by Maureen Buja  July 3rd, 2017

Mieczysław Horszowski in 1990

At his death at age 100, just one month short of his 101st birthday, the Polish and later American pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski (1892-1993) had one of the long-lasting careers in the performing arts. His age puts him with other pianists such as Alice Herz-Sommer (1903-2014) and Leo Ornstein (1893-2002), as spanning a century of amazing musical change.

When you trace his influences, we find that his first teacher was his mother, who had been a student of Karol Mikuli who had been a student of Chopin’s. He then became a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky, who had studied with Carl Czerny who had been a student of Beethoven. Thus, in one performer, we have both the great German and Polish piano traditions.

His first notable performance was in Warsaw at age 9 of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and his international career as a child prodigy began thereafter, with tours of Europe and America.

His repertoire was limited because he was small, barely 5 feet tall as an adult, and therefore couldn’t play the works that required a large hand span. His repertoire, therefore, was diverse and ranged widely over both the Classical and Modern periods. He performed the entirety of Beethoven’s solo piano repertoire in New York in 1954-55 and all of Mozart’s piano sonatas in 1960. He also played music by Bach and Stravinsky.  

Mieczysław “Miecio” Horszowski in 1902

His performance style was ‘natural, unforced….balancing intellect and emotion,’ and, as was common with Leschetizky’s students, his tonal quality was also noted. In this performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, we hear these qualities, as the piano seems almost to sing.

Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11: III. Rondo: Vivace (Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano; Vienna Symphony Orchestra; Hans Swarowsky, cond.)
In the final movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, he brings a sense of both sound and silence.

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”: IV. Largo – Allegro disoluto (Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano;)
An amazing pianist and teacher to the end, he gave his last lesson a week before his death. His students at the Curtis Institute of Music included Richard Goode, Dina Koston, Anton Kuerti, Murray Perahia, and Peter Serkin, among many others.

Well Done, Tatay Laurie

I will miss your voice, Prayer and Declaration for me Tay

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 by Emily E. Hogstad  May 20th, 2026

Today, we remember Johann Sebastian Bach as one of the most prolific composers in music history. However, a significant portion of his output – about half – has not survived.

Johann Sebastian Bach

These lost works span categories including sacred and secular cantatas, Passion settings, and instrumental compositions.

Their disappearance can be attributed to various historical factors, including neglect after Bach’s death, the scattering of manuscripts among heirs, wartime losses, and more.

Today, we’re looking at the stories behind these lost Bach masterpieces – and how they might have been lost to time.

What Happened to Bach’s Manuscripts After He Died?

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts were divided among his family members, especially his widow Anna Magdalena and his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Wilhelm Friedemann sold his father’s scores piecemeal during various periods of financial struggle.

After his death in 1784, the remaining manuscripts were auctioned off to various collectors – including one of his students, Sara Itzig Levy, best-known today for being Felix Mendelssohn‘s great-aunt.

Carl Philipp Emanuel inherited another chunk of his father’s estate: the manuscripts of Bach’s Passions and other major works. He died in 1788, and his collection was passed to his granddaughter.

After she died in 1805, many of the manuscripts were sold off. A large portion was eventually purchased by a musical society and archive founded in Berlin known as the Sing-Akademie.

The Sing-Akademie’s Role In Preserving Bach Manuscripts

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

In 1800, German composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter became the leader of the Sing-Akademie. His star student, Felix Mendelssohn, became fascinated with the Bach works that were in the musical society collection, as well as the ones that his great-aunt had saved for her own private collection.

Over the generations, wartime upheavals took a toll on Bach’s works.

During World War II, the Berlin Sing-Akademie archives were moved for safekeeping and then seized by the Soviet army.

For decades, it was believed the archives had been lost, but in 1999, they were found in Ukraine intact. The rediscovery of the old Sing-Akademie archives yielded some previously lost Bach works and documents.

Other Bach Rediscoveries

Bach manuscript

This isn’t the only place where undiscovered Bach manuscripts have been found, either.

In 1992, Peter Wollny, the present-day director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, came across two unsigned and undated music manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium.

Years later, Wollny discovered that the handwriting in the manuscripts belonged to a student of Bach’s named Salomon Günther John, and that John may have copied them out.

The works – two Ciaconas for organ, likely dating from Bach’s teenage years – were authenticated and were performed for the first time in centuries in November 2025.

The discovery suggests that more lost Bach works might be uncovered someday.   

What Were the Lost Works?

The lost Bach works fall into a few baskets:

• Sacred cantatas
• Secular cantatas
• Passions
• Instrumental works

Why Are So Many of Bach’s Sacred Cantatas Lost?

Throughout his career, Bach’s job description often included writing sacred cantatas for performance on Sunday services and feast days.

While Bach worked in Leipzig between 1723 and 1750, his responsibilities included composing cantatas.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach claimed that he composed five full annual cycles of church cantatas.

Each annual cycle would consist of around 60 cantatas. Five full cycles’ worth would suggest the existence of 300. However, we only know of around 200, meaning around a hundred are presumably missing.

Another contributing factor to the confusion was the fact that Bach frequently (and understandably) reused or adapted parts of older cantatas as part of his newer versions.

After Bach’s death, there were simply too many pieces – and too many heirs – for the cantatas to remain a unified collection, so they were ultimately split up.  

What Happened to Bach’s Secular Cantatas?

Bach also composed numerous secular cantatas, i.e., celebratory works for royal birthdays, weddings, city officials, and the like.

Because they were often written for a single specific occasion, their scores were less likely to be preserved. Sometimes those scores might have been gifted to dedicatees or patrons as gifts.

One example is Bach’s Birthday Cantata for Augustus II (BWV 1156) from 1727. The libretto survives today because it was presented in print to Augustus, but Bach’s music hasn’t survived.

It has been theorised that portions of Bach’s Mass in B minor, dating from 1749, were adapted from this cantata, as pieces of the Mass appear to fit Haupt’s text.

If that theory is true, it means that Bach may have reused secular music in his later sacred music, or vice versa, even decades after the fact.  

Why Are So Many of Bach’s Passions Lost?   

Only two authentic Bach Passions have survived in their entirety: the St. John Passion from 1724 and the St. Matthew Passion from 1727.

We also have the libretto of a third: the St. Mark Passion.

However, Bach’s obituary lists five Passions, suggesting there might be two we don’t know about.

A payment record exists from 1717, paying Bach (referred to as “Concert Meister Bachen” in the paperwork) for a Passion music performance. However, we don’t have any trace of this hypothetical work at all.

As for the fifth, if it ever existed, we have no concrete evidence about it.

There’s an outside possibility that while writing his obituary, Bach’s family incorrectly ascribed a Passion to him. A surviving manuscript of a St. Luke’s Passion copied by Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel exists, and for a while, historians believed that Bach had written it. However, it has since been attributed to another unknown composer.

If the obituary was correct, and there were indeed three other complete passions by Bach that we know nothing about, as gutting as the loss would be, it would also make a certain amount of sense. The Passions were massive works meant for performance during Holy Week, which only happened once a year, so these weren’t works that were intended to be preserved and performed long-term.

What Happened to Bach’s Lost Instrumental Works?

Scholars believe that we have far fewer instrumental works by Bach than we should, given that he had two appointments – one in Weimar from 1708 to 1717, and one in Köthen from 1717 to 1723 – where his primary responsibilities would have included writing instrumental music.

It is believed that his Harpsichord Concerto in D-minor (BWV 1052) was adapted from a lost violin concerto; transposing the keyboard part to violin suggests an original string version.   

In fact, reconstructions have been made for about ten instrumental concertos that Bach likely wrote but are now lost.

Bach’s obituary also mentions that he composed “many trios”, but not many survive.

There’s also an excerpt from a Sinfonia in D-major that ends abruptly and has no known accompanying sections; we simply don’t know where the rest went.  

Conclusion

Johann Sebastian Bach’s surviving output is vast, but, unbelievably, it represents only a fraction of what he actually composed during his lifetime.

The story of those lost pieces reminds us that there is much we still don’t know about Bach’s work – even though he is arguably the single most important figure in the history of classical music.

But there are still plenty of archives to comb through. So who knows? In the years to come, we may yet discover more of Johann Sebastian Bach’s lost works.

Elegant Plagiarisms: Classical Themes in Popular Songs

 by Donna Arnold  May 17th, 2026

The Great American Songbook is a term describing the canon of the most important and influential popular songs from roughly the 1920s to the 1950s. During this era, popular songs were widely disseminated in the United States via phonograph records, radio, sheet music sales, and live big band performances. They were replete with beautiful melodies. People from all walks of life became familiar with the mainstream top hits of the day. Singers were constantly looking for good material, and in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, an interesting trend arose for composers and arrangers to borrow themes from classical music and create popular songs from them. Most were drawn from the romantic era.

Listeners who were familiar with classical music would probably recognise them, but listeners who were unfamiliar could enjoy the pieces without knowing of the connection. In several cases, major performing artists who embraced such material had beautiful voices and could well have become classical singers had they so chosen.

A fine example is the pop song “Tonight We Love” (1941), which was an adaptation of the piano concerto number 1 in B flat minor by Peter Tchaikovsky (1875).

Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No. 1 – 1st Movement   

Orchestra leader Freddy Martin arranged the music and Bobby Worth wrote lyrics for it. It became a major hit for Martin in 1941.

Freddy Martin

Martin’s arrangement is taken from a very long passage of Tchaikovsky’s original work. He recorded it twice with two different soloists. The soloist on this one is tenor Tony Martin (no relation to Freddy Martin).  

The pop song “Till The End of Time” (1944) was an adaptation of Frédéric Chopin‘s Polonaise in A flat major, Op. 53 — the “Polonaise héroique” (1842).  

The pop song was written by composer Ted Mossman and lyricist Buddy Kaye. It was a major hit for Perry Como in 1945.

Perry Como

He said it was his favourite of all the songs he recorded in his long career.   

The pop song “Full Moon and Empty Arms” (1944) was an adaptation of the second theme of the third movement of Piano Concerto number 2 in C Minor, opus 18 by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1901).

Bruce Liu – Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18: III. Allegro scherzando   

This pop song was also written by composer Ted Mossman and lyricist Buddy Kaye. It was a major hit for Frank Sinatra in 1945.

Frank Sinatra

Symphonic Gems: Borodin’s Prince Igor – Polovtsian Dances – Noseda | Concertgebouworkest  

The pop song is from the musical Kismet (1953) by Robert Wright and George Forrest.

In this performance, the soloist is Tony Bennett, for whom it was a major hit in 1953.

Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett “Stranger In Paradise” on The Ed Sullivan Show   

The pop song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” (1918) was an adaptation of a passage from Frédéric Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, op. posthumous (1834).

Dmitry Shishkin – Fantasy-impromptu in C sharp minor Op. 66 (third stage)  

Harry Carroll composed the music and Joseph McCarthy wrote the lyrics for the pop song for the musical Oh Look in 1918. In this clip from Ziegfeld Girl (1941), a movie about the Ziegfeld Follies, Judy Garland sings a particularly emotional rendition of it that depicts her successful audition to become a Ziegfeld girl.

Judy Garland

I’m Always Chasing Rainbows-Judy Garland   

The era that inspired these transformations had faded by the 1960s. However, the use of classical themes in popular songs continues in full force to this day, but now it encompasses many vastly different styles that appeal to vastly different audiences. In contrast, in the years of the Great American Songbook, those early examples would have reached a much broader spectrum of the American public and had a much wider influence than any particular style of popular music does today.

For those of us who love classical music and perhaps are intrigued by those elegant plagiarisms and want to explore them further, opportunities abound. Thanks to recording and film technology, there is a treasure trove of them waiting for us to enjoy.

Donna Arnold is the long-time music reference librarian at the large music research library at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. She answers questions on a wide range of subjects for the university community, national, and international patrons. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Texas. Her many research interests include the Great American Songbook.

The 10 Saddest Pieces by Frédéric Chopin

 by Emily E. Hogstad  May 18th, 2026

Few composers have been associated with sadness as consistently as Frédéric Chopin.

Across his nocturnes, preludes, mazurkas, ballades, and other works, Chopin returned again and again to expressing emotions of longing and resignation.

Frédéric Chopin

Those feelings were shaped by exile, chronic illness, and a persistent sense of isolation.

Today, we’re looking at ten of Chopin’s saddest pieces and tracing how he portrayed all the different shades of sadness: melancholy, grief, bitterness, and even numbness.   

Few pieces in the piano repertoire sound as immediately personal as this nocturne.

Its almost unbearable intimacy makes sense given its background: it was composed when Chopin was just twenty years old as an exercise for his beloved pianist sister Ludwika, who was about to embark on a study of his second concerto.

It would remain a private shared statement of grief between them for 45 years, only being published in 1875.

The only reason it survives at all is that Ludwika ignored her brother’s dying wishes to burn his unpublished manuscripts, meaning its very existence is a poignant symbol of a sister’s belief in her late brother’s talent.   

This prelude is part of a set of 24 preludes, one in each major and minor key.

Its right-hand melody is relatively static. The real movement here comes in the left-hand harmonies, constantly changing and slipping despairingly downward.

That steady sinking motion creates a sense of inevitability, as though the music already knows how it will end: on a quiet, heartbroken – although maybe reluctantly accepting – note. 

Waltzes are famous for being light and joyful dances. Therefore, at first glance, this waltz might seem to not belong on this list.

However, the more you listen, the more you hear emotions here that are usually not associated with dance music. This waltz has a sarcastic character and mocking undertone.

Chopin allows for a number of subtleties, tugging around the tempo in such a way that would make it very difficult to actually dance to. As a result, this is less a practical waltz and more a bitter portrait of one.  

Throughout his life, Chopin’s depression was often triggered by feeling like an outsider – culturally homeless and distanced from family and friends.

These emotions were especially strong during his first years in Paris in the early 1830s, after the failed November Uprising in Poland, which left him feeling unsafe returning home to Warsaw.

Here he channelled those emotions into a stylised version of a famously Polish dance: the mazurka.

Like the waltz in C-sharp minor, this is less a practical dance than a dance-tinged meditation on what it feels like to remember a lost place and time.   

Chopin continued writing mazurkas throughout his life; this one was written the year of his death, when it was becoming increasingly clear that he’d never see his beloved Poland again.

This final mazurka feels both more mature and cynical than the earlier one in A minor. This is the work of a composer who, over the years, had learned how to box up his emotions in a supremely artful fashion.

Taken together, these two mazurkas tell a story about how Chopin’s relationship with the mazurka and his exile changed: it’s the same sorrow, but he has lived nearly two decades with it, and the edges have softened.   

This brief prelude – under two minutes long – transforms sadness into something more monumental.

Its stark chordal writing and unyielding marchlike rhythm make that emotion feel massive: heavy, immovable, unconquerable.

Hans von Bülow

Conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow went so far as to nickname this prelude the Funeral March.

Pay attention to the pattern of the notes in the bass. That particular pattern is known as the “lament bass”, and you can hear it in other famous works like Henry Purcell‘s “Dido’s Lament” from his opera Dido and Aeneas.

However, unlike Purcell, here Chopin employs it in a context without words, leaving the listener to imagine their own tragic narrative.   

Unlike the introverted intimacy of the C-sharp minor nocturne that opened this list, this nocturne in C minor turns into the equivalent of a scream in a crowded room.

Pianist Theodor Kullak wrote of this nocturne, “The design and poetic contents of this nocturne make it the most important one that Chopin created; the chief subject is a masterly expression of a great powerful grief.”

At the work’s midpoint, its central climax swells into something truly operatic, requiring the performer to employ desperate octaves. This is loud, virtuosic grief, verging on crazed.   

Chopin’s first ballade is the most narrative-driven work on this list. It lasts around ten minutes, giving Chopin the time and freedom to craft an entire story.

Here, the grief and sadness are no longer static, like in some of the shorter works on this list. Instead, it evolves with all kinds of colours and shades of grief and pain.

Moments of lyric calm become overwhelmed by turbulence, and the ending is both virtuosic and catastrophic.

This is Chopin at his most dramatic.  

Chopin’s “Funeral March” (the third movement of his second piano sonata) is undoubtedly the most famous expression of grief in his entire output. In fact, its opening theme has become a cultural shorthand for death.

That memorable main theme comes across as monotone, calling to mind a mourner at a funeral who is feeling deeply emotional but numbly holding it together for the sake of ritual. The intensity of the delivery of the theme ebbs and flows.

In between, there are contrasting sections that call to mind that same mourner daydreaming of happier times.  

Polonaises – like mazurkas – are another uniquely Polish genre, tied closely to Chopin’s identity and his lifelong emotions of alienation and depression.

Some of Chopin’s polonaises are heroic. (One – his Polonaise in A-flat major – is actually outright nicknamed the “Heroic.”)

By contrast, this one feels tragic. The harmonies are dark; the chordal writing is thick in the bass.

Any sense of celebratory national pride is replaced by sadness and disillusionment. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein went so far as to call this polonaise a symbol of Polish tragedy.

However, its grief is not localised to a specific time or location; it is timeless. It portrays the kind of empty sadness everyone feels after the worst of acute grief has passed, in the numb, messy aftermath.

This was always one of Chopin’s greatest gifts as a musician: the ability to turn the sadness of his unique experiences into expressions of both sadness and beauty.

Conclusion

Sadness in Chopin’s music never registers on a single emotional register, but rather encompasses an entire spectrum of feelings. It can be confessional or ceremonial, restless or resigned, private or collective.

Taken together, these ten pieces offer a portrait of a composer who experienced sadness as a whole rainbow of emotions: a quality that has ensured his music’s relatability and popularity for nearly two hundred years.

That emotional breadth is what continues to draw listeners back to Chopin’s music – often at moments when they are searching for language for their own sadness.