When the orchestras during Franz Schubert’s time tried to play his Symphony #9, it proved to be very tricky for those tasked with performing it. As a result, when Schubert proudly handed over the piece to Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, (Organization of the Friends of Music) he received a payment in gratitude… but no commitment to perform it.
Then in December 1828, the Gesellschaft did at last agree to play a C major symphony by Schubert, it was not the ‘Great’ that the audience heard but his earlier Sixth, composed in the same key. Tragically, Schubert did not even get to attend this performance. Only days earlier, he had died at the age of just 31, leaving much of his music unpublished, in the safekeeping of his older brother Ferdinand.
And there it remained gathering dust in a trunk until the final months of 1838 when, during a stay in Vienna, Robert Schumann decided to pay Ferdinand a visit. ‘Ferdinand let me look among the treasures of Franz Schubert’s compositions that still found themselves in his hands,’ recalled Schumann in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1840. ‘The riches that here lay piled up before me made me shudder with joy…
Listen now as Herbert Blomstedt leads a performance of this amazing music:
){kind=link}