while i love this question, t is quite obvious that one could come up with an answer to almost any composer...for example, liszt wrote several pieces that were drafted, second drafted, performed, but never caught on; chopin was the king of rewriting, and brahms had mroe failures than one cna mention in a single page. What I like most about these failures are that they accentuate the genius behind the brilliant works. I know of no one who has churned out pure mechanical technical genius his entire life, but by comparison, even the lesser works only make the greatest look greater...there is no wrong answer here. But I am confused...do you mean lesser works that are famous, or lesser OBSCURE works, that are obscure for the reason that they shy in comparison to the genius ones? Because there is an explicit difference between the two.