Schubert - Symphony #8 (Unfinished)

[haydnguy]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlLADRH9Kb0"]YouTube - Schubert - Symphony n.8 Unfinished [1/3] - Abbado (COoE)[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzhwL5v8kw"]YouTube - Schubert - Symphony n.8 Unfinished [2/3] - Abbado (COoE)[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1yruqU-HhQ"]YouTube - Schubert - Symphony n.8 Unfinished [3/3] - Abbado (COoE)[/ame]

[Herodotas]

Thanks for this! It's a wonderful symphony isn't it...........makes you wonder just how much greater it would have been had it been completed. Some say he was so keen to get on with the 9th that he laid this one aside and didn't pick it up again - I wonder if the priority was right? I always find the first movement so haunting, with all that brooding tension in the lower strings and the nervy outbursts from the brass and woodwind...but also with the plaintif lyricism of that wonderful oboe.

Abbado's features are also so expressive aren't they? He obviously feels the music so intensely. It makes me appreciate the second movement so much more too - I tend to take it a bit for granted, thinking it pales into insignificance compared to the first, but Abbado makes it seem part of a perfect whole doesn't he?

[Despina41]

Originally Posted by Herodotas

Thanks for this! It's a wonderful symphony isn't it...........makes you wonder just how much greater it would have been had it been completed. Some say he was so keen to get on with the 9th that he laid this one aside and didn't pick it up again - I wonder if the priority was right? I always find the first movement so haunting, with all that brooding tension in the lower strings and the nervy outbursts from the brass and woodwind...but also with the plaintif lyricism of that wonderful oboe.

Ah, but the 9th is a masterpiece in its own right. Seems a little underrated to me...? But it's one of my favorites.

[Herodotas]

I like the 9th too - I must listen to it again.

[Felix]

The unfishedness of the Unfinished will remain an eternal mystery. Schubert definitely put the Symphony aside, quite inexpliably, and sent the first two movements to friends in Vienna, hoping they would be performed. These traitorous friends kept the manuscript in their possession for decades until 1868. This means that Schumann and Mendelssohn never heard it, though to me it sounds as though it must have existed for all eternity.

In my book (Master Musicians, New edition) the author believes it was the example of Beethoven, that made Schubert put the Symphony aside. There was Beethven going from strength to strength with his heroic Symphonies in major keys. What was a little Symphony in B minor doing in this procession? Schubert was determined, before his life ended, to write a big Symphony and fully engaged chamber works.

Every note in the Unfinished is inspired, but one that strikes me particularly is the passage in the first movement where the orchestra come crashing down on a mnor or a diminished chord, followed immediately by the simplest of simple classical cadences in the minor - they had never sounded like this before and never would afterwards. Similarly the perfect cadence that ends the movement is charged to the hilt with meaning....and then the miraculous way in which Schubert takes up this cadence in the slow movement. A transformation of theme if ever there was one. The kaleidoscopic shifts in harmony in the second subject: had there ever been anything like this before? Did anything of the kind happen again? I know that I could refer to similar unique qualities in other great composers, but harmonic shifts were the special domain of Schubert's genius. The slow movement ends more and more lonely in an epic distance, and maybe this is how this Symphony should end. It's hard for me to imagine what could follow and it evidently was for Schubert too.

Brendel explains in his essays on Schubert that he changed his sketches drastically when he revised them, making all the difference between a great and a mediocre work - he gives examples -, so any Symphonies patched up from sketches have very little value.

Best wishes