Schubert vs. Beethoven

A thought for next month:
If only Schubert had Beethoven's longevity

DAN COREN

One of our readers, Hannah Berger, wrote in March to say that she wished Robert Zaller’s review of the Tokyo String Quartet had appeared in that concert’s program notes. I agree with the concept; even if we are, after all, the Broad Street Review, we do far too many after-the-fact reviews and not enough previews. So, here are my thoughts about Schubert’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, which the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform under Christoph Eschenbach in mid-May.

I already mentioned this concert in an article I wrote more than a year ago, and if I do say so myself, I think its last two paragraphs are worth rereading now. Man, I am going to miss Eschenbach!

The “Unfinished” Symphony was written in 1822, just after Beethoven had composed his last piano sonata; the “Great” C major Symphony around 1826, just after the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth. With the hindsight of historical perspective, it’s all too easy to imagine a Vienna in the 1820s dominated by these two great composers working side by side, producing masterpiece after masterpiece.

Not that they weren’t doing just that. But the fact went virtually unnoticed; the attention of the Viennese musical public was directed elsewhere.

Beethoven the eccentric

By this time, Beethoven was regarded as a half-crazy eccentric. The premiere of his Ninth was more a public spectacle– come and see the mad, deaf composer conduct!– than a musical event— and, indeed, there is something of the mad scientist about Beethoven after 1812. I think of him as having locked himself in his lab, struggling with the sub-atomic particles of the Classical style, disdainful of the trivialities of the modern musical scene. He may have known of Schubert, but Beethoven, like virtually everyone else, had no idea of Schubert’s significance.

The hot tickets in Vienna then were the supernatural operas of Carl Maria von Weber, especially Der Freischütz, and the operas of Rossini. Ludwig Spohr was thought by many to be the greatest living composer.

Like an Ingmar Bergman film

Schubert was an up-and-coming musician with a promising future who was trying, with not much success, to jump on this bandwagon. Although he had become capable of expressing all the dark emotional complexity of an Ingmar Berman movie in a three-minute song, Schubert lacked a flair for opera (or for operatic gestures– he wrote no concertos at all), and his attempts to write in the Italian style rank among his weakest music.

Schubert’s first six symphonies, even the Fifth, are– dare I say it?– pretty dull. The Eighth (there is no Seventh) is, of course, anything but; nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1828, Schubert seems to have forgotten the two movements he’d shoved into a drawer somewhere six years earlier.

And then there’s the Ninth. Writing an enormous symphony, one with trombones, no less, and string writing that, as I understand it, still taxes the stamina of modern performers, was not exactly a realistic career move for a young composer known primarily as a miniaturist. And yet, amazingly, the work was played once, sort of, and Schubert even got a bit of money for it. (Follow this link to an excellent Wikipedia article.) If you listen to it, remember to thank Robert Schumann for what was arguably Schumann’s greatest contribution to our musical life, the resurrection of this symphony.

If Beethoven died at Schubert’s age…

What would Beethoven’s legacy have been had he, like Schubert, died at the age of 31?

He’d probably be remembered as an iconoclastic virtuoso pianist who showed great promise as a composer. He would have written one very odd symphony, at once experimental and almost mockingly conservative. His one rather academic set of string quartets would (and still does) suffer by comparison with Haydn’s nearly contemporary set, Op. 76. (Haydn would have outlived Beethoven by nearly a decade.) His most memorable contribution to the literature would have been two delightful piano concertos and several adventurous (albeit rather prolix) piano sonatas; judging by what would have been his last works— the Sonatas Op. 26 and 27— Beethoven seemed to have been on the verge of abandoning sonata-form entirely. (Opus 26 has not a single sonata-form movement.)

All the works that define Beethoven as an heroic musical colossus wouldn’t exist. We would never have heard the results of his subsequent obsessions with the innermost secrets of sonata-form and of the Classical style. It’s impossible to imagine who or what would have filled the void.

Now, for Schubert’s first 31 years…

Of course, it was Schubert, not Beethoven, who died at that early age. To restate what I’ve written elsewhere in BSR (a letter in response to Robert Zaller’s review of Ignat Solzhenitsyn playing Schubert), my most poignant alternate reality in music history is the landscape that might exist today if Schubert had been granted a normal lifespan. No other composer's death left such a gaping hole in a world that might have been.

Consider what Schubert accomplished by the time of his death in 1828:

• A long string of chamber music masterpieces, capped by the incomprehensibly beautiful C Major String Quintet;
• Six settings of the Mass, the last two of which are among the jewels of the choral literature;
• Hundreds of songs;
• Many piano sonatas, capped by three enormous ones written in the space of a month or two during his last illness;
• And, of course, the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies.

In his last few years, Schubert, the great melodist, grappled with the problem of filling up large stretches of musical time. He did it with long stretches of obsessively repeating rhythms, never more successfully than in the Ninth.

The symphony with the horses

When I mentioned this work to my wife recently, she asked, “Isn’t that the one with the horses?” It sure is. For nearly an hour, Schubert’s Ninth Symphony canters, trots, gallops and thunders along. (Turn your volume up for these clips.) It exudes the dream-like quality of a marathon run through an endless musical landscape.

The Ninth is not, for the most part, a lyrical work– but it contains one of the greatest crises and lyrical resolutions in the Romantic literature, 80 seconds of music that echo through the entire 19th Century into the music of Bruckner and Mahler. If only Beethoven could have heard it.



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