Key Igor Stravinsky work found after 100 years

Stephen Walsh, a world expert on the composer, tells how lost score was found in piles of dusty manuscripts
Stravinsky in exile: the expatriate modernist was regarded as a non-person in the Soviet Union. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Rex

An important early orchestral work by one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, thought for more than 100 years to have been irretrievably lost, has turned up at last in a pile of old manuscripts in a back room of the St Petersburg Conservatoire.

Igor Stravinsky composed his Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (Funeral Song) in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, shortly after Rimsky’s death in June 1908. The 12-minute work was performed only once, in a Russian symphony concert conducted by Felix Blumenfeld in the Conservatoire in January 1909, but was always thought to have been destroyed in the 1917 revolutions or the civil war that followed. Read More