Symphony No. 9
1824
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
★ 9.7
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19th century
1801 – 1900
Showing 9 albums from the 19th century
5th Symphony
1808
Four notes, then half an hour that never lets up. It premiered in an under-rehearsed, freezing four-hour concert that nobody enjoyed.
★ 9.3
Tristan und Isolde
1865
Seventy-seven rehearsals in Vienna ended with the opera abandoned as unperformable. It waited six years for a stage willing to try it.
★ 8.7
Winterreise
1827
Schubert found the second half of these poems in a magazine only after he had already set the first twelve as a finished cycle.
★ 8.4
Nocturnes
1846
Chopin rarely played in public, preferring drawing rooms of a few dozen people. The left hand keeps steady time while the right pulls freely against it.
★ 8.3
Symphonie fantastique
1830
Berlioz wrote it while obsessed with an Irish actress he had never met. Four timpanists play at once to make the thunder in the third movement.
★ 7.8
Pictures at an Exhibition
1874
Mussorgsky wrote it for piano after a memorial show of a friend's drawings, and several of the pictures it describes have since been lost.
★ 7.2
Symphony No. 4
1885
The finale is thirty variations over an eight-bar bass line lifted from Bach. At the private play-through one friend begged him to scrap the finale.
★ 7.0
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
1888
The pianist he wrote it for called it worthless and unplayable, so Tchaikovsky premiered it in Boston instead, where it was a triumph.
★ 6.6