Symphony No. 8 (Schubert)

In 1823, the Graz Music Society gave Schubert an honorary diploma. He felt obliged to dedicate a symphony to them in return, and sent his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a leading member of the Society, an orchestral score he had written in 1822 consisting of the two completed movements of the Unfinished plus at least the first two pages of the start of a scherzo. This much is known.

What may never be known is how much of the symphony Schubert actually wrote, and how much of what he did write he gave to Hüttenbrenner. The following exists:

• The first two movements, complete in full score
• The first two pages of a scherzo in full score

The rest of the scherzo (except for the missing second strain of the trio) exists in a separate manuscript in short score (not sent to Hüttenbrenner, but found among Schubert's copious manuscripts after his death and carefully preserved by his devoted schoolteacher brother Ferdinand), along with a complete short score of the second movement and the end of the first movement, but nothing of any fourth movement.[5] A fourth movement finale in the home key (B minor) would have been the norm for any symphony written at that time, but there is no direct evidence that Schubert ever started work on it. It has, however, been surmised that the most extended entr'acte from Rosamunde (also in B minor, in the same style of the first movement and with the same instrumentation as the symphony) was indeed that fourth movement, which Schubert recycled by inserting it into his Rosamunde incidental music composed in early 1823 just after the Wanderer Fantasy.

The Schubert scholar Brian Newbould, who harmonized, orchestrated and conjecturally completed the piano sketch of the scherzo, believed this to be true; but not all scholars agree. Pages appear to have been torn out after the beginning of the scherzo in the full score sent to Hüttenbrenner, in any event. That Hüttenbrenner neither had the work performed, nor even let the society know he had the manuscript, is curious and has spawned various theories.

Old age and approaching death seem to have influenced Hüttenbrenner to reveal the work to an important and gracious visitor at long last (in 1865, when he was 71 and had only three more years to live). This was the conductor Johann von Herbeck, who premiered the extant two movements on 17 December 1865 in Vienna, adding the brilliantly busy but expressively lightweight perpetual-motion last movement of Schubert's 3rd Symphony in D major, as an inadequate finale, expressively quite incompatible with the monumental first two movements of the Unfinished, and not even in the correct key. The performance was nevertheless received with great enthusiasm by the audience.[6] The score of those two movements was not published before 1867.

The Unfinished Symphony has been called No. 7 (recently, for example, in the New Schubert Edition) instead of No. 8 as it usually is, since the other work sometimes referred to as Schubert's 7th (in E major, completed by Felix Weingartner) was also left incomplete but in a different way, with at least fragments of all four of its movements in Schubert's hand.

The two complete movements (scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings), which are all of the symphony as it is performed in the concert repertoire, are:

The fragment of the scherzo intended as the third movement returns to the tonic B minor, with a G major trio. The first 30 measures are preserved in full score, but the entire rest of the scherzo proper (both strains) only in short score. Only the first strain of the trio exists, and that as a mere unadorned, unharmonized single melodic line. The second strain is entirely absent.

After Hüttenbrenner's release of the two completed movements of the Unfinished to Herbeck, some music historians and scholars took much trouble to "prove" the composition complete even in the truncated two-movement form, and indeed that abbreviated structure alone has captivated the listening public to consider it as one of Schubert's most cherished compositions. The fact that classical tradition was unlikely to accept that a symphony could end in a different key from the one it began in (with the B minor first movement and the E major finale by default incomplete), and the even more undeniable fact that Schubert had begun a third movement in B minor (leaving precisely 30 bars of fully orchestrated scherzo and 112 succeeding bars in short score), stands against the view that the two completed movements can legitimately stand alone.[5]

Reviewing the premiere of the symphony in 1865, the music critic Eduard Hanslick wrote:

When, after a few introductory bars, clarinet and oboe sound una voce a sweet melody on top of the quiet murmuring of the strings, any child knows the composer and a half-suppressed exclamation "Schubert" runs hummingly through the hall. He has hardly entered, but it is as if you knew his steps, his very way of opening the door... The whole movement is a sweet stream of melodies, in spite of its vigor and geniality so crystal-clear that you can see every pebble on the bottom. And everywhere the same warmth, the same golden sunshine that makes buds grow! The Andante unfolds itself broadly and [even] more majestically [than the opening Allegro]. Sounds of lament or anger rarely enter this song full of intimate, quiet happiness, clouds of a musical thunderstorm reflecting musical effect rather than dangerous passion... The sonorous beauty of both movements is enchanting. With a few horn passages, an occasional brief clarinet or oboe solo on the simplest, most natural basis of orchestration, Schubert achieves sound effects which no refinement of Wagner's instrumentation ever attains. (translated from the original German)

He ended by stressing that the symphony is among Schubert's most beautiful instrumental works.[6]

Franz Schubert Memorial in Vienna. Schubert lived here in 1822–23 with his friend Franz von Schober and wrote the Unfinished Symphony.

In 1927–28, Felix Weingartner composed his Sixth Symphony, La Tragica (in memory of 19 November 1828, the day Schubert died), as a tribute to Schubert on the centenary of his death. The second movement of Weingartner's symphony is a realization of Schubert's incomplete sketch of the scherzo (seventy years before Newbould's independent effort).

In 1928, the 100th anniversary of Schubert's death, Columbia Records held a worldwide competition for the best conjectural completion of the Unfinished. About 100 completions were submitted, but also a much larger number of original works. The pianist Frank Merrick won the "English Zone" of the competition; his scherzo and finale were later performed and recorded (on Columbia), but are long out of print.

Only some of the completions—Merrick's is not one of them—used material from Schubert's scherzo sketch. The first movement of Joseph Holbrooke's Fourth Symphony, one of the British entries, is mostly a performing version of the sketch (the second strain of the trio of which, entirely missing from the sketch, had to be conjecturally completed), and a theme from the scherzo appears in his finale. Independent completions of the scherzo movement also were made by Geoffrey Bush in 1944 and conductor Denis Vaughan c. 1960.

More recently, British musicologists Gerald Abraham and Brian Newbould have also offered completions of the symphony (scherzo and finale) using Schubert's scherzo sketch and the extended B minor entr'acte from his incidental music to the play Rosamunde Schubert wrote a few months later, long suspected by some musicologists as originally intended as the Unfinished's finale.[3] (In fact, it was even played as the finale as long ago as the British premiere of the symphony on 6 April 1867.) Its first movement, the scherzo sketch and the entr'acte are all in B minor, their instrumentation is the same, and the entr'acte (like the first movement) is in sonata form (as are all Schubert's symphonic finales) and in a very similar style and mood. If the entr'acte indeed started life as the finale of this symphony, then Schubert evidently recycled it (probably at that stage unorchestrated) from the symphony to the incidental music, presumably orchestrating it for the play and perhaps making compositional changes.

British pianist and Schubert specialist Anthony Goldstone prepared a new 4-movement performing edition of the Symphony for piano duet, using the transcription of the first two movements prepared by Huttenbrenner, his own completion of Schubert's Scherzo, and the Rosamunde entr'acte in a transcription by Friedrich Hermann, edited by Goldstone. The work in this completed version was given its premiere recording in 2015 by Goldstone and his wife/duet partner Caroline Clemmow as part of their 'Schubert: Unauthorised Piano Duos' series for Divine Art Records.

The Russian composer Anton Safronov completed the scherzo sketch and created a new finale for the symphony (some themes of the latter based on themes from several Schubert piano works), which he described as "an attempt to move into the mind of the composer". His completion was performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 6 November 2007 with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment,[8] and on 2 October 2007 with the Russian National Orchestra (followed by the American tour in the early 2008,[9]) both performances conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Due to his unusual use of material from Schubert keyboard works in the finale, Safronov's completion has been subject to criticism varying from definitely positive[10] to ambivalent[9][11] and negative.[12]

Robin Holloway, Cambridge University professor of composition, has realized the Scherzo based on, but not bound to, the sketches; e.g., with two trios, the first from Schubert's sketch and the second entirely his own composition. It was premiered by the Cambridge University Musical Society on 18 June 2011.

In January 2019, Chinese electronics company Huawei used artificial intelligence with the Mate 20 Pro smartphone to create hypothetical melodies for the third and fourth movements by using the Kirin 980's dual NPU. Emmy Award-winning composer Lucas Cantor then arranged an orchestral score. The composition was performed live at Cadogan Hall in London on 4 February 2019.[13] However, many consider that the result is disappointing and far from Schubert style.[14] Goetz Richter writes for instance : "The completed movements are trivial and achieve ultimately a loose and inauthentic family resemblance to Schubert".[15]

• The composer and pianist Leopold Godowsky composed a Passacaglia with 44 Variations, cadenza and fugue on the opening theme of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, for solo piano. Godowsky added a quarter-note F♯ to the beginning of Schubert's theme, as an anacrusis.
• The composer Gilad Hochman composed a contemporary homage to Schubert's Symphony titled Shedun Fini (metathesis of the word 'Unfinished') for a clarinet–cello–piano trio in form of Prelude and Allegro, using different quotations and stylistic influences.

Notes

Sources

• Newbould, Brian (1992). Schubert and the Symphony: A New Perspective. Toccata Press.

• Corey Field, editor. The Musician's Guide to Symphonic Music: Essays from the Eulenburg Scores. Schott Music

• Symphony No. 8: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Piano reduction (Note: the PDF shows C-naturals in measures 198 and 200 of the first movement; these should be C-sharps.)
• About the Composition: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 ("Unfinished"), Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
• 1937 – Sir Thomas Beecham – London Philharmonic Orchestra OGG Recording