Every Day Is Special: December 17 - This Symphony Isn't Finished

December 17 - This Symphony Isn't Finished - So, Let's Perform It?

Posted on December 17, 2019

The famous Austrian composer Franz Schubert never finished his Symphony No. 8. He was creating the music in 1822 - but then he broke off from the project to write a four-movement "fantasy" for solo piano.

And although Schubert lived another six years, he never went back to finish this symphony. Because of that, it is usually referred to as "the Unfinished Symphony."

What does it mean to say that a symphony is unfinished?

Well, symphonies generally have four movements. The third movement is often called a scherzo, and it is sometimes performed separately from the rest of the symphony. The fourth and final movement returns to what is called "the home key." The home key is the key (or scale) in which the symphony started (in the case of Symphony No. 8, the key of B minor); listeners expect, when music goes off into a different key, that it will eventually return, and when this expectation is met, the listeners get a sense of satisfaction.

The Unfinished Symphony has two movements fully written and orchestrated, plus a scherzo (third movement) nearly complete as a piano score but with only two pages orchestrated. There is no fourth movement at all, it seems. (Some musicologists believe that another piece in B minor started as the fourth movement, but there is no evidence to back this theory.)

Some time in 1823, Schubert was given an honorary diploma by the Graz Music Society. Apparently Schubert felt that he should, in return, dedicate a symphony to the society. One of Schubert's friends, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, was one of the most respected leaders of that society, so Schubert sent him the completed parts of his Symphony No. 8 (the first two movements plus the first two pages of the third movement, or scherzo). I am not sure if he promised his buddy that he would finish the symphony and send it along, or what...

But we do know that Hüttenbrenner never had the symphony performed, not even when Schubert died in late 1828. And apparently he never informed the Graz Music Society of the existence of the symphony - let alone the fact that he actually had it in his possession! - which is truly surprising.

Finally, in 1865, when Hüttenbrenner was quite old, he showed the work to a conductor who was visiting him. I read that the conductor was flabbergasted! On this date in 1865, the conductor premiered the first two movements - which he finished off, not with the incomplete scherzo, but with the third movement of Schubert's Symphony No. 3.

Johann von Herbeck was the conductor
who was lucky enough to be shown the
Unfinished Symphony, and he was the
one who premiered it decades after
Schubert died.

I bet the audience was flabbergasted, too. It would be like finding an hour's worth of music by John Lennon of the Beatles that you never knew existed - 40 years after his death!

Quite a few composers have created a tribute to Schubert by completing either the scherzo or the symphony. On the 100th anniversary of Schubert's death, a record company held a competition for the best completion of the Unfinished Symphony; about 100 were submitted. Another interesting attempt to finish the Unfinished was when a Chinese electronics company used AI (artificial intelligence) to create likely possibilities, given Schubert's style and the portions of the symphony we have. However, critics graded the AI completion as very mediocre, "inauthentic," and "trivial."