Franz Schubert: Symphony no 8 in B Minor (“Unfinished”)
Franz Schubert had a habit of not finishing symphonies. In the last decade of his life alone, he started six and completed just one. The other five were left abandoned, sometimes mid-phrase, and in various states of dereliction – a sketched-out movement here, a few scribbled notes there.
Musical scholars have since pondered these unfinished works. Was Schubert particularly absent-minded, was he musically profligate, did he even suffer from ADHD?
But as a man who produced music on an astonishing scale, it’s quite possible that Schubert simply had moments where he lost track of what he was meant to be doing next. In one year alone, 1815, he composed two symphonies, various sacred works including two masses, a string quartet, several piano sonatas and 146 songs – some 22,000 bars of music in all. Once he had finished (or got bored with) one piece of music, he would set it aside and immediately begin another. As he lacked a good filing cabinet, the odd masterwork, unfinished or otherwise, could get mislaid along the way.
It was much the case with the “Unfinished” Symphony in B Minor from 1822. Having written two movements of the work at typically breakneck speed, Schubert failed to not only complete the remaining movements, but also to keep track of the score’s whereabouts.
Having just been awarded an honorary diploma by the Graz Musical Society, Schubert decided to thank them by presenting his new, incomplete symphony to Anselm Huttenbrenner, a member of the society. A slightly nonplussed Huttenbrenner shut the manuscript away in a drawer and forgot all about it for the next thirty years.
Perhaps the strangest aspect to this story was Schubert’s own attitude to the work. It was clearly one of the best things he had written, and yet he never saw the music again nor asked to have it returned.
Such behaviour suggests the popular image we have of Franz Schubert, as the diffident, slightly self-effacing young genius, careless of his reputation and his legacy. It’s maybe partly true, even if it does not tell the whole story of his personality.
His life was comparatively uneventful. Born in a Vienna suburb, he spent his whole life in the city and he rarely travelled. Aside from an unsuccessful stint as a schoolmaster, he had no steady job, choosing instead to eke out an impoverished, freelance existence from his music. He had few influential friends and almost no wealthy backers. He moved in Bohemian circles, among some of Vienna’s younger but lesser-known artists, writers and musicians. Aside from socializing, bar-hopping and attending countless musical soirées, Schubert spent the rest of his time writing music, almost obsessively.
As a child, Schubert had been sufficiently talented to rapidly outstrip many of his early teachers – these included his own father (a schoolmaster and amateur musician) and his pianist brother, Ignaz. At the age of ten he won a place at Vienna’s prestigious Stadtkonvikt. There he was taught composition by Antonio Salieri, who was apparently so enamoured by his young student that he told him, “you can do everything… for you are a genius.”
Schubert’s earliest compositions from this time already show an individual voice. Although well-schooled in Classical technique (from Salieri) and grounded in the language of Haydn and Mozart (both composers he loved), Schubert was soon taking inspiration from nearer contemporaries such as Beethoven, Hummel and Rossini, all of whom would influence his mature music at some point.
Life was somewhat less congenial once Schubert had left the Stadtkonvikt at the end of 1813. In order to avoid conscription into the Austrian army, he took on a teaching role at his father’s school. But from the very start, he hated the work and hated being pulled away from his creative endeavours. He also struggled to keep his classes under control.
Schubert longed for a life that would allow him to devote himself entirely to his music. Due encouragement would arrive in 1816, in the form of his very first commission (for a cantata, Prometheus). The fee wasn’t much, but it was a start. At the same time, one of Schubert’s friends provided him cheap lodgings, allowing him to move out of his family home for the first time. Not long after that, a member of the wealthy Esterházy family (the former patrons of Haydn and Hummel) offered Schubert a cushy summer job on their estate, teaching their daughters piano. But Schubert’s career opportunities would never rise much higher than this.
In the early nineteenth century, there were five principal ways by which a composer could make a steady income: teaching (if you had sufficient pupils), working as a church musician, working for an aristocratic court, becoming a concert virtuoso, or by writing a successful opera.
Unfortunately, Schubert would flop at just about every one of these. He didn’t want to teach. He applied for countless kapellmeister roles and music directorships but was turned down each time. As a pianist, he was competent rather than compelling. He made serious and repeated efforts to write an operatic hit, but never quite managed to pull it off – it was the one musical genre he never mastered.
Perhaps he lacked certain advantages in other ways. He had something of the perpetual student about him (a friend once described him as “lackadaisical”) and could be slovenly in his habits. He would sometimes go to bed fully clothed and without even taking his glasses off. Nor did he make a good first impression – observers noted his shabby, plain appearance, his physical awkwardness and his withdrawn manner with strangers.
He also lacked Beethoven’s ability to get cozy with nobility: he could be something of a cultural snob and hated nothing more than mundane conversation. One friend noted that Schubert “suffered from a genuine dread of commonplace and boring people, of philistines, whether from the upper or middle classes, of the people, that is, who are usually known as ‘educated’, and Goethe’s outcry [I would rather die than be bored] was and remained his motto.” Schubert much preferred spending his time with like-minded young artists.
The young composer therefore tried to earn a living through publications of his music alone – which may partly explain why he wrote so much. But it was an even more precarious venture in the 1820s than it would be today. He had little business acumen and nor did he help himself in other ways: attempts to play off publishers against each other usually ended up being financially counter-productive.
In the event, Schubert often lived on the verge of destitution and continually had to sponge off friends. Recognising the little genius in their midst, the latter did what they could to help – one would organise Schubert free accommodation , another would find him domestic appliances, others made sure he ate enough by inviting him to dinner.
But as Schubert looked to publishers as his sole source of income, and the publishers in turn would only accept songs and his lighter salon pieces, it gradually had a paralyzing effect on his reputation. He became known almost solely as a creator of German lieder. As a serious composer of symphonies, sonatas and chamber works, he worked largely underground. In the last five years of life, he would turn out one masterpiece after another, almost all of which remained unknown to the public at large and even to some of his friends. As Schubert biographer, Peggy Woodford, puts it: “for the average Viennese Schubert was a song-and-dance composer, a sort of Ivor Novello of his day; for the musical intelligentsia, his best work was becoming almost too ‘modern’, too avant-garde to understand. Thus he remained largely unappreciated.”
The “Unfinished” Symphony in B Minor, written in the autumn of 1822, is a prime example of the latter category, even as it bears witness to Schubert’s growing power and originality. Although still constructed within tight Classical parameters, the emotional and psychological range within the music is immense. At times, it seems, we are transported to cheerful Viennese soirées, at other times to the darkest corners of the human soul.
The first movement begins with an ominous theme played by just the cellos and double basses, before an oboe and clarinet circle uneasily above fluttering strings. By way of contrast, the second theme of the movement, heard firstly in the cellos and then violins against breezy syncopation, is positively sunny. All is well and yet one senses that the moment won’t last. Several silences, punctuated by loud, explosive orchestral chords, briefly destroy all sense of order. Later in the movement, the eerie first theme is worked up into terrifying proportions. Such emotional contrasts are a perennial characteristic of Schubert’s mature music. For a composer who died so tragically young, they can appear almost like a signature stroke, each time suggesting the fragile, transient nature of human existence.
But if the first movement is a terrific tour de force, the second is perhaps one of the most visionary that Schubert ever wrote. The first thing to note is its key of E Major, a very distant tonality from B Minor. The movement is built around three distinct sections, all heard at least once.
The first is a steady, slightly ceremonial theme, with repeated descending figurations (played both pizzicato and bowed) in the cellos and basses. Then follows one of Schubert’s most haunting passages, a still, almost ethereal melody shared between solo woodwind instruments and accompanied by soft syncopated strings. Just for a moment time almost seems to stop. The spell is only broken by the rudest of interruptions, as the full orchestra enters dramatically, bringing some of the most impassioned and anguished music of the entire piece. “My compositions spring from my sorrows”, Schubert once said. “Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.”
Does the work ever recover from this shattering moment? Even as the first theme returns at the end of the movement, its E Major tonality no longer feels stable (at one point it modulates mid-phrase into A Flat Major and then back again, a striking and disconcerting effect). The music finally dies away with a long-held chord and those descending cellos and double basses once more. And after that, it’s as if there is really little more to be said.
A third movement for the symphony does exist in piano score – a fast Scherzo in B Minor. If nothing else, it proves that Schubert originally intended to write more. But nor is the Scherzo quite on the same level as the rest of the symphony. And perhaps Schubert also recognized that when he handed just the first two movements of the work to Huttenbrenner.
The work was finally premiered in 1865, after Huttenbrenner belatedly remembered the manuscript collecting dust in his drawer. It was immediately declared a masterpiece and has rarely been out of favour since.
By then, its creator had been dead for many years. Not long after abandoning work on the symphony, Schubert’s health suffered an alarming collapse and he was seriously ill for several months, suffering from what is now generally thought to have been syphilis. The condition would entirely alter his outlook. The young composer sensed that he was already on borrowed time. He had just six more years to live.
And yet he had the bulk of his greatest music ahead of him. In artistic terms, Franz Schubert had still barely set sail.
Suggestions for further listening
Happily for us, Schubert did actually finish some of his other symphonies. Most were from his teens, of which no 5 in B Flat Major (1816) is probably the best.
He completed just one symphony in his maturity, but it was a biggie – the Symphony no 9 in C Major (1826), nicknamed “The Great”.