Symphony No. 9, “The Great”

During his life, Franz Schubert composed, or at least started, a dozen symphonies, several of which he left unfinished. What we now know as his “Unfinished” Symphony, ironically, was almost certainly completed, even though the partial autograph score reveals only two movements.

The origins of Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony, often given the designation as his Ninth, were for many years equally problematic, despite the fact that the score for this big work was in the hands of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (more commonly known today as the Musikverein) during the composer’s lifetime.

At the top of the manuscript is a date that looks like “March 1828,” which led English lexicographer George Grove (famous in music circles as editor of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians) to argue that the date was when Schubert started composing the work. However, more recent examinations of the score have revealed that the pages were trimmed so that the last “8” of the inscribed date could instead be a “5” or “6.” This would suggest that this is the symphony that Schubert’s friends said he composed while on holiday in summer 1825 and was long considered lost.

That summer, Schubert traveled with his friend, the singer Johann Michael Vogl, in the mountains of Upper Austria for five months. In the city of Linz, they stayed with Anton Ottenwalt, who wrote to another of their friends: “By the way, he worked on a symphony in Gmunden, which is to be performed in Vienna this winter.” Such a work was not performed that winter, but in 1826 the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, having learned that Schubert was writing a symphony for them, voted a gift of 100 crowns to him in acknowledgement. A set of parts was made and the autograph score delivered. The work was tried out in rehearsal but found to be too difficult, so it was returned to the shelf.

More than a decade later, long after Schubert’s death, Robert Schumann called on Schubert’s brother Ferdinand in Vienna in 1839 and was amazed to find an enormous collection of unknown music, including the Symphony in C major, which no one had ever heard. He immediately arranged a performance in Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn oversaw the city’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Other orchestras, however, still refused to rehearse it because the relentless stream of notes in the string parts, especially in the last movement, were considered too difficult and exhausting.

No doubt about it, this is a big symphony. The nickname “The Great” is a translation of the German word “Grosse,” which means large or expansive. This nickname was first given to the work to help distinguish it from Schubert’s earlier, shorter symphony in C major (No. 6), now known as the “Little” C-major Symphony.

As Haydn did in almost all his symphonies, and Beethoven did occasionally, Schubert begins his first movement with a slow introductory section, marked Andante, which crescendos into the start of the movement proper, marked Allegro. It was Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony (No. 103) that gave Schubert the idea of bringing back the broad theme of the introduction (originally stated by two unaccompanied horns) at the conclusion of the movement, first in the winds, then in the strings.

Schubert’s slow movement is a unique creation, with a nod toward the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and its jog-trot tempo. Schubert was sometimes inclined to allow the development of his music, especially in slow movements, to generate tension, defused at the last minute by a return to his main theme. But in this movement, the process loses control. Angry dotted figures in the strings are goaded by repetitive brass figures in a terrifying escalation, to the point where the music completely collapses. A bar and a half of silence is needed before the music can resume, wounded but alive.

One would be hard pressed to name examples of happier music than the third-movement Scherzo, which seems to have descended from a cloudless sky. Its Trio section, too, is a glimpse of paradise, with a long melody given to the winds as a group.

The finale is another matter altogether. The unflagging pace, the sense of machinery switched to “full power,” and the dotted rhythms in the strings all suggest that this music cannot and will not be stopped. The famous second subject, with its four repeated notes, compounds the pulse and provides the drive that reaches the end of a “Great” symphony that few have matched.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.