Schubert, Franz

Preface

Franz Schubert
(b. Vienna, 31 January 1797 — d. Vienna, 19 November 1828)

Scherzo in B-minor D 759/3.
— Completed Performing Version by Nicoala Samale & Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs —

Orchestral Movement in B-minor D 797/1.
— Conjectural Finale to the ›unfinished‹ Symphony D 759 —

Schubert‹s Unfinished: A stock-taking

The B-minor Symphony (D 759), in its surviving form as a three-movement (!) fragment, has posed questions to posterity that have remained unanswered to the present day. These questions have given rise to a multitude of tenacious legends and rumors that have been elevated into a ‘theory’, and sometimes heatedly debated, by musicologists, critics, and aestheticians. In essence, the debates are a musicological snipe hunt. Posterity has turned the hard necessity of the fragment into a virtue: the claim is still heard that Schubert considered his symphony ‘finished’ at the end of the E-major Andante, thereby creating in effect a new species of a two-movement symphony. Any completion, so the theory goes, is unthinkable in view of the ”degree of perfection” attained by the extant movements. This was followed by the self-serving pronouncement that the sketched Scherzo was ”not at the same level as the first two movements”, and thus irrelevant. It would seem that the mere fact that Schubert let this musical torso, including its calligraphic title page, go out of his hands and dedicated it to the Steiermärkischer Musikverein (= Styrian Musical Society) constitutes ‘evidence’ that he regarded the work as finished in its two-movement form. It has even been claimed that the piano fantasy Der Wanderer (orchestrated inter alia by Franz Liszt and Charles Koechlin), a work he began to write in November 1822, was conceived as the symphony’s Finale, or at least its ideal continuation. Arnold Schering, writing in 1938, conjectured that the symphony was complete because it minutely follows an assumed program: namely, the prose sketch Mein Traum (= My Dream) handed down by Schubert. Others maintain that Schubert simply abandoned this symphony, like so many others. Yet all of these are mere speculation, pointless in view of the paucity of facts and ill-suited to shed light on the matter. Musicologists have played a key role in the formation of this legend and continue this dubious enterprise to the present day. Regrettably, even the preface to Werner Aderhold’s scholarly-critical edition of the symphony – an edition that also invites criticism on some finer points of its editorial method – is but another example of the hapless snarl of fact and fiction, discoveries and conjectures, reality and wishful thinking. Let us therefore summarize the known facts:

At some indeterminate time Schubert composed at least three movements of a symphony in B minor, initially in complete short score. The first three of these ten pages of sketches, corresponding to the first 248 bars of the complete score of the first move-ment, are lost. The sketch of the third movement ends with the draft of the Trio, the subsequent staves being left blank. The handwritten full score elaborated from the sketch breaks off in the third movement after a few orchestrated bars. It contains seventy consecutively numbered pages of fair copy, the first being a title page in calligraphic roman script that reads ”Sinfonia / in / H moll / von / Franz Schubert mpia” (”mpia” is an abbreviation of manu propria, or ”in his own hand”). Below this, to the left, we find the date ”Wien den 30. Octob. 1822”. After Schubert’s death on 19 November 1828, the short-score sketches of the symphony passed to his brother Ferdinand and then, following the latter’s death in 1859, to the Viennese autograph collector Nicolaus Dumba. In contrast, the full score wound up, by an unknown route, in the private library of Schubert’s friends, the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner. (Anselm was initially secretary and from 1824 director of the Steiermärkischer Musikverein in Graz; Josef functioned as a sort of private secretary to Schubert in 1822-3, no doubt mainly taking care of his financial affairs.) At first the score evidently remained with Josef, who wrote out a version for piano four-hands in 1853. He also added several markings in the manuscript itself, e. g. prefixing a number of instrument names to the brace on page 21 and probably inserting the page numbers on pages 2 through 70. At some point Anselm Hüttenbrenner in Graz obtained Josef’s manuscript. The Schubert Lexikon (Graz, 1997) claims that ”it is unknown when the symphony passed from him to his brother in Graz, for the memoirs and epistolary communications that he sent to various recipients many years later (see Deutsch’s Erinnerungen, pp. 3, 88, 222, 497 and 512) are self-contradictory, not least regarding the symphony‘s dedication.” In this light, Schubert allegedly dedicated and presented the work to Graz’s Musikverein in 1823 as a token of gratitude for being made an honorary member. As a proof, Anselm Hüttenbrenner cited a letter of thanks dated 20 September 1823.

We owe the discovery of this semi-symphony to the Viennese conductor Johann Herbeck, a tireless seeker of Schubert autographs, thanks to whom many manuscripts survive today that might otherwise have been lost over the years. As early as 1860 Herbeck heard that Anselm Hüttenbrenner preserved a number of previously unknown Schubert manuscripts. Finally, on 1 May 1865, he paid Hüttenbrenner a visit in Graz on the pretext of wanting to conduct the latter’s own compositions in Vienna. Hüttenbrenner will-ingly offered Herbeck the original of the symphony although he would have been perfectly satisfied with a copy, as the conductor recalled in his memoirs. (From this, the Schubert Lexikon drew the conclusion that the reproach leveled against Hüttenbrenner by several scholars – namely, that he deliberately withheld the manuscript – probably does him an injustice.) Herbeck conducted the première of the two complete movements in Vienna on 17 December 1865. (It is known that 106 musicians took part, i. e. an orchestra with a very large string section and doubled wind parts.) Even then he regarded the absence of further movements as a shortcoming, and as a ‘makeshift Finale’ for this occasion he chose the madcap last movement of Schubert’s Third Symphony. The symphonic torso was published by Spina, Vienna, in 1867, at which time the publisher supplied its nickname, ‘The Unfinished’. At first Herbeck apparently kept the manuscript. Anselm Hüttenbrenner died in 1868, and after Herbeck’s own death in 1877 the fragmentary score was acquired by Nicolaus Dumba, eighteen years after he had purchased the short-score sketches. Dumba then added his signature to the lower left-hand corner of the title page. The manuscripts of the Scherzo were first made known by Friedländer, who was allowed to consult them on Dumba’s premises in 1883 and published his findings in Berlin in 1887. Two years earlier, in 1885, the Unfinished was issued in print in Leipzig, as part of the Alte Schubert-Gesamtausgabe (= Old Schubert Complete Edition), in an edition partly supervised by Johannes Brahms. The sketches were reproduced in the critical commentary (I/13) to Series I of the Gesamtausgabe. When Dumba died in 1900, he bequeathed the fragmentary score and the sketches to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, in whose archive the reunited material has remained since 7 March 1901. The draft Scherzo was also made accessible in a facsimile edition published in 1923-4 by Drei Masken Verlag in Munich. It was not until 1967 that Christa Landon, while scouring the archive of the Wiener Männergesangsverein (= Men’s Choral Society) in Vienna, unearthed another, previously unknown page of score containing bars 10 to 20 of the Scherzo. This leaf is incompletely orchestrated, but as it lacks a page number it evidently never entered Hüttenbrenner’s collection. According to Landon, the leaf was severed from the full score. She assumed that it initially remained among the possessions of Schubert’s family and later passed to the Männergesangsverein, perhaps as a commemorative gift. In 1978 Walther Dürr and Christa Landon issued an updated facsimile edition of the fragmentary score and sketches (omitting the blank pages), published by Katzbichler. Finally, a new Urtext edition of the complete material, including critical commentary, was published in 1996 by Bärenreiter in the Neue Schubert Ausgabe (= New Schubert Edition) accompanied by a miniature score which, unfortunately, omits the critical commentary. …

Read full preface > HERE