Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 (‘Great’)

Program notes

About the Work

For a long time this symphony was thought to be a work of Schubert’s last year, and the manuscript does carry the date March 1828. Scholars now agree that he began it in the summer of 1825 and had it fully scored by 1826. In a letter of 1824 he had already said that he meant to prepare the way to ‘a grand symphony’, and this is that work. The nickname ‘Great’ was not his. It was first used simply to tell the piece apart from his earlier and shorter Symphony No. 6, the ‘Little’ C major, though it has long been understood as a description of the music’s scale and majesty. The numbering is unsettled too: English-speaking countries call it No. 9, while the current edition of the Deutsch catalogue of Schubert’s works lists it as No. 8.

Schubert could not afford to put on a performance. He sent the score to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna with a dedication, and the society paid him a small sum, had parts copied and gave the work an informal run-through. It was then laid aside. Schubert died in November 1828 without hearing it played in public.

Ten years later Robert Schumann visited Vienna and was shown the manuscript by the composer’s brother Ferdinand. He recognised at once what it was, and went back to Leipzig with a copy for Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the first public performance at the Gewandhaus on 21 March 1839. Schumann wrote about the occasion in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and praised the symphony for its ‘heavenly length’, a phrase that has stayed with it ever since. He also wrote that the instruments in it were like human voices, full of life and wit.

Other orchestras were slower to agree. For years the symphony was thought too long and too difficult, and when Mendelssohn tried to introduce it in Paris and London the players refused to go on with it. The demands are real. Schubert asks for unusual stamina from the strings, who repeat their driving figures for pages at a time, and he gives the woodwinds unusually prominent and exposed parts. He also treats the three trombones as full members of the orchestra, with melodies of their own, at a time when they were still mostly kept for special effects.

What to Listen For

The symphony begins with two horns alone, in unison, playing a broad, calm melody. Its first three notes simply rise through a major third, and that small figure runs through the whole movement. The slow introduction is unusually long and complete in itself. It quickens without a break into the main Allegro, and at the very end of the movement the horn theme comes back in triumph with the full orchestra behind it.

The second movement, in A minor, moves at a steady walking pace over a march-like tread in the strings. It alternates twice with a warmer, more consoling theme in the major. Listen for the moment when the march builds to a harsh climax, breaks off into silence, and has to begin again quietly.

The Scherzo is on the same large scale as everything else: a stamping, energetic dance worked out at full length, with themes that keep slipping into waltz time. Its central Trio is a broad, swaying song for the woodwinds.

The finale starts with a fanfare of dotted rhythms and triplets and hardly pauses for breath afterwards. The second theme is announced by four repeated notes on the horns, which then become a marching tune over endlessly circling strings. A little later, at the start of the development, the woodwinds play a phrase that recalls the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth. The four repeated notes return in the coda, hammered out by the whole orchestra, to bring the symphony to its close in C major.