Schubert - symphonies

[martinos]

Thank you for all Schubert' Symphonies. But a mistake : the score for 9th is not 9th but 7th Martinos

[aldona]

The numbering of Schubert's symphonies is controversial (and confusing).

Here's my version of events (which I'm sticking to, and which will probably differ from yours):

The "Unfinished" symphony (D.759) is generally accepted as No.8.
(Although I have sometimes seen it referenced as No.7.)

The "Great" C Major symphony (D.944) I know as No.9.
I have often seen it referred to as No.7, and occasionally as No.8.

When someone says "Symphony No.7" I think of the one that exists in lots of unfinished bits & pieces/ sketches (D.708a? D.615?). Or the hypothetical lost "Gmunden-Gastein" symphony (D.849), which some authorities believe is identical to D.944. Or is it the one that Brian Newbould reconstructed from fragments and recorded as No.10?

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/al.asp?al=CDA67000

And there you have a brief and easy-to-understand guide to the numbering of the Schubert symphonies.

As you can see, if you die at the age of 31 and leave lots of work unfinished or partially finished, you can keep the scholars and musicologists busy arguing for centuries.

aldona

[SeuLunga]

Some info on numbering:

1 - 6 as is
7 - unofficialy, it's the D.729, in E major, because Schubert finished it in one line, and orchestrated about half the exposition of the first movement. There are other 2 sketches in D (two separate symphonies).
8 - the unfinished
9 - the great

Why: until the discovery of the unfinished, the Great was n.7, then came the unfinished as n.8, but the unfinished was earlier than the Great, so the Great was moved after the unfinished, instead of just switching... Deutsch lists the symphonies as n7 = unfinished and n8 = Great, but that didn't catch much.
So it was prefered to leave n.7 open for the 'lost' G-G, which was then discovered to be, in fact, the Great, so n.7 remained open.
I think that D.729 is the best one to fit that position, given it is more complete than the other 2 sketches.

There is also a sketch for another after the Great, which may be listed as n.10.

[vinteuil]

That's in the U.S. or if you follow Deutsche chronologically.
Some people just call the the last two by their titles to make things easier.

[Lyle Neff]

That's in the U.S. or if you follow Deutsche chronologically.
Some people just call the the last two by their titles to make things easier.

That is, "The Short One," and "The REEEEEEEEEEEEALY LOOOOOOOONG One."

[aldona]

That's in the U.S. or if you follow Deutsche chronologically.
Some people just call the the last two by their titles to make things easier.

That is, "The Short One," and "The REEEEEEEEEEEEALY LOOOOOOOONG One."

Even "The Short One" is not really that short:

2 movements = 1/2 hour (almost)

If Schubert had finished it, it would have rivaled "The Really Long One" in length. We might be discussing "The Great B Minor Symphony."

aldona

[pml]

Hi guys.

Yes, this is really confusing. (And despite Aldona's comment above, I'm not sure I'd mark it 10/10 for complete accuracy, and I'm only going to give myself 8/10, because I didn't realise just how much work Newbould had done...)

Brian Newbould (amongst others) has completed five of the Schubert "Unfinished" symphonies (yes, five):

D 615 in D major: fairly insubstantial: only two movements (an Adagio–Allegro moderato, and an Allegretto), about four and three minutes of music respectively. The Hyperion recording doesn't dignify it with a number.

Hyperion: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/al.asp?al=CDA67000

D 708a in D major: only slightly more substantial: the standard four movements this time, though only the Scherzo and Trio is longer than three minutes. Why? Rinse and repeat a three minute Scherzo and Trio (AABB-CCDD-AB) and you will easily get seven minutes of music. Again, the Hyperion doesn't give it a symphony number, and quite appropriately so; these two might qualify as "6A and 6B", or if you like software version numbers, maybe "6.1" and "6.2".

D 729 in E major: as Seu Lunga pointed out, this is a continuous sketch of a large four-movement work from beginning to end of about 35 minutes duration (1340 bars), though for over 1000+ bars of it Schubert only wrote out a single melodic line, so much of Newbould's completion is conjectural, based on taking Schubert's thematic ideas and constructing plausible counterpoint, instrumental textures etc. He had to abandon work on this to compose Alfonso und Estrella (D 732).

From memory, the 90 or 100 bars that Schubert fully scored doesn't even reach the end of the first movement exposition. There are two other completions besides Newbould's (1981), one dating from ~1881 (Barnett), and one from 1934 by the well-known conductor/composer Felix Weingartner (1863–1942). This one is now sort of accepted as "No. 7", when and if people refer to it at all. There are not many recordings of it around, either:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Franz-Schubert-Sy ... B000001SPY (the Newbould version, on the Koch CD label)
Naxos: http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp ... de=9.80641 (the Weingartner version, in an archival recording from 1952)

By the way, do not confuse it with the fake Schubert symphony in E, mentioned here:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Schubert-Symphony ... B0000057VE
This is supposedly the "Gmunden-Gastein" symphony of 1825. The reviews this work gets are quite funny to read, as there is obviously a lot of plagiarism in it!

D 759 in B minor, the archetypal "Unfinished" symphony: yes, the two complete extant movements add up to nearly half an hour, however the Scherzo and Trio that Schubert sketched would clearly have been not much larger than the dimensions of Symphonies 1–6. My own completion of the movement plays for under 6 minutes (still under 7', even if all of the repeats were to be pedantically obeyed in the repeat of the Scherzo). I find that the B minor entr'acte from Rosamunde D 797, Nº 1 works as an okay finish to the piece, it's nearly 10 minutes, goes through a variety of moods, and has a wonderful coda that flashes into B major at the very end. Satisfying, but not "Great" (as in the D 944 sense!). This is generally accepted as "No. 8", though you will find the Neue Schubert Ausgabe confusing the issue by calling it "Nr 7" (and D 944 then becomes "Nr 8"); cf the rant on this below.

There have been hundreds of attempted completions of the two missing movements, some of which are quite "wacky" and un-Schubertian. A number of composers were unaware of the existence of the sketches for the Scherzo, or decided to ignore it. Mine is pretty conservative, and I might post it here sometime today if I'm feeling motivated...

D 936a in D major: again, sizeable sketches for unusually, a three-movement work: however the third movement would apparently have combined elements of Scherzo and Finale (perhaps a bit like the way Beethoven's 5th has the last two movements "involved with each other"). In this movement there are apparently strong signs of the counterpoint studies that Schubert was making in late 1828, so it might have been quite "special".

Again there is more than one version of this to be had: a "straight" completion by Newbould, and a rather "wacky" one by Luciano Berio, entitled "Rendering", which presents the Schubert fragments properly realised, and when they gradually peter out, then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of a 20th century atonal soup: a bit like if you imagined that the manuscript had abruptly disintegrated into an unrecognisable mess of black dots This one is now often referred to as "No. 10" since it was the one described as the "letze" or last symphony Schubert was working on prior to his death.

There is one other symphonic sketch (from memory, something like D 2b/997) in D major, as well as some orchestral sketches that might have been intended for a symphonic work, since the form of a classical overture tends to follow typical first-movement sonata form. None of these are to the same extent as D 729, 759, or 936a.

The hypothetical lost Gmunden-Gastein symphony of 1825, I would have no idea about at all. One theory has it that it was merely the first draft of D 944, as opposed to the final version (which may be incorrectly) dated March 1828; there was also a 19th-century vogue that it was the Grand Duo sonata in C for piano four hands D 812, which led Joseph Joachim to orchestrate it for Schubert's usual symphonic forces. Whatever it is, let's simply call it lost, and commiserate...

So, here's the reason for the huge amount of confusion above. There are at least three competing numbering conventions:

19th century: 7 = Great C major; 8 = Unfinished B minor (numbered subsequently to D 944, because it was rediscovered later, in the 1860s).
Current IMSLP template: 7 = D 729 in E; 8 = D 759 in b (Unfinished); 9 = D 944 in C (Great); 10 = D 936a in D (Last)
Neue Schubert Ausgabe/Otto Erich Deutsch: Nummer 7 = D 759, h-moll (Unvollendete); Nummer 8 = D 944, C-Dur (Grosse)

The vast majority of 20th century literature: books, websites, CD recordings, LP records, library catalogues, etc. will use the second of these conventions, mainly for the B minor and C major symphonies, of course. However, the 19th century convention was still being used well into the 20th century: the first orchestral score I ever saw of Schubert was a Boosey & Hawkes pocket score of "Number 7" (the key was C major)

The convention which I absolutely cannot abide is the one adopted by the New Schubert Edition and Deutsch, which reverses the 19th century nomenclature despite the risk of inherent confusion with old scores, by choosing numbers for both the B minor and great C major that are at odds with both of the other two conventions, i.e. with 99% of the known Schubert universe. Like: how pedantic, musicologically-informed, and brain-numbingly, pants-wettingly, colossally and monumentally stupid.

You would have thought that someone as clever as Deutsch would have found it simpler to break the strict chronological order and have the complete symphonies numbered from 1 to 7, and the "unfinished" ones relegated to 8, 9, 10; but no. With all due respect to them in all other regards, as far as consistent and convenient symphonic numbering goes: Deutsch & NSA = Dumb and Dumber.

Basically, it's so confusing that these days I tend to leave off the numbers of the symphonies after No. 6, and just call them by their monikers, or key signatures, thus: E major, B minor (or only slightly ambiguously, the "Unfinished"), the Great C major, and the Last D major

Anyway, I think the point of the original poster above, was that whoever submitted the old B&H plates of the "Great" believed what it said, and called it "No. 7" (which was in line with the 19th century convention). The submitter then made the mistake of applying the information for one of the other possible "No. 7"s (i.e. the IMSLP template, where 7 = D 729).

Someone should rename and re-upload that score (and possibly break it into four separate movements at the same time).

The convention that has been adopted by the IMSLP template is, and for evermore shall be: 7/E (729), 8/b (759), 9/C (944), 10/D (936a). Amen.

(At least until the genuine (?) Gmunden-Gastein symphony in E major turns up, as opposed to the fake one! Just kidding. Mwahahaha.)

It would be really wonderful if someone could lay their hands on the Weingartner version of 7 in E major, as he is now in the PD in Canada (and Australia too). The very fragmentary symphonies in D major (615 and 708a) are unlikely to appear here in any form apart from scans of MS, though I suppose I will rejig the little navbox of the Schubert Symphonies to include them as well.

Here endeth the rant.

Regards, PML

PS Dr Jones, would you like me to post my completion of the B minor?

[aldona]

And despite Aldona's comment above, I'm not sure I'd mark it 10/10 for complete accuracy

Hey, no problem. I'm no music scholar, just an enthusiast, and if you give me 6/10 that's still a pass.

By the way, do not confuse it with the fake Schubert symphony in E, mentioned here:
(snip)
This is supposedly the "Gmunden-Gastein" symphony of 1825. The reviews this work gets are quite funny to read, as there is obviously a lot of plagiarism in it!

Yes, I almost got sucked in by the "fake" Gmunden-Gastein symphony when I was a humble university student. That CD was one of the first Amazon purchases I made when I got an income and internet access. But reading the CD liner notes something did not sit right (reading about the story of the lost symphony and dreaming of finding it since childhood, their version of events just did not fit), and my suspicions were confirmed when I actually listened to it.

It's a reasonably clever "cut-&-paste" of various themes from other Schubert works, and bits and pieces of orchestration from here and there, but it just doesn't have that spine-tingling quality I get when listening to the Newbould completion of the 10th symphony, and just feel in my guts that "this is authentic Schubert."

I've still got the CD of the fake. I'll have to bring it out when I play "put on a random CD and guess the composer" with my fellow music geeks. That will really mess with their minds.

PS Dr Jones, would you like me to post my completion of the B minor?

I would be delighted. It is fun comparing the different completions by different composers. See also Schubert's piano sketch, which includes the surviving bit of the 3rd movement, which I uploaded from the Complete Works "Revisionsbericht."

Please don't feel you have to call me Dr Jones - my "doctor" degree is not in music, and on a forum like this I am the lowest of the amateurs and everybody else is more entitled to the title than I am.

Not to mention: hearing "Dr Jones" makes me think I am at work, and I get an overwhelming urge to put on a pair of rubber gloves and perform an internal body cavity probe on someone.

Aldona

[pml]

Dear Aldona,

(If I was being generous with 8/10, it's because you deserve an HD for your devotion to Schubert)

You might want to take this to a personal message, but where do you work, in the city or in the `burbs? (I know you live out Healesville-way or somewhere equally picturesque, as that photo you posted elsewhere in the forums demonstrates.)

As we are both Melburnians and Schubertians (to greater or lesser degree!) I would love to catch up with you for a coffee (or other convivial beverage of choice), though as I am an inner-city dweller and public transport user, Healesville would be a little bit out of the way for me.

And I would be very amused to hear that CD of the fake Schubert symphony sometime: I don't mind having my mind messed with occasionally!

The "Doctor Jones" thing is just me teasing you a little, because I know you do have the qualification (albeit medical, not musical), and do have some affection for those wonderfully unlikely and escapist Harrison Ford movies, that Mr Spielberg keeps directing. Enough said!

See also Schubert's piano sketch, which includes the surviving bit of the 3rd movement, which I uploaded from the Complete Works "Revisionsbericht."

Yep. My completion includes the piano sketch typeset in parallel with the orchestration above it (like bits of Newbould's Schubert 7, or Cooke et al.'s Mahler 10). Only trouble is, the first two movements haven't been thoroughly edited, so I'm going to delete out some of the pages that are unfinished.

I have way too many unfinished projects, and this one of the more curious ones, because the "unfinished" bit of the symphony (the latter 600-odd bars) is the bit that I've concentrated on and finished to my satisfaction, whereas I figure that anyone can use one of the numerous existing editions for the "finished", extant movements (the first 680 bars), which I haven't completed knocking into shape...

Best regards, Philip

Not to mention: hearing "Dr Jones" makes me think I am at work, and I get an overwhelming urge to put on a pair of rubber gloves and perform an internal body cavity probe on someone.

Must... not... respond...

[aldona]

I've sent you a PM...

Have you heard the conspiracy theory that does the rounds every so often... that the Entr'acte No.1 from "Rosamunde" was originally intended as the finale to the "Unfinished" symphony?

It was written in the same year (1823), in the same key (B minor), for exactly the same combination of instruments. The speculation is that Schubert was in a rush to get all the music ready for Rosamunde, so he cut up and recycled part of the symphony.

It's even mentioned in Wikipedia, so there must be some credibility to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosamunde

Aldona

[pml]

Hi Aldona,

PM reply for you, too

Done: I will post the completion later today, once I delete the pages in the first two movements that are not ready to be seen by the world in general. In the meantime I'm going to procrastinate (how I love not working Wednesdays).

My pet theory about the B minor Entr'acte for Rosamunde, and my reason for including it as the finale to my completion of the B minor symphony, is as follows.

Yes, it ticks the boxes in lots of ways:

* Time period: 1822/23. Chronologically it fits right in.
* Instrumentation: exactly the same as the first and third movements of the projected symphony (Schubert uses E horns in the Andante con moto, rather than D horns).
* Length and form: a sonata-form movement of 383 bars (about 8 or 9 minutes in performance) is of a similar magnitude to the 1st and 2nd movements (368 and 312 bars respectively).

Formally it's a little weak, but no "looser" than other Schubert finales: for example, even as late as the String quintet D 956 you'll find a 2nd subject that some criticise as "fairly trivial". So we're not talking the quality of say the final movement of the Great C major.

The development section is a little short with an episode and development of only the first subject, with an abbreviated return. The coda has a nice tierce de Picardie to finish firmly in B major, which is totally within the conventions of the period. Lastly, I've played the symphony as a 40 minute piece with my completion of the third movement plus the Entr'acte, and basically it hangs together as well as any other four-movement work Schubert was writing about this time, say the Octet, string quartets, Grand Duo, etc.

We have fairly reliable evidence that Schubert was pushed for time to deliver the music for Rosamunde, having just composed Fierrabras and Schöne Müllerin beforehand. This remains true even we reject the testimony of the rather mad Helmina von Chézy, who is the source of the story that the orchestral parts were delivered to the theatre only 48 hours before the première. He had to use the overture for Alfonso und Estrella as the overture, presumably as he didn't have time to write a new one.

Most of the divertissements in the incidental music are for later acts, particularly the singing: I mentioned in one of the other threads how composers would often write out the vocal parts and continuo first, to allow copyists to go to work on providing vocal scores, before returning to instrumentation, since singers are notoriously bad at sight-reading compared to orchestral musicians and need longer lead time. (And believe it or not, 48 hours is plenty of lead time if you have professional singers and players, but I expect Schubert might have had much better amateurs for players, as opposed to singers.)

The Nº 2 Ballet paraphrases the music in the B minor Nº 1 Entr'acte, so my suspicion is that at some point in 1823 Schubert thought to himself "aha, I already have some stuff I could use for this ridiculous play by the mad woman von Chézy", and tried to make his life easier by incorporating some of the music from the symphony into the incidental music.

The questions we would really need a time machine to answer properly are, did the B minor Entr'acte go into the Rosamunde music unchanged? Was it already written down in some form in 1822 when he abandoned the Scherzo and Trio of the symphony? Had he kept the idea in mind only, and so when he put the music into Rosamunde, did he think something like "uh oh, my big bold symphonic idea that I'd had last year won't work as well here, so let's simplify it a little?"

I suspect it went in almost unchanged, but there's vanishingly little documentation to back this up; it would be so useful to have piano sketches for that Entr'acte, to compare to the three movements of piano sketches that do exist for the Symphony.

Best, PML

[kouneva]

I seek the printed score for the "fake" Symphony in E major from 1825, known as "Gmunden-Gastein" which was reconstructed for that Centaur recording available widely.
I tried to contact the conductor but I think he has passed away since.
Does anyone know if the sketches from this Symphony are published, or the score from which this recording was made exists anywhere?
Thank you so much,
Penka
kouneva@ca.rr.com

[Cat]

August 2021 marks two centuries to the month since Schubert began work on one of his unfinished symphonies, the E major symphony (D 729), which appears to have been abandoned when he took up work on his three-act opera Alfonso und Estrella in the middle of the following month.

Since I noticed there’s now a lot more recordings available of both the Newbould and Weingartner completions, I put together a score with a transcription of the music in the facsimiles Cypressdome uploaded a couple of years back, since a typeset is about 1% the size of facsimiles – and hopefully slightly less esoteric to read!

To answer the previous poster, albeit ridiculously long after the fact – the fake “Gmunden-Gastein” symphony by Gunter Elsholz may have been self-published. Besides the fabrication of a D 849 symphony*, he also appears to have issued realisations of the sketches D 708 A and D 936 A, which in the 1990s were available from Bad Soden: Parkstraße 46a, D-65812. I can’t advise a more recent address to obtain these works; they may be completely out of print.

* I find it hugely more plausible that the work composed at Gmunden and Bad Gastein in the summer of 1825 was the first revision of the C major symphony (D 944), even if there is no conclusive proof. The canonical March 1828 date would therefore be a finishing date, not a starting date, and the manuscript papers for the D 944 holograph actually date from the right period to be the D 849 work.

[Arciom Nesterovich]

Schubert
Symphony 9- https://musescore.com/sheetmusic?text=s ... mphony%209
Symphony 7- I didn't find

[Cat]

The numbering of Schubert's symphonies is a little perverse, but there's plenty of versions of no. 9 around (that is, the C major from March 1828, D 944). I wasn't aware of the Muse Score version but I notice it replicates the usual omissions and errors (refer to the New Schubert Edition).

As for No. 7 (usually but not always referring to the E major from August 1821, D 729), because it's incomplete and hugely less famous than the B minor "Unfinished", there are not many versions of it around, and mostly only from publishers:

1821 -- composer's holograph in full score. Thanks to the RCM Library for scanning the MS in their holdings.

~1881--85 -- completion by John Francis Barnett. IMSLP already had the piano reduction of this, published by Breitkopf & Härtel and since my previous comment the RCM Library have uploaded B&H’s Orchesterbibliothek set of parts to this edition, which are very nearly complete. Since the Barnett version is performed comparably rarely as opposed to the versions below, perhaps putting this set on IMSLP will lead to a performance before long.

~1934 -- completion by Felix Weingartner. Originally published by Universal Music (Vienna), now available from a reprint firm (Repertoire Explorer).

~1978 -- completion by Brian Newbould. Published through University of Hull Press, 1992.

~2012 -- urtext of composer's holograph published by Bärenreiter (Franz Schubert, Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Serie V: Orchesterwerke, Band 6: Sinfonische Entwürfe und Fragmente, pp. XXXIV--XXXVI, 63--230, 313--316).

2021 -- a quick transcription of my own from the 1821 holograph to mark the bicentenary.