Schubert began composing the “Great” Symphony in C Major (D. 944) during the summer of 1825 and is presumed to have finished it in early 1826. Based on letters by Schubert’s friends, performances were lined up during that season, but they fell through. Schubert then gifted the autograph to the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in October 1826. The following summer, the Society produced orchestral parts, which are still held in the Gesellschaft archives. While no public performance occurred during Schubert’s lifetime, posthumous annotations in these orchestral parts hold clues to how nineteenth-century musicians performed the work. Based on new archival research, this paper focuses on these nineteenth-century performance choices and illustrates what they reveal about nineteenth-century attitudes towards Schubert’s symphonic structures. The paper will also examine conductor scores belonging to Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein, which are held in the archives of the New York Philharmonic, in order to reveal how certain modern-day performance choices came about. A comparison with tell-tale markings in Schubert’s own autograph will be used to propose what Schubert himself may have had in mind.

GUEST BIO

SUZANNAH CLARK is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She has written on the music of Franz Schubert, the history of tonal music theory, and medieval vernacular music, particularly on the songs of the trouvères and the thirteenth-century motet. She has published on theorists ranging from Gottfried Weber, Arthur von Oettingen, Hugo Riemann to Heinrich Schenker. Her book Analyzing Schubert was published in 2011. Material for her talk at UMich is taken from her forthcoming book Franz Schubert: The “Great” Symphony in C Major (D. 944), which is commissioned by Cambridge University Press as part of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series. She is also currently writing a book Music Theory: A Very Short Introduction for the Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press.