Heavenly length?

Had a rehearsal play through of Schubert 9 last week.  It is a piece which excites strong opinions.  But one thing that all orchestral players agree on is that it is one of the most exhausting pieces in the entire repertoire.  It is not long as a Mahler symphony, but in Mahler there are generally places to take a break, whereas the Schubert is inexorable and there is nowhere to relax.  The first three movements are difficult enough in this respect, but the finale - over 1000 bars - is in a class of its own.  Thankfully we did it without all the repeats.  I do remember playing in a performance years ago with all of the repeats - it very nearly finished me off.

As far as is known Schubert never heard the work performed - indeed there seems not to have been a performance in his lifetime, although there may have been a private informal run through.  Schumann admired what he call the symphony's "heavenly length" but I am of the view that had Schubert heard the symphony in performance he would have made some small excisions here and there just to cut out some of the repetition.

But what a symphony it is.  In many ways it is more modern and forward looking than Beethoven's 9th symphony , which is more or less its contemporary.  So much of it looks forward to the world of the next generation. Heard out of context parts of the trio are pure Dvorak, while the slow alternating chords near the end of the slow movement are highly characteristic of Brahms.  Incidentally it was Brahms who was responsible for the confusion over the numbering of the symphony.  He believed that unfinished works should be numbered after finished works, so attached the number 7 to the symphony, on the basis it was the only symphony Schubert finished after no 6.  The "unfinished" was no 8.  So the parts we were playing from were headed symphony no 7.  The absurdity of this symphony being numbered before the earlier unfinished symphony was gradually appreciated and so the symphony became no 9.  The unfinished remained no 8.  And no 7?  Well there is another unfinished symphony which became no 7.  This is much more fragmentary - for most of the piece we only have a first violin line so it is not really performable, although there have been realisations of it.  But it plugs in the gap in the numbering very conveniently.

The other composer whose music seems pre-echoed in the symphony is Bruckner.  Some of the harmonic daring , particularly in the first movement, seems to foreshadow much of what can be found in Bruckner - and of course the sheer scale of Schubert 9 was not really matched until Bruckner's symphonies a generation later.  But there is a direct connection between the two composers.  Right towards the end of his life Schubert felt the need to improve his counterpoint skills and arranged some lessons with Simon Sechter, who was one of the leading teachers of the day.  We don't know exactly what happened in those lessons, indeed if they every really took place, but it is astonishing that Schubert felt he needed lessons.  The link is that Sechter was one of Bruckner's main teachers - we know for certain that Bruckner went through an intensive course of harmony and counterpoint with Sechter.

Schubert 9 is of course the work of a young man, even though it is a "late" work.   I can remember discussing with one of my lecturers at university what Schubert's music might have developed into had he lived longer. After all he would only have been in his mid 60s when Tristan und Isolde was written.   One senses that had he lived Schubert would have got to the harmonic language of Tristan well before Wagner.