In classical music, it is relatively rare for a work to be written in collaboration by multiple composers. This contrasts with popular music, where it is common for more than one person to contribute to the music for a song. Nevertheless, there are instances of collaborative classical music compositions.
Collaborations The following list gives some details of classical works written by composers working collaboratively.
Opera and operetta
In 1656, The Siege of Rhodes was written in London, and is considered to be the first English opera. The vocal music is by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, and Captain Henry Cooke, and the instrumental music is by Charles Coleman and George Hudson. In 1721, Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel each wrote one act of the opera Muzio Scevola. Also in 1721, Michel Richard Delalande and André Cardinal Destouches jointly composed the opera-ballet Les élémens. Between the 1720s and the 1760s, François Francoeur and François Rebel collaborated on a number of operas. In 1767, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Haydn and Anton Cajetan Adlgasser each wrote one act of Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots. Only Mozart's music has survived. Luigi Ricci and his younger brother Federico wrote a number of operas together, including Crispino e la comare (1850). In 1861, the operetta Les musiciens de l'orchestre was written by Léo Delibes, Erlanger, Aristide Hignard and Jacques Offenbach. Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre was an operetta produced in Paris in December 1867. One act each was written by Georges Bizet, Léo Delibes, Émile Jonas and Isidore Legouix. Mlada (1872) is an opera-ballet by Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Ludwig Minkus, Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It was never staged, and much of the music is lost or known only in later versions. The only extant part of the original score is Act I, by Cui and Minkus. Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde Durán collaborated on a number of zarzuelas. Chueca provided most of the melodies and Valverde provided the orchestral polish. Their collaborations included Un maestro de obra prima (1877), La Canción de la Lola (1880), Luces y sombras and Fiesta Nacional (both 1882), Cádiz (1886), El año pasado por agua (1889), and other operas. Their masterpiece was La gran vía (Madrid, 1886). Valverde Durán also collaborated with Ruperto Chapí, Tomás Bretón, his own son Joaquín "Quinito" Valverde Sanjuán, and other composers. Quinito Valverde Sanjuán also collaborated with other composers, such as Tomás López Torregrosa, Ramón Estellés, Rafael Calleja and José Serrano, however, his contribution to these works was more significant than his father's had been to his. Other zarzuela composers collaborated in some important works: Amadeu Vives with Gerónimo Giménez in El húsar de la guardia (1904), La gatita blanca (1905) and other; Giménez with Manuel Nieto in El barbero de Sevilla (1901) and with Ruperto Chapí in La eterna revista (1908); Pablo Luna with Tomás Barrera or Rafael Calleja; etc. in 1913, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky together wrote a completion of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina for a production by Sergei Diaghilev. Stravinsky's ending is sometimes still heard, but this joint realisation is otherwise unknown. From 1919 to 1930, Juan Vert and Reveriano Soutullo collaborated on 21 zarzuelas, both providing music. These collaborations include some of the most known instances of the genre: La del soto del Parral (1927), La leyenda del beso (1924) or El último romántico (1927). In 1921, Alberto Franchetti and Umberto Giordano jointly wrote the opera Giove a Pompei. In 1929, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill collaborated on the opera Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh's Flight), based on the writing of American pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh. This was later changed by removal of Hindemith’s contribution, renaming it to Der Ozeanflug (The Flight across the Ocean), and removal of Lindbergh’s name. The opening line was changed from "My name is Charles Lindbergh" to "My name is of no account". In 1937, Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert wrote the opera L'Aiglon. Ibert wrote Acts 1 and 5, Honegger the rest. In 1938, they again collaborated on an opera, this time Les petites cardinal. In 2000, the opera The Age of Dreams was written by three Finnish composers: Kalevi Aho, Olli Kortekangas and Herman Rechberger. It was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival that year. In 2016, the hypnotic opera Indigo was written by two Finnish composers: Eicca Toppinen and Perttu Kivilaakso.
Ballet La source (1866) is a ballet with music by Léo Delibes and Ludwig Minkus. Minkus wrote Act I and Scene 2 of Act III; Delibes wrote Act II and Scene 1 of Act III. In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev commissioned orchestrations of some pieces by Frédéric Chopin for the ballet Les Sylphides, by Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Taneyev, Nikolai Tcherepnin and Igor Stravinsky. In 1910, Robert Schumann's Carnaval, Op. 9, was choreographed for a ballet for a production by Diaghilev, with orchestrations by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Tcherepnin, Glazunov and Lyadov. In 1921, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre (all members of Les Six; the remaining member Louis Durey was unavailable) collectively wrote a ballet to Jean Cocteau's Les mariés de la tour Eiffel L'éventail de Jeanne (1927) is a ballet written by ten French composers: Georges Auric, Marcel Delannoy, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, Jacques Ibert, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Albert Roussel, and Florent Schmitt. In 1956 appeared Don Perlimplin (also seen as Perlimplinada), a collaboration between Federico Mompou and Xavier Montsalvatge. Most of the work was by Mompou, but Montsalvatge helped with the orchestration and linking passages, and added two numbers of his own.
Orchestral Six of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano solo (including the best known, No. 2) were orchestrated by his pupil Franz Doppler, with later minor touches by Liszt himself. Johann Strauss II collaborated on a number of pieces with his brothers Josef and Eduard, mostly famously Pizzicato Polka (1870) with Josef. In 1904, Nikolai Artsybushev, Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Sokolov and Joseph Wihtol wrote Variations on a Russian Theme. In 1918, the Variations on "Cadet Rousselle" were written as an encore piece for voice and piano by Arnold Bax, Frank Bridge, Eugene Goossens and John Ireland. In 1930 Goossens arranged this composite work for small orchestra, publishing it as his Op. 40. It is much better known in its orchestral form. Captions: Five Glimpses of an Anonymous Theme, published in 1923, is a suite of movements by Herbert Bedford, Arthur Bliss, Eugene Goossens, Felix Harold White and Gerrard Williams.The Musical Times, Vol, 107 No. 1482 (August 1966), p. 667 In 1937, shortly after they first met at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona, Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley together wrote Mont Juic, a suite of Catalan dances. It was named after the Barcelona hill on which they had heard some popular tunes. For many years, it was not known which composer wrote which movement, but Berkeley later revealed he had written only the first two movements. It was published as Berkeley's Op. 9 and Britten's Op. 12. In 1945 appeared Variations on a Theme by Eugene Goossens. The variations were by Ernest Bloch, Aaron Copland, Paul Creston, Anis Fuleihan, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Bernard Rogers and Deems Taylor, with Goossens himself writing the finale. The work was premiered on 23 March 1945 by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Goossens. In 1952 came the premiere of La guirlande de Campra, a set of orchestral variations on a theme from André Campra's 1717 opera Camille, reine des Volsques. The composers were Georges Auric, Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Henri Sauguet and Germaine Tailleferre.cocteau, satie & les six In 1966 it was choreographed as a ballet. In 1953, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett, and William Walton jointly wrote Variations on an Elizabethan Theme. The theme (Sellinger's Round) was arranged by Imogen Holst from a keyboard harmonisation by William Byrd. Each of the composers also quoted briefly from one of their own earlier compositions. At the first two performances, the audience was not told which composer had written which variation, but were invited to take part in a competition to match the variations to the composers, to raise funds for the Aldeburgh Festival. Nobody correctly guessed all six composers. In 1956, in honour of the pianist Marguerite Long, eight French composers wrote Variations sur le nom de Marguerite Long (although only one of the eight sections was actually a set of variations). Variations on a Theme of Zoltán Kodály, a 1962 orchestral work, was written by Antal Doráti, Tibor Serly, Ödön Pártos, Géza Frid and Sándor Veress, Kodály's composition pupils, for his 80th birthday celebration. The theme is taken from Kodály's String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2. The score is published by Boosey & Hawkes. in 1966, Severn Bridge Variations was jointly composed by Malcolm Arnold, Alun Hoddinott, Daniel Jones, Nicholas Maw, Michael Tippett and Grace Williams. The Aldeburgh Festival Variations, also known as Variations on "Sumer Is Icumen In", was premiered in 1987. It contains variations by Oliver Knussen, Robin Holloway, Judith Weir, Robert Saxton, Alexander Goehr, Colin Matthews and David Bedford.
Concertante works In 1833, Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles collaborated on a work for two pianos and orchestra, Fantasy and Variations on the "Gypsy March" from Carl Maria von Weber's 'La Preziosa'''. Moscheles later made an arrangement for two pianos alone. The manuscript score of this arrangement, inscribed by both Moscheles and Mendelssohn, was presented by Moscheles's son to Anton Rubinstein, and is in the library of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Ungarische Zigeunerweisen is a piece for piano and orchestra, dating from 1885. It has a curious and still uncertain origin. The piano part was written either by Sophie Menter or Franz Liszt or possibly both had a hand in it. The piece was orchestrated by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892, and premiered under his baton in Odessa in 1893, with Sophie Menter as the soloist.
Vocal and choral In the early 1830s, Felix Mendelssohn published two sets of 12 songs each, as Opp. 8 and 9. Three songs in each set were written by his sister Fanny Mendelssohn. While each song was the product of one composer alone, as sets, they were collaborations. In 1840, around the time of their marriage, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann published a set of 12 songs called Gedichte aus Liebesfruhling (Love's Spring). Clara wrote numbers 2, 4 and 11, while Robert wrote the rest. It was published as Robert's Op. 37, but Clara's songs were also given the opus number 12 in her own catalogue of works.