Symphony No. 8 (Schubert)
's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D 759, commonly known as the Unfinished Symphony, is a musical composition that Schubert started in 1822 but left with only two movements—though he lived for another six years. A scherzo, nearly completed in piano score but with only two pages orchestrated, also survives.
It has been theorized by some musicologists, including Brian Newbould, that Schubert may have sketched a finale that instead became the big B minor entr'acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde, but all evidence for this is circumstantial. One possible reason for Schubert's leaving the symphony incomplete is the predominance of the same meter. The first movement is in, the second in and the third again in. Three consecutive movements in basically the same meter rarely occur in symphonies, sonatas, or chamber works of the most important Viennese composers.
Schubert's Eighth Symphony is sometimes called the first Romantic symphony due to its emphasis on the lyrical impulse within the dramatic structure of Classical sonata form. Furthermore, its orchestration is not solely tailored for functionality, but specific combinations of instrumental timbre that are prophetic of the later Romantic movement, with astonishing vertical spacing occurring for example at the beginning of the development.
To this day, musicologists still disagree as to why Schubert failed to complete the symphony. Some have speculated that he stopped work in the middle of the scherzo in the fall of 1822 because he associated it with his initial outbreak of syphilis—or that he was distracted by the inspiration for his Wanderer Fantasy for solo piano, which occupied his time and energy immediately afterward. It could have been a combination of both factors.
Early history
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 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. 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. The score of those two movements was not published before 1867.
The Unfinished Symphony has been called No. 7 instead of No. 8 as it usually is, since the other work sometimes referred to as Schubert's 7th was also left incomplete but in a different way, with at least fragments of all four of its movements in Schubert's hand.
The completed movements
The two complete movements, which are all of the symphony as it is performed in the concert repertoire, are:I. Allegro moderato
The first movement, in B minor, opens in sonata form, softly in the strings, followed by a theme shared by the solo oboe and clarinet. A typically laconic Schubertian transition consists of just four measures for the two horns, effectively modulating to the subdominant parallel key of G major.The second subject begins with a celebrated lyrical melody in that key, stated first by the cellos and then by the violins to a gentle syncopated accompaniment. This is interrupted by a dramatic closing group alternating heavy tutti sforzandi interspersed with pauses and developmental variants of the G major melody, ending the exposition.
An important moment in the first movement occurs in measure 109. In these measures, Schubert holds a tonic B pedal in the second bassoon and first horn under the dominant F chord, that evokes the end of the development in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Unfortunately, a well-meaning but inexperienced editor removed this dissonance by altering the second bassoon and first horn part. Conductors must check these parts carefully to make sure that the B pedal is intact.
Unusually for sonata form, the development section begins with a quiet restatement of the opening melody in the subdominant, a tonality usually reserved for near the end of a sonata form movement somewhere in the recapitulation or coda, and rises to a prolonged climax in the same key, starting with a dramatic variant of the opening melody in the full orchestra with prominent trombones. The expected relative major of the tonic minor first appears only at the end of that climax, and then again for the second subject of the recap —instead of much earlier, in the second subject of the exposition, as customary. The flutes and oboes then resume their melodic role at the end of that dramatic outburst, transitioning to the recapitulation.
The recapitulation consists mostly of orthodox sonata-form restatement of the themes, except that Schubert restates the melodious second theme in the relative key of D major instead of the usual B major. The dramatic closing section, however, does end in B major and leads to a coda in the tonic B minor. This recalls the opening theme for still another, final, dramatic reworking to pave the way for the emphatic concluding chords.
II. Andante con moto
The second movement, in E major, alternates two contrasting themes in sonatina form. The lyrical first theme is introduced by the horns, low strings, brass, and high strings playing in counterpoint. The plaintive second theme, in minor, after four simple unharmonized notes in transition spelling out the tonic chord of the relative C minor quietly by the first violins, begins in the solo clarinet in C minor and continues in the solo oboe in C major in an example of the major–minor juxtapositions that are a hallmark of Schubert's harmonic language.A dramatic closing theme in the full orchestra returns to C minor, but ends in D major. A short transition back to the tonic E major ushers in the recapitulation—notable for how it restates the second theme in the subdominant A minor begun by the oboe and continued by the clarinet.
The coda starts with a new theme that is simply an extension of the two-bar E major cadential figure that opens the movement. This gives way to the laconic triadic first-violin transition motto, which leads to a restatement of the first theme by the woodwinds in distant A major followed by the motto again leading back to the tonic E major for a final extended transformation of the first theme, leading in term to a final extended version of the opening cadential figure that reappears to close.
Third and fourth movements
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 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, and the even more undeniable fact that Schubert had begun a third movement in B minor, stands against the view that the two completed movements can legitimately stand alone.
Reception
Reviewing the premiere of the symphony in 1865, the music critic Eduard Hanslick wrote:He ended by stressing that the symphony is among Schubert's most beautiful instrumental works.
. Schubert lived here in 1822–23 with his friend Franz von Schober and wrote the Unfinished Symphony.
Modern completions
In 1927–28, Felix Weingartner composed his Sixth Symphony, La Tragica, 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.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, 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, 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 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 Unfinisheds finale. Its first movement, the scherzo sketch and the entr'acte are all in B minor, their instrumentation is the same, and the entr'acte is in sonata form 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 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, 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, and on 2 October 2007 with the Russian National Orchestra 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 to ambivalent and negative.
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. However, many consider that the result is disappointing and far from Schubert style. Goetz Richter writes for instance : "The completed movements are trivial and achieve ultimately a loose and inauthentic family resemblance to Schubert".