Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 “Unfinished”

How shall we picture this? An author writes a novel: the beginning is extraordinarily well-written, but then he cannot find a way to end it and, in despair, abandons the work. What a pity for such a magnificent start! That, more or less, is how countless musicologists think about Franz Schubert, who in 1822 began his B minor Symphony in a way no one had ever written a symphony before, then went on to compose a second movement, even sketched a third – and then gave up, simply stopped. In fact, we know a commissioned piece made him set the symphony aside for the time being. But why did he never return to it? No one knows. One enduring theory is that he could not find an ending to match such a beginning, that the opening raised expectations no finale could satisfy. Other explanations – illness, lack of time, no prospect of performance – are equally plausible. In any case, the myth of the “beautiful failure” suits the image of the romantic artist well. And yet one might just as reasonably ask how Schubert could afford to leave a symphony like this lying idle in a drawer.

In truth, however, that was not what he did. The fair copy of the score of the first two movements somehow – no one knows quite how – fell into the hands of the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner. They kept it locked away until long after Schubert’s death, before Anselm, now an old man, allowed himself to be persuaded to release it – on condition that one of his own overtures be played on the same programme of a Viennese society concert. Thus the “Unfinished” did not receive its premiere until 1865, forty-three years after its creation.

But once the music begins, all that is forgotten. And it begins as no symphony had ever begun: in total darkness, with a pronouncement of fate in the blackest registers of the cellos and double basses. The murky atmosphere never clears; it remains impenetrable, uncanny, ominous. A knocking figure in the pizzicato strings, a drizzle of notes in the violins, above them a meandering oboe and clarinet line that sounds like a cry into the void, threatened by jagged accents and crashing chords: detonations in the dark. Schubert relishes such shocks – for instance when the second theme, a ländler-like melody turning in circles (first heard in the cellos), is suddenly overwhelmed by the full orchestra in fortissimo, with eerie tremolos like some ghostly nocturne. Or when the sombre oracle of the basses appears a third time, sinks into the abyss and sets off a howling and groaning, as if graves were opening: black romanticism.

The second movement in E major, an Andante con moto and thus hardly slower than the first, is likewise charged with almost violent tensions. It speaks in hushed tones as well as monumental grandeur of farewells, of final hours, of the end of time. The full orchestra intones a funeral march worthy of a state burial; later the trombones even seem to summon the Last Judgement, as if Schubert had turned to composing a Catholic Requiem. Yet already the very opening of the movement – with the horn fifths, the “wandering” bass lines, the string cantilenas with their cadential formulas, the clarinet and oboe solos that sound like farewells from songs of travel – all point towards a leave-taking without return, before the final bars celebrate a passage to the other side. How could anything possibly have followed that? And more to the point: why? Schubert’s “Unfinished” was complete.