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The History in This Program
F
ranz Schubert’s arrival in America seems to have been slow in coming compared to other
composers of the day. More than 20 years after his death, the New York Philharmonic
was a leader in introducing his music when it gave the U.S. premiere of his Symphony No. 9,
Great, in 1851, and other Schubert works became a regular feature of 19th-century Orchestra
programs.
The U.S. Premiere of the Unfinished Symphony took place in 1867, two years after its World
Premiere in Vienna, led by Theodore Thomas at one of his Symphony Soirées at Steinway Hall.
Thomas, who had been a member of the Philharmonic’s violin section since joining in 1854 at
the age of 19, was engaged in a broad array of the city’s musical activities. He performed in chamber concerts, led the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and created his own orchestra, which provided
fierce competition for the Philharmonic. (The Philharmonic would solve that problem by electing Thomas as its conductor, requiring him to disband his own orchestra. But by 1891 Chicago’s
wealthy music lovers had enticed him away from the Philharmonic to create that city’s landmark orchestra.) The New York Times praised his rendition of the Unfinished Symphony,
uttered as it was by musicians who appeared to be wholly in sympathy with the
composer’s sentiment. No performance could be more melodiously engaging, nor could
any more perfectly develop the art and general plan of a composition, than that by Mr.
Thomas’ orchestra.
Still, the Schubert symphony heard most regularly in New York was the Great. The story of
its 1851 premiere provides insight into the activities of the Philharmonic’s fledgling cooperative organization, then in its ninth season. For instance, while programming decisions are
now made years in advance, Schubert’s Great was scheduled only six weeks before the concert
date. The music, which is still housed in the Orchestra’s
Music Library, was bought at the local music store Scharfenberg and Luis — Scharfenberg being a member of the
Orchestra. That season’s annual report notes that the set
of 30 orchestral parts cost $17.77, with an additional $16.16
spent on extra handwritten copies for the strings. It’s hard
to imagine that seven hand-copied string parts cost almost
the same as the entire printed set, at a time when labor was
fairly inexpensive. Luckily, they got substantial use. Some
parts are noted “marked after Toscanini,” indicating that
they were used until at least the 1930s.
— The Archives
To learn more, visit the New York Philharmonic Leon
Levy Digital Archives at archives.nyphil.org
Theodore Thomas
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Symphony in B minor, D.759, Unfinished
Franz Schubert
I
ncomplete works are an inevitable feature
of most composers’ catalogues. After all,
they are no more likely than anyone else to
receive specific advance notice of when they
will reach their coda. In the case of some
long-lived composers, the events seem to
have occurred according to plan: Rossini,
Verdi, Strauss, Sibelius, and Vaughan
Williams, for example, had already shepherded their musical careers to fulfilling finishes, and gave the impression of having left
this world satisfied that they had said what
they needed to say. Others were cut off in
mid-sentence, sometimes at the height of
their powers, while engaged in the production of masterpieces: think of Mozart’s
Requiem or Puccini’s Turandot.
Because Franz Schubert died young, at the
age of 31, popular conception has sometimes
fixed on the idea that his Unfinished Symphony was a casualty of this sort. Of course, it
is possible that if Schubert had lived longer
he might have gotten around to filling out his
piece to the standard four movements that
made up the typical symphony of his era.
However, the fact is that he had put the score
aside long before his death.
In the last decade of his life Schubert accumulated a sizable stack of incomplete largescale works, including several symphonic
“torsos” and aborted sonatas. The Unfinished
Symphony, which he wrote in 1822 (six years
before he died), is the most superb of them all.
In October of that year he sketched out three
movements of the piece in piano score, and the
following month he completed the orchestration of the first two movements plus a fragment of the ensuing, incomplete scherzo.
There it ended.
Various theories have been proposed to explain why Schubert left the work in mid-stream.
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Some hypothesize that he did finish it, but that
sections have been lost. Perhaps the B-minor
entr’acte from Rosamunde was intended as the
symphony’s finale, some speculate; it mirrors
the symphony’s key and instrumentation exactly (even employing a third trombone, unusual in the orchestral lineup at that time), and
it appeared shortly after Schubert was working
on the symphony. Others believe he abandoned the symphony because he felt he could
not provide two final movements on the same
high plane as the opening two. (This is doubtful, given the stream of profound, large-scale
masterpieces — including his Great Symphony in C major, final three piano sonatas,
and sublime chamber masterpieces — that
would still issue from his pen.) The most credible explanation is that in late 1822, precisely
when he would have moved on to the “missing” movements of the piece, Schubert was diagnosed with syphillis. The disease was
incurable at the time, and the attendant treat-
IN SHORT
Born: January 31, 1797, in Vienna, Austria
Died: November 19, 1828, in Vienna
Work composed: 1822, in Vienna;
completed — so to speak — on October 30
of that year, with orchestration carried out
the following month
World premiere: December 17, 1865, in
Vienna, by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Johann von Herbeck, conductor
New York Philharmonic premiere:
February 6, 1869, Carl Bergmann, conductor
Most recent New York Philharmonic
performance: May 9, 2015, Alan Gilbert,
conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 24 minutes
ments were as dreadful as they were ineffective. It seems possible that the news threw
Schubert out of kilter vis-à-vis this piece, disrupting his creative concentration entirely.
In any case, the following year Schubert
sent the manuscript to his friend Anselm
Hüttenbrenner, who put it in a desk drawer,
and there it languished for 40 years. After
four decades, Hüttenbrenner liberated the
manuscript from its dark, silent recess and
presented it to the conductor and choral
composer Johann von Herbeck, who oversaw its first performance, in Vienna in 1865,
43 years after it was written.
Even before Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony was premiered the piece had been
known in theory if not in practice, since Hüttenbrenner had made mention of it in a biographical dictionary in 1836 and a Schubert
biographer, Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn,
had picked up on its existence (via that
source) in 1864. It was he who started a campaign to get Hüttenbrenner to release the
work to the public — no mean achievement,
since by then Hüttenbrenner had become all
but a hermit, interested principally in abstract theological inquiries and in magnetism. Hellborn owed his success to a clever
ploy. Claiming that he wanted to put on a
concert of three great Viennese composers —
Schubert, Franz Lachner, and Hüttenbrenner
himself — he begged the last to show him
some suitable works, and then wondered
aloud if perhaps a previously unperformed
piece by Schubert might not be found. Out of
the drawer came the Unfinished. At its premiere, it shared the bill with an overture by
Hüttenbrenner.
The influential Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, writing about the work’s premiere, said:
With a few horn figurations and here and
there a clarinet or oboe solo, Schubert
achieves, with the most simple, basic orchestra, tonal effects which no refinement
of Wagnerian instrumentation can capture.
Hanslick carried out his role as an antiWagnerian with missionary zeal, and his
swipe at the later master does come off as
demeaning his point just a bit. Nonetheless,
he was right about the sonic beauty of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It would be
hard to think of an earlier symphony, including even those of Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven, in which the use of symphonic
sound is so consistently evocative.
Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
Listen for … the Big Tune
“This is the symphony that Schubert wrote but never finished.” Grade-school music teachers used
to sing this as an aide-mémoire for the first movement’s “big tune,” which Schubert bestows on the
cello section:
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