The Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was tremendously popular in the early years of the 20th century. The French composer Claude Debussy wrote a successful opera based on Maeterlinck’s play “Pelleas and Melisande,” and the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had his heart set on turning Maeterlinck’s “Monna Vanna” into an opera as well.

Unfortunately, Rachmaninoff began work on “Monna Vanna” in 1906 before he had secured the rights to do so. In fact, Rachmaninoff had already finished one act of his opera by 1907 when he learned that Maeterlinck had already granted the rights to another composer. Rachmaninoff was crushed.

Although he stopped work on his opera, years later when he sat down at the piano to play for friends, he would sometimes include melodies from his abandoned opera.

One of those who heard Rachmaninoff play in this fashion was the much younger Russian conductor Igor Buketoff, who said he was too embarrassed at the time to ask the great Rachmaninoff to identify this unfamiliar music.

Decades later Buketoff was startled to recognize those same tunes as he looked over Rachmaninoff’s unfinished piano score for “Monna Vanna,” which had ended up at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Buketoff orchestrated the surviving portions of Rachmaninoff’s opera for its premiere, which occurred on today’s date in 1984, at annual summertime music festival in Saratoga Springs, New York—some 75 years after the music was composed.