The Unfinished or the Unfinishable?
Performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Giordano Bellincampi.
Photo: Public Domain
If there’s one thing most people know about Franz Schubert, it’s that his most popular symphony is unfinished.
He began composing it in 1822 and after finishing the first two movements, he abandoned the project, leaving only sketches of a third movement scherzo.
One theory says that the Entr’acte from Schubert’s incidental music to the play Rosamunde is the missing fourth movement.
Schubert never heard the symphony played – and it wasn’t until 43 years after this music had been composed that it was performed.
It was a case of a rediscovered masterpiece. In 1865, a seventy-six-year-old man came forward to a Viennese conductor with the astonishing news that he had a Schubert symphony. Well, part of one that Schubert had sent him, some forty-three years earlier.
Why didn't Schubert write more of the symphony? For reasons we only have guesswork: whether they're psychological, connected to the period of illness he went through; musical - feeling he couldn’t compose another two movements that would be satisfactory; or simply practical, that having put the piece to one side, he wanted to get on with new projects rather than return to older music.
One possible non-musical explanation for the premature ending of this music, was that in November of that year – 1822, he contracted the syphilis that would kill him six years later, and Schubert’s state of mind meant he wasn’t able to complete the symphony.
But it’s easy to feel that what we have a perfectly completed work – as some have suggested, rather than the Unfinished, it's actually the Unfinishable. Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt said "The form is perfect; there is simply nothing else to say."
Programme note by Carey McDonald
Recorded by RNZ in Auckland Town Hall, 25 July 2019
Producer: Tim Dodd
Engineer: Rangi Powick
