The Unfinished Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert Javier ... - Ethesis

IV Of Changes and Operatic Hopes
were at last more willing to support German operas in addition to Italian productions.
This offered new hope for German opera composers, and Schubert clearly decided to
take advantage of this more favourable situation. In fact, Alfonso seems to have been a
commission from the impresario Domenico Barbaja, the newly appointed manager of
the Kärtnertor Theatre at that time. Barbaja also asked other composers to submit
German operas for the following season to be programmed alongside the Italian.
Among the composers he invited was Weber, who would eventually submit Euryanthe.
As documentary evidence shows, Schubert was very much involved in the opera world
of the city during those months. Among other events, he attended an abridged version
of Der Freischütz in Vienna in the autumn of 1821 and met Weber himself in February
1822 when the composer returned to Vienna to conduct the work. 24 Schubert’s opera
was finally delivered on Feb. 27, but he would never see it performed in his lifetime. It
could be that the plans for the summer season were already too far advanced by late
February to include Alfonso, but the truth is that, after a ‘wildly enthusiastic season of
Italian opera’ described by a contemporary critic as ‘an idolatrous orgy,’ 25 Alfonso und
Estrella was put aside without any clear performance prospects. After some months,
tired of waiting, Schubert asked for the score back and, with the help of some of his
friends, tried to gain the interest of theatres elsewhere, such as in Dresden and Berlin; 26
unfortunately, without success. Other attempts such as by Josef Hüttenbrenner’s (a
close friend of Schubert’s) to get one of the young composer’s early operas staged in
Prague was also unsuccessful. 26 In the years to come, Schubert continued to work hard
on other stage projects, but it is clear that his output would have been quite different
had fortune in this genre been kinder.
Paradoxically, after all of these professional disappointments in the field of
opera, Schubert turned to other genres with renewed intensity. The end of 1822 and the
first weeks of 1823 brought one of the most impressive series of works that he would
ever write – works of an emotional depth and a mastery of form and expression rarely
seen in his output hitherto. Among them, we find the two movements of a symphony in
B minor (D759, Unfinished, Schubert’s fourth attempt at a symphony between his Sixth
and the Great), the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy for piano (D760, his first major piano work in
years) and the settings of Matthäus von Collin: Wehmut (Melancholy, D772), Der
Zwerg (The Dwarf, D771) and Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams, D827); of
Friedrich Rückert: Dass sie hier gewesen (That They Have Been Here, D775), Du bist
die Ruh (You are the Rest, D776) and Lachen und Weinen (Laughter and Tears, D777);
and of Goethe: Der Musensohn (The Son of the Muses, D764), Willkommen und
Abschied (Hail and Farewell, D767) and Wandrers Nachtlied II (Wayfarer’s Night
Song II, D768). These are all works displaying a much greater concentration – works
closer in musical language and spirit to the world of the Romantics, with which
Schubert had been in contact for several years, mainly through his friends and the
reading group.
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