About this Piece

Whether or not Schubert regarded his B-minor Symphony as complete is no longer a matter for speculation. We now know that he planned to add to it. Piano sketches—a few measures orchestrated—have been found for a third (scherzo) movement, and there is evidence that the B-minor entr’acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde is based on what would have been the fourth and final movement.  

The composer had gone as far as he could go with the score in 1822 and went on to other musical business—above all the creation of the “Wanderer” Fantasy and the completion of the Mass in A flat, begun two years earlier. Schubert presented the two completed movements of the symphony to his friend Josef Hüttenbrenner, to be passed on to his brother Anselm, in appreciation of the latter’s help in obtaining an honorary membership to the Music Society of Graz for the composer. The question remains unanswered to this day: Why did Anselm hold on to the manuscript for nearly four decades after Schubert’s death—by which time the composer, relatively unknown during his lifetime, had become widely appreciated and reports of an “unfinished” symphony in B minor had long been circulating in the press? Adding to the mystery, Anselm made a two-piano arrangement of the symphony that he and Josef Hüttenbrenner performed privately, with Josef assuming that Anselm would publish the original.  

It was Josef Hüttenbrenner who alerted the composer and conductor Johann von Herbeck to the symphony’s resting place. In 1860 Hüttenbrenner wrote to the Herbeck that he should look at the Schubert manuscripts in Anselm’s possession, adding at the end of his letter, “among them is a treasure, the B-minor Symphony, which we put on a level with the great Symphony in C, his [orchestral] swan song, and any one of the symphonies by Beethoven.”  

It took Herbeck five more years to approach Anselm and rummage through the manuscripts accumulated in his home near Graz. When he finally made the visit, Herbeck obtained the manuscript (at no cost) by promising a performance of an overture by Anselm on a program with the symphony and a work by another, younger member of the Schubert circle, Franz Lachner. Thus, on December 17, 1865, in Vienna, the three composers shared a program under Herbeck’s direction. How the works by Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Lachner fared on that occasion has not been recorded, but Schubert’s Symphony was an immediate hit, and the speculation over why it was unfinished applied a romantic patina to the music’s already irresistible appeal.  

From the opening, Schubert finds the same voice that is heard in the Rosamunde incidental music, the “Great” C-major Symphony, and the last two masses, in A flat and E flat. This is a voice marked by broad, lyric themes and grand orchestral effects, most strikingly the dramatic string tremolos and the dark, noble sound of trombones. —Herbert Glass