Great in scope and substance, Franz Schubert’s final chapter to the symphonic genre is a true tour de force, as the genius songwriter infuses his expansive offering with fearless exuberance.

The disconnect between Franz Schubert’s talent and his public recognition in his lifetime is hard to reconcile. This was a composer who produced hundreds of first-rate songs as a teenager, not to mention symphonies and chamber music, before even a note of his music had appeared in performance or in print. His songs gained a bit of traction in his lifetime, but his many attempts to break into opera were disastrous. As for his symphonies, not a single one reached the public before he died. As one publisher wrote to Schubert, in rejecting his manuscripts, ‘The public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious procedures of your mind’s creations.”

Schubert’s first six symphonies, composed between the ages of 16 and 21, are beautiful and original but hardly controversial, with their strong resemblances to late Haydn and early Beethoven. Schubert took a more bold approach with the symphony he began in 1822, but he abandoned it after two movements, leaving what we now know as the “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, he set down that symphony around the same time that he suffered through the first phase of the syphilis infection that claimed his life six years later.

A letter from 1824 attests to Schubert’s continuing ambition to compose a “grand symphony,” a desire that could only have been stoked further when he attended the premiere that year of Beethoven’s epic Symphony No. 9. The next year, while vacationing on an Austrian lake and enjoying his best health in years, Schubert began his massive symphony in C major, the one that would eventually earn the nickname “The Great.”

-- Copyright © 2017 Aaron Grad

Originally performed February 4, 2017.