Curse of the ninth List of symphonies with names. Phil Paine. Retrieved 5 April London, England: Gramophone. Classical Net. American Music. University of Illinois Press. Scott Mortensen. Classical Notes. Peter Gutmann. The Brooklyn Rail. Classics Today. Retrieved 8 April This was year he contracted syphilis, which would eventually kill him in Musically, there was nowhere else to take the first two movements. The Unfinished Symphony is considered by many to be the first Romantic symphony because of its dramatic development and lyrical melodies.
He quit while he was ahead. In his correspondence and writings, we see Schubert regularly discuss other symphonies he wrote, but never the Unfinished. Share this article. Search StringOvation. Connolly Music Home About us Shop our brands. StringOvation Latest articles Submit a guest post. Subscribe to StringOvation. Northport, NY In mid-flow, just before you think the music's going to comfortably cadence again, Schubert pulls the rug out from under your ears - so to speak.
There's a breathtaking pause, and then a plunge into a scalding minor-key fortissimo chord. The rest of the first section stabilises the music's trajectory into G major. But that tranquility doesn't last for long, as Schubert composes another revelatory few bars that lead back into the spectral opening - if the conductor observes Schubert's repeat sign - as he or she should do - or on into the works' central section.
This central section confronts the ghost of the very start of the symphony head on. This is the Unfinished Symphony's chilling heart of darkness : the theme in the cellos and basses is brought from out of the shadows to be revealed with a devastating glare. Apart from some haunting reminiscences of the accompaniment of the serene second theme - now sounding all the more disturbing in this precarious context - the whole of the middle of the movement is based on that opening music.
Schubert conjures some extraordinary textures: the tremolo and slow chromatic ascent in the low strings that creates heartbreaking dissonance; the repetition of a sequence of ever-more intense phrases that builds up to a full, fortissimo encounter with the symphony's musical apparition, which in turn catalyses music of menacing energy and contrapuntal ferocity - before the movement returns to the oboe and clarinet theme we heard earlier.
The reprise of both minor and major-key themes finds new strangenesses in the way Schubert subtly alters what we've heard, as if the music were infected by the darkness we have experienced. The end of the movement is no less remarkable: that ghostly theme returns, but Schubert manages to wrest the music towards a B minor resolution instead of another existential exploration of its musical and emotional possibilities.
The second movement , in E major, is also in three beats to the bar, and many conductors take a similar if not identical tempo in both movements, which amplifies the strange sense of unity across both pieces. There are specific thematic and gestural connections between them compare the first cadence in the Andante in the bassoons with music you've recently heard at the end of the first movement , and on a larger scale, the movements are almost like negative images of each other: you've got a minor key first theme in the Allegro, but major-key opening melody in the Andante; a major key second theme in the first movement, and a minor key second melody in the second keeping up?
What's more, the second movement's minor-key theme floats above exactly the same gently throbbing rhythmic accompaniment that the first movement's second theme does - and the calm of the Andante's opening melody is yet another illusion, as it melts into weird keys and chromaticisms along the way.
And in a piece full of sleights of ear, the slow movement has some of the symphony's most discombobulating transitions.
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