CLL& Franz Schubert Franz Perer Schubert was born in Liechtenthal, a subir g A ‘ Vienna, on 31 January 1797 and died in Vienna on ig November 1828. autiously, one can hope that the commemorative concerts, publica- tions, and scholarly conferences called into being in 1978 by the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death began an overdue te- evaluation of his work and stature as an artist. But we still read sometimes that he was something of an amateur as a composer, albeit an inspired one, and there are still writers who portray him as the most seductive of charmers but deny him greatness. How much of Schubert’s music is in the active repertory? An eighth! Less? Two or three of the symphonies, the Trout Quintet, the Cello Quin: tet, the Impromptus and Moments musicaux, a few songs such as Gretchen am Spinnrade and Der Erlkénig, the Ave Maria and Die Forelle, An die Musik and the most famous of the Serenades, are insistently with us. Some of the other orchestral and chamber music has a growing audience, as do the great song cycles, while more and more pianists find the courage play the sonatas. (At the end of the 1920s, Rachmaninoff admitted he had 1 known that Schubert had written any piano sonatas.) But how vague “° eae ni ae two or three of those sonatas and oe ean et (unless we play them ourselves), and how ma! en erally—of songs we have probably never heard. And what ° - the most trivial level, do most of us know about Schubert's - choral works, his sacred music, Of Schubert himself most feet exactly) and a bit on the gold-rimmed spectacles; consu: his operas? of us have some sort of image: 5 pudgy side, potato nose, curly ae rs ming whatever wine and coffee 2” hort (fv? hai, ne ae i471 ald ifford oF charge; the center of a circle of adoring friends who look could s 5! _ KA him, found hin places to live, joined him on hiking tours (how nact alte ral aie jging” we find in his music), and with whom he played cards and we ards and cha- an unassuming Tittle man whose Viennese accent was as dense x ree knddel in his soup ant who somehow, blithely, without beens ekerching oF erasing, jotted masterpieces onto tablecloths and the backs of menus. Much of that is true. He could compose at incredible speced—we know quite 2 lot about that because his teacher, Antonio Salieri, got him in the habit of dating his manuscripts—and at least one song, his setting of “Hark, hark the lark” from “Schakespear’s” Cymbeline, actually was written in a sudden seizure of inspiration, among friends, at a café table, on the back of a menu. But those witnesses to his life whose rich and moving testimony is collected in Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, edited by Otto Erich Deutsch, also noticed that when he sat at the piano to accompany the great Michael Vogl or when he himself sang his songs in his own com- poser’s falsetto, something transformed him beyond their recognition. He could compose music that frightened and dismayed them, the death- possessed songs of Winterreise (Winter Journey), for example, which they rejected even though he insisted it was the best thing he had done. “My productions came about through my understanding of music and through my pain,” he wrote in his diary, “and those that are produced by pain alone seem to please the world least.” He had warned his friends that these songs would make them shudder, and the friends’ rejection was, paradoxi- cally, a form of understanding and of love, because in rejecting the songs they were rejecting his knowledge of death, his own death, then just a year away. John Harbison’s assertion that Schubert “got closer to full meta- physical revelation than any other composer” is a challenge we do well to take seriously. “At last I can pour out my whole heart to someone again,” the twenty-seven-year-old composer wrote to his friend the painter Leopold Kupelwieser: You are so good and faithful, you are sure to forgive me things that others would only take very much amiss. © be bref ‘eal nuicalnio leet most unhappy, the most wretched man injthe world. Picture to yourself a man whose health will never be sound again and who, out of sheer oes over that, does everything to make matters constantly worse mee of bet- ter, Picture to yourself, I say, 2 man whose brightest hopes have come to - hom love and friendship at best offer only pain, someone ne att (creative response at least) to all that is beautiful threatens whose respi‘THE SYMPHONY: A hes USTENER's Sun; vo vanish. . « « "My peace is gone, my heart is heavy: never, sh. . me 1 anipall | find peace.”! That could be my daily song nov, for gah T ca never to wake again, and each ‘Ch nighy when 1 go to sleep | hope camel Ings back to me yesterday's grief. At the same time, Schubert’s self-awareness comprised a keen sq of his own worth, of his artistic goals and possibilities. He grew ae . shadow of Beethoven, who himself had had to mature in the shadow ‘ Haydn and Mozart, but bit by bit, Schubert came to understand that was qualified to step forward as the heir of Beethoven. (I tell some of that story in the essays on the Unfinished and the Great C-major symphonies.) His last musical wish, fulfilled five days before his death, was to hear Bec. thoven’s Quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131. (“The King of Harmony had sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing,” said Kar} Holz, one of the violinists at that gathering.) We also know now that the imposing series of works in which Schu- bert declared himself—from the Octet, the A-minor and Death and the Maiden quartets, and the Grand Duo for piano, all of 1824, to the Cello Quintet and the three piano sonatas of the last year, 1828—was not writ ten without sketches and erasures, without intense concentration and Sitz- fleisch. We have, furthermore, the wrong idea if we imagine his work going unnoticed and Schubert himself hopelessly neglected except within the circle of his friends. True, his fame was local, and the E-flat Piano Trio was his only work published abroad in his lifetime, but Vienna wes an important musical center, and it meant something to be known there. True also that Schubert never attained the success in the theater that he longed for so ardently, nor did he ever hear a professional performance of one of his symphonies, but for the rest, his music was sung and played, admired, and talked about. On 7 March 1821, Michael Vogl, a star of the Court Opera, sang Der Erlkénig at an important charity concert, and that put an end to Schubert’s obscurity in the capital. Something like an eighth of his music was in print when he died, not bad for a prolific musician with ho connections, without a significant career as a performer, and lacking all talent for self-promotion. ; Finally, a word about the numbering of Schubert’s symphonies. There is no entirely satisfactory or universally accepted system. Up to the Little—- or at least littler—C-major Symphony, D.589, there is no problem. (The "Schubert is quoting Gretchen am Spinnrade, seventeen with a knowled, : 2 . an Schubert's Letters and Other Writings, edited by O. E. Deutsch (London: Faber x the poem from Goethe's Fanst that he halls lge of the human heart no boy of that age ought to have: — e aeSchubert 473 umbers are those assigned by Deutsch in his thematic ¢. n yg fi f < works; they are useful in that for the most part th accurately, but they have not become “ [ : atalogue of gchubert ie hey indicate the Se ye haves up to that point, six complete S naturalized” and familiar. ie der ob thee plete Schubert symphonies, rationally numbered in order of tl eit composition from No. | in D “ce i? (October 1813), c0 the Litle C-major, Number 6, D.589 (Febraam 1818). These six works are preceded by a fragment of another eat ia D major, a slow introduction plus nineteen bars of allegro, which Deutsch places as “probably written about 1812.” Number 6 is followed b sketches and fragments of two more symphonies, one in D major, D. ais (May 1818), and one in E minor/major, D.729 (August 1821). From here on, we have confusion. Next come the two fully orches- trated movements in B minor and E major (plus part of a scherzo) which we know as the Unfinished Symphony, D.759, the beginning of whose full score is dated October 1822 and which was lost—or rather, hidden—until 1865. Then comes the Great C major, which was completed early in 1826, though the manuscript bears the date of March 1828, a confusing discrep- ancy that has never been cleared up. Finally, in the last weeks of his life Schubert made considerable progress on what would have been yet another symphony in D major, D.966a, parts of which have been realized in “per- forming versions” by the German musicologist and conductor Peter Giilke and by Brian Newbould. The Italian composer Luciano Berio has used the sketches of the D-major Symphony to compose a work titled Rendering. This posthumous collaboration is not, however, a scholarly “performing version” but something Berio himself has described, perhaps with more candor than the musicologists, as a work of “dual authorship.” The Great C-major, as the English musical lexicographer Sir George Grove was the first to call it, has been listed as No. 9 and sometimes— rather less often in recent years—as No. 7.* Calling it No. 7 made sense while the Unfinished was still buried in the attic of Schubert’s friend An- D lated Deutsch notes that “Mendelssohn, [Arthur] Sullivan, and Brahms are said to have contempl finishing the sketch” of the E minor/major Symphony. John Francis Barnett, an Eadie senteee actually did so about 1863, as did Felix Weingartner, the Austrian compostr #0. O00 ae 1934. A stylistically more accurate edition was made in 1977 by the English musicologist Brian Newbould. 4Great is a problem adjective, Grof in German means great in the sense of big as well as of : : a magnificent, whereas the English “great” has all but lost its Se ee ee ae S to find it in, for example, “great toe”). When Schubert voiced his plan to 5 ‘edly hoped it would also tum out to be nie,” he meant one on a large scale, though eee aan neta “great.” to the effect t t “ Cae (tee ed rrr ean work Schubert's Large C-major Symphony oF Big C-major Symphony us would, after all, agree that D.944 is indeed great474 THE. SYMPHONY: 4 USTENER»s SUI, Known sm edition y selm Hiittenbrenner and the Great C-major was the next. after No. 6. But the editors of the complete Schubert out in Germany between 1883 and 1897 chose to disregard chronole, put the Unfinished Symphony after the seven complete ones, ee and that work came by its familiar number, 8. The next step—of den IS hoy, the Great C-major Symphony as number 9—was sensible insofay tng the chronology of this work and the Unfinished straight, but a wes gor that it left the number 7 unaccounted for. ‘Sance in There is some rational justification for calling the Unfinished Ne > and the C-major No. 8, as the 1979 revised edition of the Deutsch i 7 logue does; on the other hand, there is a real psychological obstacle accepting this reshuffling of familiar titles and familiar numbers to 7a new and unfamiliar combinations. (To confuse things further, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which feels proprietary because it Save the firs: public performance of the work, calls the Great C-major No. 10 in its programs!) Hoping to make things both comfortable and sensible, some program editors simply call the one work Unfinished Symphony in B minor, D.759, and the other Great C-major Symphony, D.944, getting rid of the No. 7/8/9/10 business altogether. Then there is a ghost to be exorcised, the so-called Gastein Symphony, named for a village with mineral springs, some fifty miles south of Salzburg, where Schubert spent a brief period in the summer of 1825. There, anda lit tle earlier in the year at Gmunden, where he had stayed rather longer, Schu- bert worked on a symphony. Several of his friends attest to this, and it is mentioned in the obituary notice by his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld. We know now that this was the Great C-major, but when it had not yet been shown that this work was written in 1825-26 and was still believed to date from 1828, there remained the question, what became of the Gastein ot Gmunden-Gastein Symphony? Many assumed that this mystery piece would someday turn up, much as the B-minor Unfinished had come out of hiding thirty-seven years after Schubert’s death. That was part of the attraction of calling the Great C-major No. 9: we saved the number 7 for the Gasteit, much as one sets a place at a Seder for the Prophet Elijah. Deutsch even signed the Gastein a number, 849, in his catalogue. But it is now as & & certain that the allegedly missing Gastein is not going to appear; OF rather that it has already done so in the form of the Great C-major.° is the Gast? foundation © thers, Zit has also been proposed that the C-major Grand Duo for Piano Duet, D.812: Symphony, but which Schubert never Got around to orchestrating. This has n° reality at all; there are, however, orchestrations of the Grand Duo by, among 0 Joachim and Raymond Leppard.pant Schubert unfinished Symphony in B minor, D.759 Allegro moderate Andante con moto The score of the two completed movements of this symphony is dated 30 October 1822. A scherzo exists in a fairly complete piano Jee an . frst nine measures of that movement, fully scored, are on the ese of the last page of the second movement. The first performance of the Unfin ished was given under the direction of Johann von Herbeck in Vieni - 17 December 1865, the last movement of Schubert's Symphony No. 3 in D major, D.200, being appended as an incongruous finale. August Ludwig (1865-1949), a German composer and critic, was the first to be seized by and to execute the unhappy idea of finishing the Unfinished: he added a “Philosopher's Scherzo” and a “March of Destiny.” Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. The most obvious question about this symphony we cannot answer. In the 1940s, there was a Victor record album of the work played by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky. The picture on the cover showed part of a desk with a page of musical manuscript, purportedly of the Unfinished. 1 remember an inkwell and a quill. The pen lay on the page and had left a few artfully placed inkblots when it dropped from the writer’s hand. I think there was a glass with a rose, some of whose petals had also fallen onto the page—at least there ought to have been. But that was not it. Schubert did not leave the score unfinished because Death forbade. He lived a full six years after he abandoned it, six yeats during which, so far as we know, he did not give it another thought. The ae a is nee and dated—Vienna, 30 Coches ae beyond that there is no reference to the work in Schubert’s lifetime. i had d the first performance in 1865, 2 amet ae Hittenbrenner in Ober-Andritz ss ¢ from cs Oe rea ee By then the existence of the work was a matter of Per merece since it was mentioned in iste ee = himself in the Biographisches Lexikon des Kaisertums Oestervel‘THE SYMPHONY: A LIST 1 476 STENERS Up, well as in the big Schubert biography by Heinrich Kreissle von Hell, (1864), Anselm Hirttenbrenner had received the Manuscript froin | is om his younger brother, Josef, who seems to have had it dircetly from Schui the details of its journey from Schubert to Josef to ert; orn however, obscure. . First of all, who were the Hiittenbrenners? Anselm, bom 1794 in Graz, a university city some ninety miles southwest of Vienna Anselm atk » WAS a com ne poser and critic who met Schubert in 1815 as a fellow-student in Antoni Salieri’s composition class. Anselm returned to Graz in 1821, bur Temained on terms of warm friendship with Schubert. He wrote a popular Set of Erlkonig waltzes based on Schubert's famous song and performed his friend's music. It was Anselm’s Requiem that was sung at the memorial service for Schubert in January 1829. He led a long, active, and varied life in the service of music, but in his last years—he died in 1868—he stopped com. posing, became pious and withdrawn, and occupied himself mainly with questions about theology and magnetism. Josef Hiittenbrenner, born in 1796, was introduced to Schubert by Anselm in 1817. He became a civil servant, but was passionately devoted to music, at least to Schubert’s and Anselm’s, with perhaps not much sense that there was a difference. Nowadays we might call him a groupie: he hung around and made himself useful, he was aggressive, his friendship often turned out to be self-serving, and he sometimes irritated Schubert with his uncritical adulation (“Why, that man likes every single thing I do”). In April 1823, half a year after the date on the manuscript of the Unfinished, Schubert was awarded the Diploma of Honor of the Styrian Musical Society in Graz. Anselm was a member of the Society and later its president, and the diploma was transmitted to Schubert via himself and Josef. In 1860 Josef first mentioned the symphony to Johann von Herbeck, explaining that “Schubert gave it to me for Anselm as thanks for having sent him the diploma through me.” In a letter to an unnamed recipient, and dated 1868, Josef tells it a little differently: “Schubert gave it to me out of gratitude for the Diploma of Honor from the Graz Music Society and dedicated it to the Society and Anselm. | had brought the diploma to Schubert.” In the same letter, Josef states that he and Anselm had been unable is pind an orchestra anywhere that would accept [the symphonyl.” We don’t know when the Hiittenbrenners had stopped trying to get someon® to perform the Unfinished, but Josef’s failure is quite believable for the first decade after Schubert’s death; in 1838, Schubert’s brother Ferdinan boentel 0 Robert Schumann that he had been unable to get pet" s for the symphonies in his possession. It is strange, though, thatSchubert Fran’ : 474 n after Schubert's Great C-major Symphony, with Sct umann’s hel vee a \ in's he began (© gain recognition as a masterwork, albeir a possibly. probl Py bee ly problematic the Hiittenbrenners seem to have made no new ¢ fforts to pet the ed out into the open. ones Unginish Schubert's letter of thanks to the Graz Society is dated 20 Sepr mt ) September 1823. This is not a reflection on his manners: chough the diploma is date 6 April, Schubert did not receive it until September. ‘The letter says order also to give musical expression to my sincere gratitude, I shall rake the liberty before long of presenting your honorable Society with one of my symphonies in full score.” Presumably che two movements of the B- minor Symphony came into Ansclm’s possession because Schubert in- tended them for the Society. I would guess that he sent only two move- ments because he foresaw difficulties with completing the piece, but also wanted to send something substantial fairly quickly. What we don't know at all is when he gave the manuscript to Josef Hiittenbrenner, nor why it remained in Anselm Hiittenbrenner’s chest of drawers rather than going to the library of the Styrian Musical Society. When Josef Hiittenbrenner first told Johann von Herbeck about the Unfinished in March 1860, these were his words: “[Anselm] posses sure. . . in Schubert’s Symphony in B minor, which we place on a level with the great Symphony in C major . . . and with any of Beethoven's Only it is not finished.” Josef’s point was to use the Unfinished as a bribe to get the influential Herbeck to perform some of Anselm’s songs, quartets, choruses, operas, overtures, symphonies, Masses, and Requiems. For some reason Herbeck delayed five years, but on 1 May 1865, after Kreissle von Hellborn had publicly urged Anselm to release the manuscript of Schu- bert’s symphony, the conductor finally made the trip to Ober-Andritz. The account that follows is from an article, “The Riddle of Schubert's Unfin- ished Symphony” by the great Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch (Music Review 1940): n Sa trea- Herbeck arrived in the village and, finding that the inn where he had he one which (Hittenbrenner] daily frequented, awaited him there. “I have come,” he said when Hittenbrenner arrived, “to ask you to allow one of your compositions to be performed in Vienna. An selm thereupon escorted Herbeck to his home « « - and into his study that looked like a lumber-room. Furniture, including a close-stool, had to bs pushed out of the way before all the manuscripts could be reached and sprea out—first, of course, those of Anselm himself, Herbeck while still in oe had chosen for the performance Anselm's Overture in C ere ae = had obtained the manuscript from Josef, but now he also ee ne fc im two overtures to play. This being settled, Herbeck said, “I intend to rag the three contemporaries, Schubert, Hiittenbrenner, and Lachner before the gone by chance was tlE SYMPHONY: A L ; eB TH ISTENER’s Cun, Vienna public in a single concert © Naturally I would like very much, Schubert represented by a new work.” Anselm replied, “Well, I stilj by Schubert.” Then from a drawer crammed with paper have have lot of things in ay old-fashioned chest, he pulled out the symphony. Herbeck maintained 5 outward calm while he held the desired manuscript in his hand. “That weet be quite suitable,” he said, then with consummate diplomacy, “yi ne allow me to have the manuscript transcribed immediately at my expenrce But Anselm, who had been completely won over, replied, “There is no nee to hurry, you are welcome to cake it with you". . . . So these manusctin the decoy and the game, arrived on that very day in Vienna where the Schubert manuscript, after its long exile, was thenceforth to remain, Between the fall of [813 and the winter of 1817-18, Schubert, with. out inhibition, almost casually, had written six symphonies. Then, as he enlarged his idea of symphony, a process that culminated in his admission in 1824 that he was making his way “zr groBen Sinfonie” and his composi- tion of the Great C-major in 1825-26, work became more complicated. In May 1818, he wrote and abandoned twenty-five pages of closely written piano sketches for a symphony in D major. In August 1821, he made more progress with but also abandoned a symphony in E minor/major, whose Adagio introduction is impressive and new in manner. In the fall of 1822 we have the great work in B minor that is the subject of this essay, and Whicbwibylthe way, was not commonly called the Wnfmshediunallthe 1890s. This period, 1818-22, is altogether one in which Schubert left many fragments. The B-minor Symphony he was able to carry a lot farther than the fragments of 1818 and 1821. We know of no external circumstances or pressures that would have kept him from finishing it. That he intended to leave it as a work in two movements in not very closely related keys is @ notion totally out of tune with everything else we know about Schubert's thought and practice. Probably most of us today share something of the Romantic fascination with ruins and fragments, with blurred beginnings and endings, but that was not part of Schubert’s aesthetic. The most convincing explanation is that he was at a loss how to g0 on. The year 1822 was a good one, begun with the completion of his wonderfully imaginative opera Alfonso und Estrella, and closing with the stunning and original Wanderer Fantasy for piano, composed at about the °Fran2 Paul Lachner (1803-90) was a Bavarian composer and conductor, active chiefly in Vienna and Munich. Wagner likened his conducting of the Andante of Mozart's G-minor Symphony (© the swinging of a bronze pigtail. The recitatives in the familiar performing edition of Cherubin!s ‘Médée are Lachner’s. In the event, nothing by Lachner was played at the Vienna concert: the Huttenbrenner and Schubert works, the program was completed by some a cappella choruses of von Herbeck’s own and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. —M.S.2 Schubert . 479 as the two-and-a-fraction movements of the Unfinished § ished Frat me Those movements were altogether new in melodic styl _ f breadth and concision in their structure ’ same ti phony: mixture O their orchestt ‘ ore, mut fit to claim a place in the tradition of the grofe Sinfonie. Schubert’ ae dards were NOW immensely high. wee But the delightful Scherzo is not on the level of the first two move ments. Above all, Beethoven had turned the planning and connanr 6 finales into a problem ever since he had begun to write symphonies ie center of gravity was at the end rather than the beginning, works in which the finale was not merely whatever came last but was the movement to- ward which the entire work tended and in which all its tensions were resolved. This problem unsettled composers as far into the nineteenth cen- tury and beyond as Franck, Bruckner, Dvofék, Mahler, and Shostakovich. Even in later years and in works otherwise as miraculous as the G-major String Quartet, D.887, and the C-minor Piano Sonata, D.958, Schubert could not always match earlier movements with finales of comparable con- ym- » the bold » and the warm gl al sound. It was music like no other ever heard bef: oe an- centration and intensity. Michael Griffel, an American Schubert scholar, had the interesting idea that Schubert, with the Beethoven Fifth in mind, imagined his B- minor Symphony as culminating in a heroic finale in major, but was baffled as to how to accomplish this. Griffel also proposed—and this, too, is a fascinating and provocative thought—that when Schubert wanted to take lessons from the great pedagogue Simon Sechter, an arrangement barely begun at the time of Schubert’s last illness and death, it was not in order generally, but to get tips on how to f contrapuntal techniques. However minor Symphony we don’t have— to study counterpoint and fugue just end a minor-key symphony by means 0! much we may mourn the complete B- and had Schubert been able to continue on the level of the first two move- ments, he would have achieved @ symphony even greater, certainly more personal, than the Great C-major—for Schubert himself in 1822, leone at those two movernents, it was just easier to shelve the problem, get the ing else. manuscript out of the house, and go on to something ic li rd i i ished is music like no other ever hea I said earlier that the ae = ee eae before. ious opening—Ve : roll i a eae but in both those pieces, pelos a5. sales © : % » . strings begin (the adjective is John Harbison’s) there is some rmal ished: lish musicologist Gerald Abra- the Unfinished: the Engl yee ‘To mention one other speculation os Brian Newbould, believed that ete bal os cS ham, seconded later by a younger Colesi ne, deadline diverted OO in B written a finale but because of €¢ PFESUE Ty oyerent in question, the Tate for Helmina von Chézy's play Rosarito « symphonic finale seems preposterous. a fine piece, but the notion in480 ‘THE SYMPHONY: A LISTENER'S ¢ announcement, the drumroll in at in the other anes pamsimo cellos and basses begin their creeping Progress withouy warning. There is another, more important, difference. Beginnings of The kind—at least before Schubert—belong to the world of slow introductions The Haydn and Beethoven examples are typical. In the Unfinished we can't tell right away what the tempo 1s is the first note a single beat in a very slow tempo, or what?—any more than we can tell whether the long note » ends is something in tempo or an unmeasured SUIDE the one, the five-story Bt on which the first phras fermata. After that long note we get some clarity. An accompaniment begins pianissimo, with nervous, rustling violins, pizzicato below. We can now make out what the tempo is—a moderate allegro in 3/4 time—and in retto- spect we can understand that the mysterious opening measures were in that tempo too. In other words, in a daring game of ambiguity, those measures implied “introduction” by their gestures but were in fact the real beginning. After a few measures, oboe and clarinet add the melody to the string ac- companiment. The sounds stay low, but the heart is disturbed: the melody is quick to stray from its B-minor moorings, and sharply accented chords interrupt its progress. The interruptions are like the pruning of a plant: their result is that the melody stretches, extends itself, until it arrives at a powerful cadence, still in B minor. Nothing about that cadence is ordinary. The crescendo leading to it is brief and thus very forceful, fortissimo arrives unexpectedly, on a weak beat, and the last two measures are tense with cross-rhythms. It was not usually Schubert’s way to modulate over a period of time into the new key where he would introduce a new theme; rather, he preferred a sudden and dramatic stepping into new harmonic territory. So it is here. Horns and bassoons, with emphatic accent, pick one note out of the closing B-minor chord, hold it for a long time (but in tempo), then make the gentlest of landings in G major. And there, to a syncopated accompaniment, Schubert gives us on€ of the most famous tunes in the world. That both tune and accompaniment are pianissimo is of the essence, though this is not always remembered by conductors: the temptation to lean into the cellos is strong. Nonetheless, this restraint—repression is not too strong a word—is everything. This is the only moment of sweet lyricism in a movement otherwise dark, tow bled, fierce. No less remarkable than the tune itself is that it, too, is Un” finished—broken off in extraordinary gestures of pathos and drama. In 8 passage that sounds and feels like development rather than exposition remember the “developmental” tendency of the first theme t© stretch an extend—fragments of the melody are tossed violently about. When, how:481 every the tune tries to resume in its original sweetness and innoce made to understand that the fortissimo outbursts after it b hocence, we first cime have made its survival impossible nae I These outbursts also introduce a problem that is a plague ozs of Sehuber’s music. The printed score has these dist tree marked with ffz (meaning fortissimo with an accent) and pean s ae minuendo sign & wedge pointing to the right. Some diminuen a ao bert have troubled scholars and musicians (more of the farther ee iN added away the latter) because they make no musical sense: the last notes of the Great C- major Symphony and the C-major String Quintet are notorious instances. The difficulty is that the symbol for an accent is also an arrowhead point- ing to the right, only shorter. Many of us believe that most of these musi- cally nonsensical diminuendos are accents drawn by Schubert with exces- sive exuberance. These violently disruptive chords in the first movement of the Unfinished are prime examples [ remember being taught as a college freshman that Schubert, though talented, couldn't compose very well Specifically, his trouble was that he didn’t understand that in sonata form he was not supposed to start devel- oping themes until he was through with the exposition (no dilly-dallying), safely crossed the double bar, and arrived in the proper development sec- tion. He is still faulted sometimes for his audacity in writing sonata move- ments that are not like Haydn's, Mozart’s, and Beethoven’s—not that those are always like each other's or even, so to speak, like themselves— and not like ex post facto descriptions of sonata form. Here, in the exposi- tion of the first movement of the Unfinished, we have twice experienced Schubert’s going with his drive to start development, and in just those places we have, twice, experienced some of his most gripping utterances. Now he is in the development proper: and the music is incredibly focused and concentrated. His subject, all but exclusively throughout this entire section, is the eight-measure cello-and-bass phrase at the very begin- in even deeper mystery and in a state of ning. We hear it first shrouded i e Eee” n assertive fortissimo. Three times the tense repression; then it takes over it ghost of the enous G-major melody appears, but the melody itself dare not raise its head: only the syncopated scoops out function, is heard. The harmon oe ne ey move: teristic of expositions the harmony IP e é fae ent into his exposi- quickly. Schubert, having put somethuDEIi as ee typical of exposition tion, now redresses the balance by pucting pone na understood com- esas development. Now if that is not a musician who position, balance, sonata form. +: The recapitulation begins with the nervous pianissimo accompaniment ae482 THE SYMPHONY: A LISTENER'S Guy PUIDE and the oboe-clarinet melody: the eight bars for cellos and basses need 87 no further attention for the moment.® The coda is like a compressed re-fi, ing > few bars are an anguished farewell both to 5 of the development. The : from the movement's dark opening measures. The final cadence is tay, and its strength should not be dissipated by the traditional misreading accent as diminuendo. of The tempo of the second movement is Andante con moto, the time signature 3/8. In spite of the differences between Allegro moderato in 3/4 (as in the first movement) and Andante con moto in 3/8, the two move- ments go very comfortably at about the sare speed, and without any sense of monotony. Something the two movements have in common is that in each, the real rhythmic unit is not the individual beat, whether quarters in the first movement or eighths in the second, but the whole measure. It is an interesting demonstration that tempo is a complex category, involv- ing much besides the speed of beats per minute—such things as weight, how the measures and the individual beats are filled in, and most crucially, the rate of harmonic change. The second movement, in E major, is calmer in spirit than the first, but here, too, Schubert constantly disturbs the flow and our expectations. The first melody, pianissimo again, is wondrously peaceful, but it has barely arrived at the close of its second phrase when the harmony is pierced by dissonance. What appears to be recovery in fact leads to an unawaited, startling excursion to G major—startling especially for occurring less than half a minute into the movement.? The Andante’s most memorable feature is the still, almost incorporeal passage for violins alone that introduces the second theme. The theme itself, a melody begun by the clarinet and continued on the oboe, is gentle in demeanor, but deeply disturbing in its unpredictable, strangely shad- owed progress over a syncopated accompaniment. Except for two brief swells to forte, this is all in pianissimo/pianississimo. It is as though Schubert had taken two elements from his first movement—the oboe-clarinet color (separated now instead of blended) and an accompaniment of agitated syn- copations—and, through alchemy, had made them yield this new and wondrous music. (In the recapitulation, the oboe begins and the clarinet continues.) 8Tchaikovsky had learned this lesson well when he composed the first movement of his Pathétique: 9$peculation beginning in the late 1980s that Schubert was gay has inevitably led to the question of how, if at all, this affects the way we hear his music, One answer that was proposed in what turned into quite an acrimonious debate is that Schubert's inclination to develop or go on exCul” sions at stages in a composition when his classical models did not do so can now be accounted for by the preponderance of the feminine element in his psychological makeup. That is, women stOP to smell the roses, while men charge straight to the goal, knocking stuff over as they g0-rant gchubert : _ Reviewins the first performance of the Unfinished, Eduard Hans! k Reve exervation: “AS if he could nor beae to par. fom Ses “ne eomposer postpones the conclusion of the [Andancel, yer ong : wort ” Ha . lante|, yes ae as it all too long. Hanslick is dead wrong, but no rN 5 pee spire nt s stion, he p ticed a most inspired moment and one very dangerous in performance: ance, {perhaps his complaint tells us that the conductor lingered too long.) Schubert begins his coda with music like that which began the move- ment, but goes at once to the still and mysterious passage for violins alone that had previously introduced the second theme. Only this time it is skewed in its harmonies so as to lead to a harmonically very far away place (G-sharp major which Schubert for humanitarian reasons notates as A-flat major). There, clarinets and bassoon sing the opening strain once more, as quietly as possible. The violin passage, with another twist of its inter- vals, brings us safely back to E major and to the last, soft cadences. We hear it as beautiful, unresolved mystery (that is, if we don’t, like Hanslick, hear it as unsatisfactory disturbance). I am sure, though, that Schubert had intended to resolve that mystery in the finale, to explain it, to “compose out” the possibility he hints at in that wonderful last minute. And perhaps there, for just a moment, you might hear the symphony as incomplete as well as unfinished. But then, it might have gone worse: in 1848, Josef Huttenbrenner’s maid used as kindling the manuscript (and only extant copy) of Acts 2 and 3 of Schubert’s opera Claudine von Villa Bella. Symphony in C major, D.944 (Old No. 9 or No. 7); The Great Andante—Allegro ma non troppo—Pit moto Andante con moto Scherzo: Allegro vivace Allegro vivace The Great C-major, the seventh an ae ee ct was long believed to have been composed in tis dated “Marz 1828.” oe and the first page of the 2 pe Pe ee ination of © eee cae eos has established that the symphony was ae See imarily during the second half of that os oe ae months of 1826. The discrepancy has not ’ com}