Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

By presenting the historian‘s view of the social conditions of the city of Vienna in the
period of Schubert‘s lifetime, and considering the care structures established within the public
sphere for the care and treatment for syphilitic men, women and children, I will demonstrate
why the acquisition of a disease such as syphilis was prevalent during this period.
Session 1.2 SCHUBERT’S UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES
Glenn Stanley (University of Connecticut)
‘Thanatos as Muse’: Visions of Death in the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony
Masterful in its concentration and impetus, the development of the ‗Unfinished‘ Symphony
contains some of the most horrific music of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, it has escaped
detailed discussion. The development contains three episodes:
1. The first-theme bass line moves into the upper register, intensifies as it is semisequentially
developed, and both prepares and is shockingly interrupted by
2. a three-part sequence that presents sudden juxtapositions of diametrically opposed
ideas: strongly declamatory fortissimo prolongations of minor and diminished -seventh chords
descend into eerily quiet cadential progressions with nervous inner-voice off-beat patterns: the
last progression leads to
3. a tutti statement of the bass-line motive that gives way to frenzied rhythms and
motivic figures in a wild stretto that exhausts itself in a brief transition to the recapitulation.
Each episode builds in agitation, inviting comparisons to the musical dramaturgy of an operatic
finale. The teleology, expressive character, and some of the specific thematic material of the
development recall the ombra music of the second-act finale of Don Giovanni. Schubert had good
reason to be fascinated by the opera‘s themes of non -conformist behavior (sexual and
otherwise) and death as consequence and judgment. They resonated with his own experience
(in whichever sexual self-definition we picture him) and artistic preoccupations. Susan McClary
has discussed manifestations of Schubert‘s sexual iden tity in the ‗Unfinished‘; the recognition of
death as a subject of the symphony reveals a new dimension of Schubert‘s exploration of his
own subjectivity.
Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (Universität Salzburg)
The Myth of the ‘Unfinished’
When Schubert sent the manuscript of his symphony in b minor to the provincial town of Graz as
a gratitude for his honorable membership in one of the last years of his life, he could not know
or even expect that 150 years later this unfinished work would become one of his most
successful compositions and indeed one of the most often performed of all classical
symphonies. In this paper I will not enter a discussion of the various opinions why The
Unfinished remained unfinished, nor will I offer a new theory of my own. Rather, what I want to
do is to reveal the circumstances that created the extraordinary fame of the Unfinished.
The symphony has fascinated the musical world not only by its beauty but also because
of the exciting story of its rediscovery in the 1860s and by the myths that have entwined around
its composition since then. One can discern three strands in the rumors that make up together
the complex and to a certain extent still influential story. There is, first of all, the rumor of a
‗hidden‘ symphony – an accusation that goes back to Kreißle von Hellborn, the author of the
first comprehensive biography of Schubert. Kreißle blamed the Hüttenbrenner brothers to hold
back the most precious ‗perls‘ of Schubert's œuvre thus trying to nurture an exaggerated
expectation of what was actually hidden. The second strand is a mystical relation to Beethoven