What started as a decade-long hunt for a missing piece of music is now making its way to McCaw Hall next week for Kyle Davis’s world premiere of The Raven.
In 2012, a young PNB corps de ballet dancer by the name of Kyle Davis set out on an unusual mission: find a piece of classical music that had never been used for a ballet. Digging through forgotten corners of the public domain, he stumbled upon a little-known composer, Alexander Dreyschock, and a virtually forgotten work from 1843 called Morceau de concert, Op. 27.
A Czech pianist and composer, Dreyschock was famous during the Romantic era throughout Europe for his almost unbelievable technique. One contemporary reportedly exclaimed, “The man has no left hand! There are two right hands!” after hearing him perform.
Davis tracked down a 1977 recording performed by pianist Frank Cooper and the Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra. Cooper, founder of the Festival of Neglected Romantic Music, had made a career out of championing forgotten works, making him one of only two known musicians to have commercially recorded Morceau de concert. There was just one problem: the recording only existed on vinyl in a distant library collection. Davis had the vinyl shipped to him, listened to it once, and immediately knew he had found the music for a ballet he’d already imagined.
“I knew instantly that this was The Raven,” Davis recalled.
The search should have been over. Instead, it was only beginning. If he ever hoped to turn his vision into a ballet, he would need the score and orchestral parts, and despite the fact that the piece had been recorded, nobody seemed to know where they were.
For years, the music became something of a ghost.
When a second recording was released in 2013 by pianist Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Davis hoped it might finally lead him to the source material. Instead, the mystery deepened. The recording existed. The score did not.
Fast forward more than a decade. Davis, now a principal dancer with PNB, presented The Raven to Artistic Director Peter Boal as a potential world premiere. The concept was met with enthusiasm, though Davis was quick to point out one major obstacle: finding the score. Davis knew the search wouldn’t be easy. Boal’s response?
They had a great team for that.
PNB’s music staff, including Music Librarian Mona Butler, whose job often involves detective work of this sort, began contacting orchestras, libraries, and archives connected to the two known recordings. Again and again they encountered the same response: yes, the piece had been recorded. No, nobody knew where the score had gone.
The trail eventually led to the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia, home to one of North America’s largest collections of sheet music and, coincidentally, one of the world’s most significant Edgar Allan Poe collections, including the only complete manuscript of The Raven in Poe’s handwriting.
There, library staff located a long-forgotten box. Inside were the surviving materials for Morceau de concert: yellowed pages, damaged parts, and fragments held together with tape. It appeared to be the very set used for both known recordings of the piece. Realizing they might be looking at the only surviving performance materials in existence, library staff undertook the painstaking process of reconstructing and re-engraving the score to ensure its preservation.
Only weeks ago, PNB received the newly reconstructed score and orchestra parts from the Free Library of Philadelphia. Since then, Mona Butler, concertmaster Michael Jinsoo Lim, principal pianist Christina Siemens, and the members of PNB Orchestra have been preparing the materials for performance, marking bowings, testing passages, and getting the music ready for the stage.
“It’s fascinating to me,” Davis said. “As dancers, we spend three to six weeks working on a ballet in the studio. The musicians get their parts only a few weeks in advance, and they don’t even come together until just days before opening.”
And this is no ordinary score.
“The piano solo is incredibly challenging,” Davis said. “I’d go out on a limb and say it might be one of the most challenging piano solos our orchestra has taken on.” Fortunately, the piece is in the hands of PNB principal pianist Christina Siemens, whose playing Davis describes as “absolutely incredible.”
The music serves as the foundation for a haunting reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Davis’s ballet explores grief, hope, memory, and loss. PNB Orchestra will be the first to play this music in over a decade and is likely the first to perform it for a live audience since composer Alexander Dreyschock’s own private performances in the 1840s.
Thirteen years after Davis first dropped a needle onto a borrowed vinyl record, the music he knew belonged to The Raven will finally fill McCaw Hall. Some mysteries remain unsolved. This one, at last, will be heard.
A Curious Coincidence
The only known surviving materials for Morceau de concert were found at Philadelphia’s Free Library, home to one of the world’s most significant Edgar Allan Poe collections, including the only complete manuscript of The Raven in Poe’s handwriting. The library also houses Grip, Charles Dickens’ pet raven, widely believed to have inspired Poe’s famous poem.
A forgotten piece of music chosen for a ballet called The Raven was hiding alongside both the poem that inspired it and the bird that may have inspired the poem. As coincidences go, that’s a hard one to top.
