FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born January 31, 1797 in Vienna, Austria
Died November 19, 1828 in Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, D.485
I. Allegro
II. Andante con molto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto; Trio
IV. Finale: Allegro vivace
This concert is the first known performance by the Wichita Symphony.
In the first half of tonight’s program, we heard a work by Adolphus Hailstork that he wrote for a talented orchestra of high school musicians. Barber’s Knoxville presented a nostalgic look back at simpler times through the eyes of a child. Here, with Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, we hear a youthful work composed by the 19-year-old Franz Schubert.
Earlier this spring at the Wichita Symphony, we heard another work by Schubert the teenager – the Mass in G Major, composed in 1815. That year, cited by scholars as Schubert’s annus mirabilis (miraculous year), marked the beginning of Schubert’s prodigious output and included nine church works, a symphony, a string quartet, several Singspiele, and works for the piano. Always a lyricist at heart, he composed over 140 Lieder, including his famous Erlkönig (The Elf King) on a poem by Wolfgang von Goethe. Remarkably, Schubert wrote all of this music – about 22,000 measures in all – as a sideline to his principal occupation as a schoolteacher.
Schubert’s pace the following year did not slacken. His 1816 work included two symphonies, a Mass, three violin sonatas, several chamber works, and around one hundred more songs. He was still teaching school and taking the occasional lesson in counterpoint from Antonio Salieri. The Fifth Symphony heard tonight was composed in about four weeks and completed by October 3, 1816.
The Symphony features a smallish orchestra more in line with earlier symphonies by Mozart than the recent, larger scale of Beethoven’s symphonies, which Schubert likely knew and heard. One reason for this was practicality. Unlike Beethoven, who premiered his symphonies in Vienna’s larger concert halls, Schubert performed his music in private homes where limited space dictated orchestral size. Consequently, the Fifth Symphony is written for a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.
By 1816, with Beethoven’s presence still felt in Vienna, composers had not yet begun to absorb the impact and influence of Beethoven’s titanic works. Mozart and Haydn’s influences still held sway. In a June 13, 1816, diary entrance, Schubert wrote, “the magical notes of Mozart’s music still greatly haunts me.” And so it was that Mozart, gone for nearly twenty-five years, influenced the young Schubert at this stage of his career more than Beethoven.
Schubert and friends likely performed the Symphony in the fall of 1816 for a semi-private concert at the home of Otto Hartwig, a violinist who was also the orchestra’s leader. Schubert would have played viola. These house concerts, where Schubert’s music was often first heard, were known as Schubertiades among his network of friends.
There are no known reviews of the first performance. Decades later, Sir Donald Tovey described the Symphony as “a pearl.” The first public performance occurred after Schubert’s death on October 17, 1841, at Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt. The music disappeared shortly after that performance. The parts remained lost until two Englishmen, George Grove and Arthur Sullivan (the latter of eventual Gilbert and Sullivan fame), discovered the parts in Vienna among the possessions of Johann Herbeck, another one of Schubert’s friends. The manuscript score eventually turned up at the Royal Library of Berlin. A four-hand piano version of the Symphony appeared in 1872. This common format allowed the public to become familiar with symphonic works during the 19th century. A complete score and parts came out in 1882. The Boston Symphony gave the first known American performance of the Symphony on February 10, 1883.
Each of Schubert’s first four symphonies begins with a slow introduction. In this regard, Schubert follows a model established by Haydn for most of his symphonies and Beethoven for his first two. Here, in his Fifth Symphony, Schubert misdirects the listener. Beginning with a couple of elongated notes, as if to suggest a slow introduction, Schubert overlays a rapid scale passage indicating the real tempo to us. This scale resolves into the jocular first theme of the first movement.
Like Haydn and Beethoven, Schubert constructs his theme out of motives. The first is an ascending triadic pattern in the first violins characterized by a dotted rhythm and echoed in the bass. The second is a descending scale. What’s noteworthy is how Schubert uses these two motives to create an extended melodic theme for nearly twenty measures before repeating it. In this manner, Schubert is like Mozart, where a lyrical flow often seems to come from a vocal line. The appearance of the second theme will be pretty evident as it enters following a loud extension of the first theme separated by a rest. This new theme offers contrast but retains the element of the dotted rhythm.
The development section plays out much as we expect with a Classical symphony. Plenty of motivic play and harmonic tension drives the movement forward.
There’s a surprise when the music reaches the recapitulation signifying the return to the first theme. Typically, we would expect the first theme to return in the home key or tonic, which in this case would be B-flat major. Instead, the first theme is recapped in E-flat major, the subdominant key. Using a “false key” recapitulation as a humorous element is not unusual in Haydn and Beethoven. Still, they usually steer us into the home key after making their joke. Because Schubert’s theme exists as a self-contained melodic entity, the entire theme plays out in the subdominant key of E-flat. Finally, we move back to the tonic of B-flat major when we reach the second theme. This harmonic diversion may seem insignificant, but it raises the question of when is a tonic, not a tonic. Composers would explore that question throughout the 19th century as the foundations of harmony and tonality began to dissolve.
The second movement is an andante con moto (moderately slow but with motion) reminiscent of Mozart’s music, where contrasts of light and dark are common. Schubert’s gentle and lyrical first theme gives way to a darker second theme in a minor key. Schubert employs chromaticism to create tension and harmonic ambiguity. Schubert repeats the two themes adding some additional ornamentation, and concludes the movement with a final statement of the first theme in the rich context of the entire orchestra.
The third movement, a Menuet, looks backward to Mozart as a model. The Menuet, a popular choice for third movements in 18th-century symphonies, had largely fallen out of favor by 1816. In choosing the dance, Schubert alludes to, and nearly quotes, the Menuet of Mozart’s 40th Symphony, a work Schubert considered his favorite among Mozart’s works. Schubert’s reference to both Mozart’s Menuet and the fourth movement of the same symphony is, as the late pianist and author Charles Rosen notes, “a blurred echo of the past.” The key of the Menuet is in G minor, which retains some darkness we heard in the second movement, and the middle section Trio in G major offers a sunnier outlook.
The fourth movement is a romp in sonata form that could easily have been written by Mozart or Haydn thirty years earlier. There is some Beethoven-like bluster here with accented chords and dynamic contrasts. Rests frequently separate the themes and sections, some elongated by fermatas (‘grand pause”), a technique Haydn sometimes utilized. The pauses allow Schubert to present contrasts without a lot of transitory material and contribute to the good-natured feeling of the music.
Notes by Don Reinhold, ©2022