Finishing Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished”

courtesy of [PIAS] America

Franz Schubert’s D. 759 symphony in B minor is best known by its “Unfinished” nickname, since only two movements were completed. However, Otto Erich Deutsch’s thematic catalog also includes a sketch of the first nine bars of a scherzo movement. Schubert’s autograph includes orchestration information in the form of an annotated piano score, along with sketches for the elaboration of the entire movement.

As the Wikipedia page for this symphony observes, the preceding century saw a variety of efforts to “finish” the symphony. In 1928, the 100th anniversary of Schubert’s death, Columbia Records even held a worldwide competition for a four-movement version of D. 759. (The results faded into obscurity not long after the awards were assigned.) More recently, there have been several performing versions that have appropriated the entr’acte music that Schubert composed to follow the first act of the play Rosamunde to serve as the fourth movement of D. 759, preceded by efforts to flesh out Schubert’s sketches into a complete scherzo movement with trio.

One week from today the French APARTE label will release a new recording of this “completed” version of Schubert’s symphony. It is the first recording to use the new (completed in 2015) Urtext edition of the symphony, which includes a performance edition of the scherzo prepared by Nicola Samale and Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs and the Rosamunde entr’acte serving as the final movement. Cohrs prepared this new edition, along with a foreword consisting an extended essay, supplemented by a rich supply of musical examples, to explain how this performance edition came to be. (That essay is also available as a downloadable PDF file.) The performing ensemble on the recording is the Concentus Musicus Wien, initially founded for period-instrument performances of Austrian baroque music by Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt and now conducted by harpsichordist Stefan Gottfried. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for this album from which pre-orders may be processed.

(Some readers may recall that both Samale and Cohrs were part of the team that prepared a performing edition of the fourth movement of Anton Bruckner’s ninth symphony, released as a recording of Simon Rattle conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in May of 2012.)

So much for theory: how to these results play out in practice? Given Gottfried’s background as an instrumentalist, one might wonder how suited he is to conducting Schubert. However, almost as soon as the exposition of the first movement is established, one can appreciate the crisp qualities of his approaches to both phrasing and dynamics. This is a performance in which the sharper edges of early nineteenth-century technique register far more effectively than many of those more syrupy approaches to Schubert that occupied too many of the conductors of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Gottfried’s approach to the symphony’s first movement prepares the listener for the wild shifts in dynamic level that make for a symphonic scherzo decidedly unlike any that Ludwig van Beethoven ever wrote.

On the other hand my own jury is still out on the wisdom behind the Rosamunde appropriation. This is probably a matter of personal taste, but I tend to prefer concluding movements that serve up a somewhat lighter touch. Obviously, there are exceptions; but I have always found a joyous quality that cuts across other movements that conclude Schubert symphonies (a joy that even works its way into at least some of the concluding movements by composers such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler). Perhaps it would be better to leave D. 795 in its “unfinished” form, even when the reconstruction of the scherzo is included.

On the APARTE recording D. 759 is preceded by seven Schubert songs with orchestral arrangements of the accompanying piano parts. Four of those arrangements are by Anton Webern, and three are by Brahms. Here I have to “come clean” and own up to having my own dog in this hunt. Readers may recall that, at the beginning of this month, I wrote about a performance of the D. 911 Winterreise (winter’s journey) song cycle in which the accompaniment was provided by a string quartet with an added bass part playing an arrangement prepared by cellist Harold Birston. My overall impression was a positive one, frequently for transparency that is too often masked to a pianist who likes his damper pedal too much but also for the way in which the intonation of the strings often endowed some of Schubert’s dissonances with sharper edges.

With regard to that latter criterion, I have to confess that I found most of the orchestral arrangements to be far too mushy to do justice to Schubert’s rhetorical skills. Indeed, to my surprise, the Webern arrangements tended to be mushier than those of Brahms! For that matter, Brahms seemed much more comfortable in both selecting instruments and balancing them than Webern was. To put it more politely, Webern’s skill set is a key asset where the music of Webern himself is concerned and not so much when he is arranging Schubert. On the other hand all of the songs were sung by bass-baritone Florian Boesch, who was clearly aware of all the rhetorical twists and turns in Schubert’s settings. Hopefully, I shall have an opportunity to listen to his Schubert performances when he has a good pianist accompanying him.