Dead composers. Unfinished symphonies. This is the theme of Musica Nova’s comically titled concert, “Oops, He Died.”

“No, these works don’t trail off at the end as the composer expires,” chuckles Warren Cohen, music director of Musica Nova. “In the case of Borodin’s Symphony No. 3, it was finished after his untimely death by his friend Alexander Glazunov. As for Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Liszt was still revising it at his death. And Elgar’s Symphony No. 3? Now, that’s an interesting story and one of the main players in the tale is, believe it or not, copyright law.”

Edward Elgar died in 1934, leaving only musical sketches for his last symphony. Before he died, though, he told friends that the best thing anyone could do would be to burn the uncompleted work, that no one would be able to make any sense of it.

“Fortunately for the world of classical music, those sketches didn’t get burned,” Cohen explains. “Instead, a friend of Elgar's actually published them. A few years later, composer Anthony Payne began tinkering with them and word got out. In 1993, the BBC asked him to play them in a live radio broadcast.”

At this point, Elgar’s family grew alarmed. They owned the copyright to the sketches and refused to allow Payne to “finish” the symphony.

“Payne was crestfallen,” Cohen says. “He’d worked on them for 25 to 30 years, which was most of his adult life. But miraculously, in 1997, the family changed their minds. They’d discovered that the sketches would fall out of copyright in 2005 and become public domain. At that point, anyone — from Eminem to Beyoncé — could finish them and claim the work as their own. So they decided that at least Payne actually understood Elgar’s work and would do a professional job.”

Elgar’s “unfinished” Symphony No. 3 premiered in 1997 and was an instant hit. The symphony has been performed many, many times since then.

“The work is wonderful and it’s become part of the classical repertoire,” Cohen says. “And Elgar’s family must be breathing a sigh of relief.”