Both Schubert (1797-1828) and Mozart had the astoundingly good fortune to have their innate compositional genius fed by superb musical educations. Mozart, whose father was one of the most esteemed violin pedagogues of the period, traveled across Europe, first as a keyboard prodigy and subsequently as that most uncommon prodigy, a composing one. In his travels, Mozart soaked up musical cultures, even visiting London at age six to take composition lessons from J.C. Bach.
Schubert, who was born to a poor schoolmaster in Vienna, not provincial Salzburg where Mozart had been born, had the godsend to be taken in by the Imperial and Royal City Seminary where he passed his audition for a boy soprano position as a chorister in the Royal Chapel in the fall of 1808. The “Stadtkonvikt” was the finest of boarding schools and also a quasi-music conservatory where Schubert’s musical talents were soon recognized as he assumed leadership of the Seminary orchestra both as violinist and conductor. The orchestra was proficient enough to perform the masterpieces of Haydn, Mozart, and early Beethoven, and a classmate reported that the performances of Mozart’s Symphony No.40 in G minor K 550 and the Beethoven Symphony No. 2 were to influence Schubert for the early years of his composing life. In addition to performing these instrumental masterpieces, Schubert sang many of Haydn’s masses and the sacred pieces of a varied roster of composers from the Austrian Empire.
Schubert’s early compositional efforts for the student orchestra also came to the attention of Antonio Salieri, yes that Salieri, who became his composing instructor. Schubert, in an unusual concession, was allowed to leave the Seminary boarding school for private lessons in counterpoint and figured bass at Salieri’s apartment. In her recent biography of Schubert [Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer], Lorraine Byrne Bodley stated that Salieri’s instruction was vital to Schubert’s great facility in composition. This was via Salieri’s concept of “Partimento” an instructional method that encouraged improvisation and the reading and performing of musical scores which led Schubert to develop phenomenal musical fluency. (In has tragically short life, he died at 31, Schubert composed over 1,500 works including over 600 songs.) Salieri taught Schubert from June of 1812 until December of 1816 – even though Schubert had left the Seminary in 1813.
After seminary life, Schubert, though drearily employed at his father’s school, was enriched by the school’s chamber music performances with friends and family. On occasion, the ensemble expanded to orchestral dimensions, and Schubert’s early symphonies were written for these mostly semi-professional forces.
The Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major D. 485 was composed in one month in the fall of 1816 and premiered in the house of Otto Hatwig, a violinist at the Vienna Burgtheater, who also lead the performance. The Symphony No. 5 is unique in Schubert’s symphonies in that it is scored for a relatively small ensemble. The Symphony was originally performed by only 29 players (Schubert played viola) and did not include the clarinets, trumpets, and drums that has been standard dating from Haydn’s London Symphonies (1791-1795). Nor did any Beethoven symphony lack these instruments. By the time of the Schubert Symphony No. 5, all of Beethoven’s Symphonies had been premiered except the Choral 9th.
Many commentators have made a connection between the Schubert Symphony No. 5 and Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (1788) because they have the same reduced complement of instruments. Schubert’s diary of that summer even proclaimed: "O Mozart! Immortal Mozart! what countless impressions of a brighter, better life hast thou stamped upon our souls!" (As a gentle riposte to those who have “outed” Schubert as gay, he also wrote in his diary that fall, “Happy is he who finds a faithful friend. Happier still is he who finds a faithful friend in his wife.”)
The Symphony No. 5 is in the classic four movements. The first movement, (“Allegro” fast) starts with a little 4-bar pickup. The main theme is jaunty and upward leaping. While in the expected sonata form, Schubert does a bit more than just pour themes into the form. The repeat of the exposition goes right to the pickup, not to the main theme (similar to the Mozart Symphony No. 40). The development is short, though very inventive, beginning with variations on the pickup, but the recap starts in the “wrong key,” a brighter subdominant return. And after the start of the coda, the movement ends exactly as the exposition ended. The second movement (“Andante con moto” faster than a walking tempo) seemingly is in a simple ABA form with the middle section more insistently urgent with a pulsing bass, but the “A” repeat after a few improvisatory-like embellishments veers off into minor, and we are back in the B section presented in even darker harmonic hues before an even more varied return of A which even gestures toward B in the basses before the close. So not ABA but ABABA(B). The biggest surprise of the Symphony is the “Minuet” in G minor -- the relative minor of B-flat major. (Did we wander into a “Tragic” symphony?) The theme has the same triadic climbing motion as the opening of the Symphony while the pretty, middle-section trio has a falling motion. The fourth movement (“Allegro vivace” fast, lively) is another sonata form which somehow manages to combine the funny accents and pauses of a Haydn finale with the comic verve of a Mozart singspiel but with the melodic colors that can only be Schubert
Program Note by IPO Board Member Charles Amenta, M.D.