Symphony No. 8 (Schubert)
's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, 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 classical symphonies, sonatas, or chamber works.
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 wide 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 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.
;Opening melody
\relative c
;First theme
\relative c
;Second theme
\header
\score
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.
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 prominent trombones over a full orchestra. 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 modulates early in the recapitulation first to E minor then to F minor, restates the second theme in the relative key of D major, and modulates back to the parallel mode of B major to close the recapitulation. The coda in the tonic B minor recalls the opening theme for still another, final, dramatic reworking to pave the way for the emphatic concluding chords.
II. Andante con moto
;First theme\relative c'''
The second movement, in E major, alternates two contrasting themes in sonatina form, with a quietly dramatic, elegiac, extended coda that could be characterized as a concluding development section. 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 turn to a final extended version of the opening cadential figure that reappears to close.
Third and fourth movements
;Scherzo theme\relative c'
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. The sketches of the scherzo were performed by Takashi Asahina with the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra in the Minoh Civic Hall on 17 January 1972.
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 stressed that the music is among Schubert's "most beautiful":File:Göttweiger Hof Spiegelgasse2.JPG|left|thumb|Franz Schubert Memorial in Vienna. Schubert lived here in 1822–23 with his friend Franz von Schober and wrote the ''Unfinished Symphony.''