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Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 ("Unfinished")

About the Composition

Quick Look Composer: Franz Schubert
© Richard Freed
Schubert composed this music in October 1822; as explained below, however, the score remained undiscovered until 1865, and the work was given its first performance on December 17 of that year, in a Vienna concert conducted by Johann Herbeck. The National Symphony Orchestra first performed the Symphony in B minor early in its first season, on December 13, 1931, with Hans Kindler conducting, and presented it last on May 12, 13 and 14, 2005, under Sir Roger Norrington.

The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, with 3 trombones, timpani and strings. Duration, 22 minutes.
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Today's audiences are accustomed to hearing symphonies that end quietly, but in the nineteenth century this was definitely a rarity. Brahms's Third was one of the very few symphonies actually designed with a quiet ending. Schubert's Symphony in B minor, like Bruckner's Ninth, ends quietly and to superb effect, but not according to the composer's original intention. Bruckner died before getting much further than a sketch for the finale of his Ninth; Schubert, apparently (and contrary to numerous romantic assumptions), simply allowed himself to put the work aside in favor of other projects, and never got back to it. This was not the only symphony he left unfinished. A short time before he composed it he completed a four-movement Symphony in E major which he never got round to orchestrating. That work has been orchestrated since Schubert's death by the famous conductor Felix Weingartner and the present-day scholar Brian Newbould, and their versions have circulated in both the concert hall and recordings; its existence, in fact, is the justification for affixing the number Eight to the more familiar work in B minor. There are also various fragments and sketches that might have formed additional symphonies if Schubert had lived longer. But when it comes to the present work, it seems reasonable to suggest that the only thing truly "unfinished"about it is the sobriquet it has acquired.

In October 1822, when Schubert composed this music, he was only 25 years old, and he was very productive in the six years that remained to him. He did make sketches for a scherzo for this Symphony in B minor, and even scored nine bars of it, but, as far is known, he made no sketches for a finale. Around the middle of 1823 he gave what there was of the score to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrunner to give to the Styrian Music Society in Graz in acknowledgement of his having been elected an honorary member--but Hüttembrenner failed to deliver it, and no one knew anything about it until it turned up in 1865, some 37 years after Schubert's death. The belated premiere was promptly given in Vienna, and the speculations began.

Some scholars have conjectured that the very substantial Entr'acte in B minor in the incidental music for Rosamunde, composed in 1823, was originally intended to be this symphony's finale, and it has been so presented on occasion. (Brian Newbould used it as the finale in his "completion"of the work.) Exactly what Schubert's intentions might have been, though, remain as uncertain as his reasons for letting this project drop after completing only two movements. Those two movements turned out to be on a larger scale than anything he had attempted in a symphony up to that time, and since he knew how slight a chance there was for getting such a work performed, it is not unlikely that he simply decided on grounds of practicality not to bother finishing it. (Fortunately for us, he did persevere in completing the still more ambitious Symphony in C major a few years later.)

Once the Symphony in B minor was discovered and performed, it quickly established itself as one of the most universally beloved works in the symphonic repertoire, but for many years it was regarded as a mere torso--a masterwork, to be sure, but a truncated one, and hence the sobriquet "Unfinished."In 1928 the Columbia Gramophone Company in England marked the centenary of Schubert's death by holding a competition for the best completion of the work. The prize was awarded to Frank Merrick (subsequently better-known as a pianist than as a composer), whose scherzo and finale were praised for their Schubertian character, duly recorded, and respectfully forgotten. The more recent "completion"by Brian Newbould at least has the virtue of being almost entirely Schubert's own music, but it is unlikely to take a much firmer place in the repertory than Merrick's, or to be widely regarded as more than a curiosity.

All this background and possibly misplaced effort may well bring us to the thought that Schubert's real reason for not "finishing"the Symphony in B minor may have had little to do with anything as worldly and practical as the improbability of a performance, and more to do with the matter of creative judgment. It is not too much to imagine that the genius who created this music might have recognized it at the time, as the world does now, as material so exalted that it could not be followed by anything without great risk of anticlimax. The abortive scherzo (which Donald Francis Tovey described as "very promising") was perhaps best shelved for possible use in some other work, and the aforementioned entr'acte--if it was indeed conceived as this symphony's finale--is simply not a convincing conclusion. The B minor Symphony as it stands, in two superbly imagined and brilliantly accomplished movements, is "finished"in the truest and best sense: exquisitely balanced, consummate in craftsmanship, glorious beyond words in the depth of its inspiration.

It is an ennobling sort of melancholy that pervades this work, with dramatic outbursts in the first movement suggesting a tragical counterbalance to the pre-eminent lyric element. The brightest luminescence Schubert allows here is that of a twilight afterglow, as when the incomparably expressive second theme emerges from the mysterious setting that prevails up to the moment of its entrance. (Schubert would produce a still more intimate near-parallel six years later in the opening movement of the towering String Quintet in C major, the last of his chamber-music masterworks.) The slow movement is possibly even more miraculous than the first, and the key of E major seems splendidly suited to its unforced serenity. "The melodies,"Klaus George Roy observed a few decades ago,
are of such magical beauty that any working-out might have seemed sacrilegious. The musical events which take place are therefore hardly those of sustained drama or development, but of a subtlety which touches the most sensitive chords of a listener's heart or hearing.
Even though Schubert himself may not have recognized it as such when he set the notes on paper, this glorious "slow movement"can only be the end of a work: it admits of no further response in sound, either in the way of certification or of contrast, but is incontrovertible in its prevailing finality.