Date of composition: 1815
Premiere: First complete performance on 19 February 1881 in London's Chrystal Palace under the direction of August Mann. (Final movement first performed on 2 December 1860 in the Vienna Redouten-Saal; conductor: Johann Herbeck)
Duration: 23 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First performed on 27 February 1932; conductor: Erich Band
In October 1867, two British Schubert enthusiasts took rooms at the Hotel Zur Kaiserin Elisabeth, very close to St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. One was George Grove, a 47‑year‑old civil engineer who had been devoted to music since his youth and was on the way to becoming a formative figure in Victorian musical life as an organiser, instigator, and writer. The other was Arthur Sullivan: at 25, he had already made a name for himself in London as a composer and conductor, and was soon to become an extraordinarily successful creator of comic operas, as one half of the duo later celebrated internationally as “Gilbert & Sullivan”.
What united Grove and Sullivan was their enthusiasm for Schubert’s music and the hope of discovering unknown works in the city where Schubert had spent his entire life. And in fact, their expectations were not only met, but exceeded. Visiting a music publisher and relative of the composer, they searched through parts of the estate and came across numerous unpublished compositions. “A quarter of an hour’s conversation was sufficient to put us perfectly en rapport, and I soon had the scores of Schubert’s First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Sixth Symphonies in hand,” Grove later recalled.
In fact, Schubert the symphonist was discovered only late. This applies in particular to the so‑called “symphonies of his youth” – a category that also includes the Symphony No. 3, composed in 1815. While, after Napoleon’s defeat, the Congress of Vienna met in imperial and princely palaces to reorder Europe and, through repressive measures, restore and secure the power of the old elites, the 18‑year‑old composer was working as an assistant at his father’s school. Schubert had already immersed himself in the world of symphonic music during his school days at Vienna’s Stadtkonvikt. In the orchestra’s evening rehearsals there, he first became acquainted with symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as a viola player, and later, in a leading role at the first violin desk, which also gave him a chance to study the orchestra as a sound medium from the inside. Whether, when composing the Third Symphony, Schubert was still thinking of the Konvikt orchestra, or whether he already had in mind the amateur orchestra that was forming at that time through an expansion of chamber music activities in the Schubert household, we do not know. What is certain, however, is that the work received no public performance during the composer’s lifetime, and that the first performance of the symphony as a whole, prompted by George Grove, probably did not take place until February 1881 in London.
The long “Sleeping Beauty” slumber of the Third Symphony, and its sluggish performance history over the following decades, reflects the aesthetic preferences of the time and the perspective from which many viewed Schubert’s early symphonic writing. Fascinated by the romantic expressive world of the “Great” C major Symphony and the Unfinished, even Schubert admirers such as Brahms regarded the early symphonies as the work of a young composer who had not yet found his own voice. One of the first to contradict this view, to attune his ear to the freshness and “great beauty” of these “admirable compositions”, and to call for them to be performed more often, was Antonín Dvořák. In an essay from 1894, he remarked: “Although the influence of Haydn and Mozart is obvious in them, Schubert’s musical individuality in the character of the melody, in the harmonic progressions, and in many exquisite touches of orchestration is unmistakable.”