Unfinished Symphony (disambiguation)

Last updated April 01, 2019

For a musical composition commonly known as "Unfinished Symphony", see Symphony No. 8 (Schubert)
For a film based on this composition, see Unfinished Symphony (film)
For a 2005 medical documentary, see The Unfinished Symphony
For an article about various musical compositions, see Unfinished symphony

Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D 759, commonly known as the Unfinished Symphony, is a musical composition that Schubert started in 1822 but left with only two movements—though he lived for another six years. A scherzo, nearly completed in piano score but with only two pages orchestrated, also survives.

Unfinished Symphony is a 1934 British-Austrian musical drama film directed by Anthony Asquith and starring Mártha Eggerth, Helen Chandler, Hans Jaray, and Ronald Squire. The film is based on the story of Franz Schubert who, in the 1820s left his symphony unfinished after losing the love of his life. The film's alternate German-language version was called Gently My Songs Entreat. This title refers to the first line of the Lied "Ständchen" (Serenade) from Schubert's collection Schwanengesang, "the most famous serenade in the world", performed by Mártha Eggerth in the film.

An unfinished symphony is a fragment of a symphony, by a particular composer, that musicians and academics consider incomplete or unfinished for various reasons. The archetypal unfinished symphony is Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, written in 1822, six years before his death. It features two fully orchestrated movements. While it seems clear from sketches that Schubert set out to create a traditional four-movement symphony, this has been the subject of endless debate. Schubert wrote the symphony for the Graz Musical Society, and gave the manuscript to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in his capacity as its representative. However, Hüttenbrenner did not show the score to the society at that time, nor did he reveal the existence of the manuscript after Schubert died in 1828, but kept it a secret for another 37 years. In 1865, when he was 76, Hüttenbrenner finally showed it to the conductor Johann von Herbeck, who conducted the extant two movements on 17 December 1865 in Vienna, adding the last movement of Schubert's third symphony as the finale. Music historians and scholars then toiled to "prove" the composition was complete in its two-movement form, and indeed, in that form it became one of the most popular pieces in the late 19th century classical music repertoire, and remains one of Schubert's most popular compositions.

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