By Stephanie Powell
Russian-born 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky made his way back into headlines on September 4 with the announcement that one of his early orchestral works Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (Funeral Song), which was thought to have been lost for more than 100 years, appeared in a heap of old manuscripts at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire when the building was emptied last fall.
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The 12-minute piece, which Stravinsky composed for his late-teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was only performed once by a Russian symphony, conducted by Felix Blumenfeld, in January 1909, and was thought to be destroyed before or during the Russian Civil War. The piece was composed right before Stravinsky composed The Firebird, which delivered him immediate fame.
To read more on the discovery of Stravinsky’s lost work, click here.