calimac

A standard classical-era symphony has four movements, of particular kinds in a particular order. Schubert's Unfinished just has what would normally be the first two, and a partial outline (in piano score) of most of the third.

What happened to the rest of it? There are several theories.

1. It's complete and sublime just as it is. This is nonsense, for perfectly straightforward reasons of classical harmonic progression. Harmonically the Unfinished ends in the middle of a
, and in Schubert's day you just don't do that. (I was going to explain in my review that the second movement is in the tonic major of the subdominant, but my editor didn't think I could say that in a family publication.) The "It's perfect as it is" theory is the favored theory of those for whom every sneeze from a master is golden.

2. Schubert wrote the rest, but it got misplaced. Unlikely, given what we know of the manuscript history.

3. He got intimidated. Nobody else, even Schubert himself, had yet written a symphony fully assimilating the huge increases in scale and emotion that Beethoven had lately wrought. By this theory, Schubert just wasn't up to it yet. Possible: Schubert was going through a period when he found it hard to complete anything. But the two movements he finished were fully up to Beethoven's challenge.

4. He lost his inspiration. This is the theory I favor, because in the wake of the first two excellent movements, the third, frankly, is out of gas. He even tore what he'd written of it out of the manuscript score. See also above about not finishing anything.

5. He wrote the rest, but discarded the scherzo and took the finale out to use as the entr'acte for his incidental music for the play Rosamunde. This theory was proposed by Sir George Grove of musical dictionary fame, and is supported by today's leading scholar in this field, Brian Newbould. If you point out that the Rosamunde entr'acte doesn't work as a finale for the Unfinished, Newbould will serenely reply, "That would be why he detached it." But Newbould misses the point. Though the entr'acte is in the right key and in sonata form, it's in the wrong idiom, more genteel like Schubert's earlier symphonies. A bad finale could have been discarded; this one would never have been written for this symphony in the first place.

6. He didn't get around to it, so we should finish it for him. There have been several attempts to suit action to this theory over the years, but if Schubert couldn't finish it, what hope for anyone else? Next up to be forgotten about is the Russian composer Anton Safronov, whose completion received its U.S. premiere on Thursday.

liveavatar and I went, and you can read all about it here.

The San Jose paper's reviewer began his review by praising the pianist (in the Brahms concerto that came with). The San Francisco paper's reviewer began by describing the conductor's glamour. Me, I wrote about Schubert.