The story goes that when Rossini failed to deliver the overture for his opera The Thieving Magpie he was locked in a room on the day of its premiere at La Scala in Milan and, under the watchful eye of the director and four stagehands, forced to write. He would throw each sheet out of the window to the copyists below, who completed the full orchestral parts just in time for that first performance on May 31, 1817. “In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out of the window bodily,” he wrote.
Many a promoter probably wished to do the same to Oliver Knussen, a composer whose works were routinely delivered five, ten or even 15 years later than agreed. Even his