Sterndale Bennett's Lost Piano Concerto Found

Abstract

I have as I before stated, not yet played this season in the great Concerts [at the Gewandhaus] because I preferred to wait until I was just leaving Leipzig, and had finished all my compositions for the Publisher, therefore on the 3rd. March I will if possible play a new Concerto which I have in hand.THIS, in a letter to Mary Anne Wood dated 7 February 1842, is the earliest specific mention of Bennett's last piano concerto, which was never published and for many years was missing. Only a ‘tantalising fragment’ of a two-piano reduction made by the composer's son and biographer, J. R. Sterndale Bennett, was known to researchers. Autograph manuscripts of two versions of the work, and two sets of orchestral parts copied for different performances, have recently come to light during the present author's research on Bennett. The discovery enables a fresh assessment to be made of an ‘unpublished work of outstanding importance’ by a composer of relatively few large-scale pieces, composed at the end of his most creative period and when he was arguably at the height of his powers. It also presents the possibility of the concerto's performance and publication, 150 years after its conception. A summary of all the sources now known is given in Table 1.