Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759,
“Unfinished” (1822)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
The “Unfinished” Symphony is scored for pairs of woodwinds,
horns and trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. The
performance time is 24 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first
performed this work on August 8, 1935 with Ebba Sundstrom
conducting.
The mystery surrounding the composition of the “Unfinished” Symphony is one
of the most intriguing puzzles in the entire realm of music. It is known that Schubert
composed the first two movements of this “Grand Symphony,” as he referred to it, in
autumn 1822, and then abruptly stopped work. He sent the manuscript to his friend
Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who was supposed to pass it on to the Styrian Music Society of
Graz in appreciation of an honorary membership that that organization had conferred
upon Schubert the previous spring. Anselm, described by Schubert’s biographer Hans
Gal as a “peevish recluse,” never sent the score. Instead, he squirreled it away in his
desk, where it gathered dust for forty years. It was not until 1865 that he presented it for
performance to Johann Herbeck, director of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.
Lacking conclusive evidence, writers on Schubert have advanced a fascinating
variety of explanations as to why the young composer never completed the last two
planned movements of this Symphony. Among others: he was too ill with syphilis;
he could not be bothered with the labor of writing down the last two movements;
his friends believed he was basically a song composer rather than an instrumental
composer and their arguments caused him to lose faith in this large work; the last two
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