Symphony No. 8, “Unfinished”

Behind the first puzzle posed by the “Unfinished” Symphony — why didn’t Franz Schubert finish it? — there is a second and even greater enigma. Schubert’s first six symphonies, written between 1813 and 1818, showed him completely at ease with all aspects of the form. But a few years later, he was leaving fragment after fragment, as if he no longer felt up to the challenge. The B-minor Symphony is not Schubert’s only “Unfinished.” Other projected symphonies were abandoned even earlier in the compositional process, and several have since been completed and performed in “realizations.” (One of these — a fairly complete sketch of a symphony in E major — was even played by The Cleveland Orchestra in 1928.) 

All these “failed” projects point to Schubert’s growing dissatisfaction with the symphonic form as he had been practicing it and suggest that he was striving for something on a far larger scale than his previous efforts. Both stimulated and discouraged by Beethoven’s formidable examples, he once exclaimed: “Who can do anything after him?!” Thus, it seems clear, Schubert was searching for his own artistic response to Beethoven’s symphonies — a response that would match Beethoven in scope and dramatic energy yet be free from any direct stylistic influence. Schubert eventually rose to the challenge in his “Great” C-major Symphony, completed in 1825, but it was a daunting task, accomplished only after several attempts. 

With the “Unfinished” Symphony, Schubert came very close to a solution. As Brian Newbould, a specialist on Schubert’s symphonies, has put it, this work is not so much an unfinished symphony as a “finished half-symphony.” It is the only one of the uncompleted “fragments” with two movements that are fully written out and orchestrated, requiring no editing in order to be performed. 

While Beethoven tended to construct his symphonic movements from extremely short melodic or rhythmic gestures, Schubert often started with full-fledged melodic statements that unfold like songs. In this first movement, song quickly turns into drama when the second theme is interrupted by a measure of silence, followed by a few moments of orchestral turbulence, after which the previous idyll is restored. One particular harmonic turn in the development section even uncannily anticipates the music of Wagner’s groundbreaking opera Tristan und Isolde (1857–59). 

The second movement combines a peaceful, ethereal melody with a more majestic theme featuring trumpets, trombones, and timpani. A new melody is introduced in a different key (C-sharp minor), again with a dramatic extension. These contrasts in mood persist until the end of the movement, where E major is finally reestablished after an exacting tonal journey through several different keys. 

The manuscript score of the “Unfinished” Symphony was long in the possession of the composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a friend of Schubert. For decades, though, Hüttenbrenner denied anyone access to the work, for reasons that remain unclear. Finally, as the story goes, conductor Johann von Herbeck, who directed the concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music), bribed the stingy composer by offering to perform the “Unfinished” alongside one of Hüttenbrenner’s own works. Now finally released, the “Unfinished” Symphony was premiered in 1865 — 37 years after the composer’s death — and was quickly recognized as one of Schubert’s masterworks. 

— Peter Laki