Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

that was brought up as a favorite topic again and again in the popular literature on Schubert,
culminating in a scene of the infamous film Das Dreimäderlhaus (1958). There we see Schubert
abandoning the composition of the symphony at the same time as Beethoven was considered
definitely to be deaf. Finally, the Unfinished retains the nimbus of being a ‗Sterbefragment‘ – a
work that was not finished because the composer died while working on it. This story is still
handed down by such a renowned musician as the pianist Alfons Kontarsky who recites that
during his childhood he imagined Schubert like God as an old man with a white beard working
on the Unfinished until the pen slips out of his hand and he fades away. All together, the myth
around this work forms an important part of its reception and essentially contributed to its
fame.
Session 1.3 SCHUBERT, BEETHOVEN AND CONCEPTS OF EXPRESSION
John Gingerich (Johns Hopkins University)
‘Classical’ Music and Viennese Resistance to Schubert’s Beethoven Project
In 1823 Ignaz Schuppanzigh began a series of subscription concerts of string quartets in Vienna
that several reviewers immediately began promoting as the best way to hear ‗classical‘ music.
Schuppanzigh‘s concerts inspired Schubert to begin, in 1824, a new project of composition in the
large instrumental genres – in Beethoven‘s genres. Schubert had composed string quartets,
piano sonatas, and symphonies before, but never, either before or after 1824, did he try to bring
these earlier works to the public through publication or performance. Schubert chose
Schuppanzigh‘s series as the exclusive purveyor of his new chamber works to the public.
Unfortunately Schuppanzigh was not equally taken with Schubert; of six new chamber works
by Schubert, Schuppanzigh premiered only three, and even these he never performed twice.
Schubert had a similar lack of success in gaining a performance of his new C-Major Symphony
(D 944). He was unable to organize a benefit concert in which it would feature as the
centerpiece, and equally unable to prod the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (GdMf) to perform
it. Even after Schumann and Mendelssohn discovered and championed Schubert‘s symphony it
did not win acceptance in Vienna, and only after mid -century were the G-Major Quartet and the
C-Major Quintet performed and published.
Why were Schuppanzigh and the GdMf so unwilling to embrace Schubert‘s new
instrumental music, and why were the Viennese in general so slow to accept Schubert as a
composer in Beethoven‘s genres? A part of the answer surely, is that Schubert‘s very fame as a
Lied and part-song composer hindered his acceptance as a composer of ―classical‖ instrumental
works. The perceived gulf between folk genres and aristocratic genres, between dilettante
genres and genres considered the ultimate demonstration of professional compositional skill
was too vast. And Schubert himself did nothing to allay unease over generic miscegenation by
intermingling all too promiscuously folk rhythms and tunes, Lied quotations and Lied
variations with his new Beethovenian pretensions.
Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan)
Franz Schubert’s Innovative Thinking: the ‘Trockne Blumen’ Variations, D802 in the Context of Johann
Nikolaus Forkel’s Interpretation of Music as a Language of Empfindungen
In his two-volume Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1788-1801), Johann Nikolaus Forkel
appropriately comments about the decline of traditional genres, when he writes that ‗music is
undoubtedly a language, however, a language of the sensations (Empfindungen) and not of
terms‘ (Begriffe). Although music, with regard to its inner workings, has much in common with