Forty years ago, as
a teenager eager to hear anything and
everything, I was easily influenced
by anyone who could provide me with
shortcuts to the greatest music, and
divert me away from trivia, or anything
which could wait another day. So I grew
up with the notion that Beethoven wrote
symphonies, but Schubert didn’t - not
even when he wrote symphonies!
One still hears these
arguments peddled. Schubert’s symphonies
(they say…) suffer from echoes of Beethoven,
slow harmonic tempi, oversized lyric
building blocks, and under-engineered
nuts and bolts holding everything together.
But the same can be said of Bruckner,
who, they might say…, made a virtue
of such ‘weaknesses’. And when, in the
B minor Symphony, Schubert so memorably
combines solo flute, oboe and clarinet
in unison to intone the opening theme,
his writing for orchestra is considered
impractical. Whereas Mahler, using exactly
the same combination in the final Adagio
of his Third Symphony, is ingenious!
Sitting through the
complete set of finished or probably-finished
symphonies, as one can do here, enables
us to make a more objective assessment.
No. 1 is the work of a boy-composer
growing up: it’s full of Mozartian and
Haydnesque charm and manners, as well
as exaggerated teenage gestures. The
voice of Beethoven - which Schubert
tried but found impossible to ignore
- can be heard in No. 2. This is most
especially the case in the flattened
seventh and quick move to the subdominant
in the opening bars - straight out of
the Prometheus overture! It can
also be heard in the explosive pianissimo-fortissimo
outburst in the finale’s coda - positively
‘ripped’ from the same place - even
the same context - in Beethoven’s own
Second Symphony. In the nicely-proportioned
No. 3 - which I consider the finest
piece before No. 8 - the young Schubert
finds his symphonic feet and speaks
with a new-found confidence. No. 4 reverts
to the neo-Beethovenian mood of No.
2, and the same structural weaknesses
and mismanaged resources. The perfectly-crafted
No. 5, with unmistakeable echoes of
Mozart’s great G minor, again harkens
back to earlier models. And the rather
faceless No. 6 shows clear signs of
Rossini’s influence.
The Unfinished
may have become a pop-piece, but is
it not one of music’s most noble masterpieces?
What other piece for orchestra of this
vintage shows such richness of harmonic
palette, such range of orchestral colour
and imagination, such sense of sheer
symphonic scale and ‘distance’? We can
of course answer these questions - let’s
not forget Beethoven’s Ninth, Oberon,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and the Symphonie Fantastique
- but we do tend to underestimate the
originality of Schubert’s conception.
And then there’s the
Ninth, whose ‘heavenly length’ reflects
not only its considerable number of
minutes and seconds, but also the vast
range of human emotions, textural devices,
instrumental effects and the harmonic
mystery tours it encompasses. Surely,
in the incomparable Great C major,
Schubert - by virtue of doing it his
way - embraced the previously-unembraceable
Beethoven?
Ever since his classic
Beethoven No. 7 with Beecham’s Royal
Philharmonic, back in 1960, Colin Davis
has been unimpeachable in this kind
of repertoire. Although his complete
Beethoven cycle with the Staatskapelle
Dresden (for Philips) suffered from
a general lack of momentum, and a middle-aged
spread of orchestral tone, this Schubert
set brings out all the playfulness of
the early symphonies, as well as the
warmth and lyricism of No. 8, and the
boldness and majesty of No. 9.
It’s true that Kleiber’s
Third has even more youthful energy;
Beecham’s Fifth offers even more grace
and lightness of touch; various Eighths
(from Wand to Mackerras) make rather
more of the music’s drama; and both
Solti’s and Gardiner’s Vienna Ninths
are - certainly superficially - more
dynamic, more exciting. But Davis has
the measure of this music. And, as well
as attending to every expressive detail,
his pacing and placing of the great
moments results in a strong sense of
symphonic structure. Schubert has No.
greater advocate!
A word about Davis’s
orchestra. In an age when orchestral
membership tends to change from day
to day, and of course members determine
an orchestra’s character, it is good
to savour the unsurpassed beauty of
sound and unanimity of purpose a pedigree
ensemble like the Staatskapelle Dresden
- the world’s oldest orchestra? - offers
us. Thanks to RCA’s truthful recording,
their playing brings joy into our living
rooms.
This is a uniformly
strong ‘library’ set, and I urge you
to hear it.
Peter J Lawson
Staatskapelle Dresden/Sir Colin Davis 
