Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (‘Unfinished’)

Program notes

About the Work

Herbert Blomstedt was born on 11 July 1927, and the Wiener Konzerthaus announces the first of these concerts, on 18 June, under the heading of his 100th birthday. Three more follow in the Musikverein: the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts on 19 and 20 June and a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on 22 June. Blomstedt came to this orchestra late. He first conducted it in 2011, at the age of eighty-three, and it made him an honorary member in 2019. The programme sets two symphonies side by side, one that stops after two movements and one that runs for more than an hour.

Schubert began his Symphony in B minor in 1822, when he was twenty-five. He wrote out two movements in full score, sketched a third, a scherzo, in piano score, orchestrated its first two pages, and stopped. He lived for six more years and never went back to it. Nobody knows why. The explanations that have been offered include illness, the pull of other work (the Wanderer Fantasy for piano followed immediately) and the difficulty of finding anything to set after two such movements. None of them can be proved.

What happened to the manuscript is nearly as odd. The score of the two finished movements passed to Schubert’s friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, himself a composer, who kept it for decades and let no one perform it. It was the conductor Johann von Herbeck who finally prised it loose, and by most accounts the price was a place on the programme for an overture by Hüttenbrenner. Herbeck conducted the first performance in Vienna on 17 December 1865, at a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, thirty-seven years after Schubert’s death and forty-three after the music was written. The same society presents the last of these four concerts.

A word on the number. In English-speaking countries the symphony has long been known as No. 8. The revised Deutsch catalogue and the New Schubert Edition count it as No. 7, and that is how the Philharmonic and the Konzerthaus list it, which gives this programme two Sevenths.

What to Listen For

Allegro moderato. The symphony begins very quietly, with a dark phrase for cellos and double basses alone. The violins then set up a restless murmur over plucked notes in the lower strings, and oboe and clarinet together sing the first theme above it. A brief link leads to one of the best-known melodies Schubert wrote, introduced by the cellos over a gently syncopated accompaniment. It does not get far. The tune breaks off into silence, and the full orchestra crashes in. That pattern, a song interrupted by violence, shapes the whole movement. The middle section grows out of the opening bass phrase and builds to a climax in which the three trombones are prominent.

Andante con moto. The second movement is in E major and moves at an easy walking pace, not much slower than the first. Horns, over a walking line in the basses, lead into a calm melody for the strings. The second idea, in C-sharp minor, is a long solo line passed from clarinet to oboe, and here too the calm is broken by passages of great weight, with trumpets, trombones and timpani. The music travels through several distant keys before E major is restored at the close. Bruckner’s symphony begins in the same key.