![]() I want to pick out some structural details for you, whether you might be coming to the symphony for the first time, think that the piece is dauntingly long, or are someone who has encountered the cliché that Schubert’s symphony is all about endless repetition and not much dynamic progression. (Even if it’s one that took decades to come to public life - it only got its posthumous premiere in 1839, thanks to the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, whose review coined the notorious phrase, “heavenly length”, a tag that has stuck to this piece and to Schubert’s late music in general.) But it’s also more ambitious because its completed symphonic journey is a self-conscious mark in the music-historical sand. In one sense, the Great C Major Symphony is less extreme than its aborted predecessor, the “Unfinished” B Minor Symphony, since the expressive world of the C major piece is less raw and uncompromising. What I think Schubert is doing in this piece is showing that his own brand of tonal dramaturgy, one that so often produced lyrical reflection and a-temporal meditation, and was equally capable of creating and sustaining large-scale symphonic momentum. ![]() Instead of telegraphing this moment, or preparing us for a big musical reveal, Schubert slips this tune, pianissimo, in the clarinets and woodwind there’s another pianissimo tremor in the strings, also based on the Ode to Joy tune and all of that, it turns out, is a dream-like upbeat before Schubert concentrates on the main drama of the movement.Īnd that drama has nothing to do with Beethoven’s symphony, or even much to do with Beethoven’s symphonism – which makes the quote more ironic than forelock-tugging. ![]() Schubert’s quotation comes at the middle point of his finale - one of the wildest rhythmical rides in symphonic literature - and it appears out of the blue. And on one hand, with this quotation from the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven’s epic finale he was explicitly acknowledging his debt to him, but he was also daring to compete with Beethoven’s signature reputation as a symphonist.Īnd yet it’s not that simple. Schubert wrote his own ninth symphony in 1825, a year after Beethoven’s had its premiere, which the younger composer also attended. Which is why, in the finale of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, the “Great” C Major, there’s a quotation from the most infamous contemporary symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth. In a few short years, Schubert (27 years younger than Beethoven) had to pay homage to Beethoven’s gigantic influence, but also – crucially – he had to have the courage to realise that what he could do as a composer was radically different from what Beethoven could, and then have the gumption to go ahead and do it. And that meant, for Schubert, coming to terms with the achievement of the most famous composer in the world, a neighbour of his in his home city, Ludwig van Beethoven.
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