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Thursday 4 February
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Symphony No. 8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’, D759 (1822)
1 Allegro moderato
2 Andante con moto
The years 1818 to 1822–3 were critical ones for Schubert,
creatively and personally. Between February 1818, the month
he completed his Sixth Symphony, and November 1822,
when he embarked on the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, he began
and abandoned nearly a dozen large-scale instrumental
works, including the Quartettsatz, D703, and four
symphonies. The most celebrated of these, and the world’s
most famous symphonic torso, is the so-called ‘Unfinished’,
begun in the autumn of 1822 and then set aside at the
beginning of November.
The symphony is shrouded in mystery. Schubert, whose fame
as a writer of songs and partsongs was rapidly growing,
composed it to no commission, with no immediate prospect
of performance, and never mentioned it in his
correspondence. The reasons why he abandoned the score
after orchestrating two movements and sketching a scherzo
and trio have been endlessly debated. Perhaps the
symphony’s non-completion can be attributed to the creative
crisis of 1818–22, when so many torsos testify to Schubert’s
struggles to reconcile the challenge of Beethoven’s middleperiod
works with his own increasingly daring, subjective
vision. According to this theory, after finishing two sublime
movements he was dissatisfied with the scherzo and daunted
by the Beethovenian challenge of creating a finale worthy of
the two completed movements. Or perhaps, as several
biographers have argued, the answer lies in the syphilitic
illness Schubert contracted during the winter of 1822–3 and
its attendant physical and emotional traumas. What we do
know is that in 1823 Schubert passed the manuscript to his
friend Josef Hüttenbrenner, in gratitude for the Diploma of
Honour awarded, at Hüttenbrenner’s behest, by the Styrian
Music Society in Graz. The symphony remained in the
possession of Josef and, subsequently, his brother Anselm,
unknown to the world, until 1865, when the conductor Johann
Herbeck gave the premiere in a concert of the Vienna
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.
None of Schubert’s earlier instrumental works approaches
the despairing, almost confessional tone of this, the first great
Romantic symphony. The tragic atmosphere of the Allegro
moderato is immediately established by the brooding ‘motto’
theme announced pianissimo by unison cellos and basses –
a darkly haunting symphonic opening distantly presaged by
Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, the ‘Drum Roll’. The mood
brightens with the famous ‘second subject’, a transfigured
waltz sounded on the cellos against repeated syncopations
on violas and clarinets. But the idyll is quickly shattered by
volcanic eruptions from the full orchestra and a passage of
strenuous imitation on a phrase from the waltz theme. At the
opening of the development Schubert works the motto into
a protracted, yearning crescendo that generates the most
apocalyptic climax in all his symphonies. The recapitulation
omits the motto, which only returns, with inspired dramatic
timing, at the start of the coda.
After the first movement’s Stygian close, the luminous main
theme of the E major Andante con moto, preceded and
punctuated by a refrain for bassoons, horns and pizzicato
basses, comes as a profound solace. Although the music is
later threatened by tumultuous outbursts so characteristic of
Schubert’s later slow movements, the dominant mood is one
of mysterious serenity. In one of the composer’s most magical
harmonic strokes, the coda conjures an unearthly vision of
A flat major, ppp, before the music glides gently back to the
home key for the tranquil close.
Programme note © Richard Wigmore
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