded her studies at the Frankfurt Conservatoire and then in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky – the most sought-after piano teacher of the era.
When the time came to launch an international career, a well-connected socialite advised young Ethel that “Ethel Liggins from Hull” wasn’t going to cut it in concert halls still dazzled by the mystique of Russian and Polish virtuosos. So Ethel Liggins became Ethel Leginska – a name that suggested Slavic glamour. It was a small act of reinvention in service of a much larger ambition, and it worked.
Leginska debuted in London at the age of 16, toured Australia at 19, and by her 20s she was a fixture on European concert stages. In 1913, she arrived in New York for her official American debut, and the city went a little wild.
Ethel Leginska
There’s a tendency to imagine early 20th-century classical audiences as stiff and reserved, but Leginska’s American career played out more like a pop phenomenon than a polite recital series. Her concerts were sold out. She once performed an entire recital at Carnegie Hall without an interval, a novelty that added to her reputation for doing things differently.
Her programmes – which included the Germanic canon, Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff – were delivered with a physical freedom and emotional intensity that seemed to defeat the usual critical vocabulary. One reviewer resorted to calling her “a musical Joan of Arc, a genius moved by unseen powers.”
Leginska also looked unlike anyone else on stage. While other women performers of the era wore the obligatory bare-shouldered evening gown, Leginska showed up in what amounted to a tuxedo: a black velvet jacket, slim skirt, and white shirt. Her hair was bobbed before bobbed hair was fashionable.
Her young fans copied her look so thoroughly that critics described seeing “numerous little Leginskas” in the audience. She later explained that her signature look was “always the same and always comfortable, so that I can forget my appearance and concentrate on my art.”
Ethel Leginska
But beneath the persona of the glamorous iconoclast was a woman under considerable professional and psychological pressure. The breakdowns, when they came, were dramatic and very public. In January 1925, she set out in a taxi for an appearance before a crowd of 2,000 at Carnegie Hall and simply vanished. A substitute was found at the last minute. The police searched for her for four days. She was eventually found in Boston, having wandered the city in a daze with, as she later described it, “music singing” in her head, stopping at a friend’s apartment to write the melody down.
The following year, she abandoned a performance before 4,000 people in Indiana, having complained the previous day about the concert hall, which she had called “an old barn”, and the absence of a proper orchestra. Doctors diagnosed a severe nervous breakdown and ordered her to rest for at least a year.
The press was not kind. In the 1920s, nervous breakdowns were widely considered the victim’s fault; the circumstances of a person’s life were largely discounted.
For a woman operating without the institutional support or management infrastructure available to her male counterparts, breakdowns were perhaps inevitable. The remarkable thing is that she kept going .
Her marriage to the American composer Emerson Whithorne, whom she had met while studying in Vienna, produced a son, Cedric, and then a custody battle that she, predictably, lost.
This was an era when a woman who chose a career over domestic life was seen as morally suspect.
Leginska responded by declaring that self-sacrifice for the family’s sake was “overrated” and that “it is impossible for a woman with a career to be unselfish.”
In the early 20th century, that was practically revolutionary.
What came next was even more radical. By her late 30s, Leginska had pivoted. She studied conducting in London and Munich and traded on her fame as a pianist, offering to perform piano concertos in exchange for the opportunity to conduct. It was a savvy workaround for a field that had no real mechanism for letting women in through the front door.
It worked. She guest-conducted in Munich, Paris, London and Berlin, including a landmark performance with the Berlin Philharmonic in November 1924, where she appeared as pianist, conductor and composer.
Picture a slight woman wearing a black tuxedo jacket striding to the podium. The audience murmurs. Women do not conduct orchestras. They play in parlours or might perform as soloists if they’re very talented, but they certainly don’t stand in front of the New York Symphony Orchestra and raise a baton.
Ethel Leginska conducting
In 1925, Leginska did exactly that, making her American conducting debut at Carnegie Hall.
The Christian Science Monitor in Boston wrote that she “knew what she was about and had definite notions of what she wanted, as well as the means to impress her desires on the players.” At the Hollywood Bowl that summer, 30,000 people were in the audience, and the applause grew into what one critic described as “a veritable ovation culminating with cheers and bravos.”
The New York Herald Tribune, meanwhile, offered the backhanded compliment that nothing “serious” had occurred to mar the performance. Detractors in the press argued, without apparent irony, that women simply did not possess the intellectual rigour to handle the complexities of conducting.
None of which stopped her – quite the opposite. She founded the Boston Women’s Symphony Orchestra, took them on two major tours, established the National Women’s Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1932, and directed the Chicago Women’s Symphony Orchestra.
These weren’t consolation prizes for a woman locked out of the mainstream – they were deliberate acts of institution-building, creating spaces for female musicians at a time when women were still largely excluded from the orchestras that mattered.
In 1935, she conducted her own opera, Gale, at the Chicago Civic Opera House – the first time a woman had ever conducted her own opera in that city’s history. Many years later, at the age of 71, she conducted, in Los Angeles, another opera she had written decades earlier, The Rose and the Ring.
Ethel Leginska died in Los Angeles in 1970, aged 83, teaching piano nearly until the end.
And then she was more or less forgotten.
The orchestras she founded didn’t survive her; the operas she composed were never taken up by the mainstream repertoire; and the institutions she challenged had little interest in preserving her legacy.
She simply slipped away.
A 2002 reissue of her mid-1920s Columbia recordings introduced her playing to a new generation, to considerable acclaim. One critic described the recordings as revealing “a superior musical mind coupled to an unerring technique.”
The Naxos label included her in an anthology of historic women pianists, but her compositions remain largely unperformed. A biography published in 2002 by Marguerite and Terry Broadbent remains the only substantial account of her life, and is itself little known.
The baton she carried, however, has been picked up by others. Women conductors like Marin Alsop – the first woman to serve as music director of a major American orchestra – and, in the UK, Alice Farnham, who runs a dedicated women’s conducting programme at the Royal Philharmonic Society, are doing now what Leginska was doing a century ago: fighting for space, building institutions and making room for others.
Ethel Leginska didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t wait for orchestras to decide they were ready to let a woman stand at the podium; she bargained her way in, and when that wasn’t enough, she built her own. She had no interest in softening her opinions about what women in the arts deserved, nor in performing the gracious, self-effacing persona the world expected of successful women. She wore a tuxedo, said what she thought, broke down occasionally under the weight of it all, picked herself up and kept going.
The structural barriers she was fighting – the assumption that serious composition and conducting were male domains, and the expectation that a woman should choose between her art and her family – are not entirely over. Women conductors are still rare enough that their appointments make news; women composers are still chronically underrepresented in concert programmes; and even women pianists are still in the minority in international competitions and major concert halls.
The conversation about how institutions support (or fail) creative women is still very much alive. Ethel Leginska was having that conversation in 1916.
It’s well past time we remembered her name.
Nico de Napoli is a classical pianist whose writing has appeared in several international publications, including Pizzicato and Classic Voice. He is also an integrative coach specialising in performance anxiety and stress management, drawing on his experience as a yoga therapist.
by Emily E. Hogstad May 28th, 2026 Western classical music is often thought of as cerebral or abstract, but throughout its history, co...
