Schubert - "Unfinished" Symphony Program Note

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Symphony No. 8 in B Minor “Unfinished” D. 759
Composed (1818-1825)

Over the course of his brief and highly productive musical life, Franz Schubert completed eight full-scale symphonies and left a nearly equal number unfinished. The B Minor Symphony was constructed between 1818 and 1825, years in which he was experiencing significant compositional and physical changes. After looking to Rossini as a model for many of his earlier orchestral works, Schubert was grappling with the influence of Beethoven, whose Seventh and Eighth Symphonies had just recently premiered. In the fall of 1822, he had his first outbreak of syphilis, which would prove fatal in six years. Along with symphonic sketches that exist only in piano score format and his so-called Tenth Symphony, begun in 1828 shortly before his death, there is an entire body of unfinished Schubert symphonies from which the B Minor, by far the most musically remarkable, was the very last to surface.

Only two movements of the B Minor Symphony survive in full orchestration. There is also a complete piano version of a scherzo, for which barely two pages of orchestral score have been found, and some speculation exists that the B Minor entr’acte for his incidental music to Rosamunde may have been a probative finale. Amazingly, the two completed movements of the score remained unheard until 1865, when Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a friend to Schubert, finally produced them from his studio. Schubert had sent the most complete version of the score to Hüttenbrenner after receiving an honorary diploma from the Graz Musical Society in 1823, hoping his colleague would share it with the committee as a sign of his gratitude. Instead, Hüttenbrenner inexplicably held onto the manuscript until long after Schubert’s passing, when a visit from conductor Johann von Herbeck prompted him to reveal it. Astonished by the discovery, von Herbeck immediately organized a premiere, “finishing” the symphony in concert with the last movement of Schubert’s Third Symphony in D Major. Several other solutions for completion have been offered since, though most modern performances opt for letting the two existing Schubert movements stand on their own.

The symphony’s unique beginning has scarce equivalents earlier in the repertory; comparable perhaps only to the opening of Beethoven’s Pastorale, it presents a subdued statement of a bare melodic idea which later receives a full motivic exploration in the development section of the first movement. This sonata form movement also presents two worlds: the characteristic lyricism of Schubert the songsmith, contrasted with minor key materials of depth and vehemence more menacing than anything found in his earlier “Tragic” Symphony in C Minor. Edward T. Cone, a frequently cited scholar on Schubert whose own symphony we also encounter on this program, speculated that “the sense of desolation, even dread, which penetrates much of [Schubert’s] music from then on” may have come from his increasing awareness of his condition and its eventual outcome. If so, the second movement is a kind of panacea then, a space in which shadows of the first movement’s material return, muted by the pervading calm that ends the unfinished work on a valedictory note.

~Eric Dudley, D.M.A. Yale Univ.