When Josef sent two bills for services rendered, Schubert was in failing health - having contracted syphilis - and in such dire financial straits, that he apparently handed over his Symphony No 8 manuscript in lieu of payment. The precise reasons are unclear, but professional ties ended.

Prof Bodley said that Josef had worked hard for Schubert over a couple of years, but that the composer came to despise him as dishonest and “almost repugnant”, as he told an associate. What we have is not an unfinished symphony but a fair copy which was once complete, but whose last two movements became separated and lost.”įor a forthcoming major new biography, titled “Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer”, she analysed extensive evidence suggesting that the manuscript came to harm while in the hands of Schubert’s former secretary Josef Hüttenbrenner and his composer-brother, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who both acted suspiciously. Noting that it has a cover sheet bearing the city in which it was composed and a date - Vienna, 30 October 1822 - as well as Schubert’s signature, she said: “Schubert only wrote title pages for complete works. Now Lorraine Bodley, professor of musicology at Maynooth University in Ireland and one of the world’s foremost authorities on Schubert, argues that the surviving manuscript is in fact a fair copy and that Schubert only produced such copies for finished compositions. Why he never finished it has been one of music’s great unanswered questions and there have been various attempts by other composers to complete or adapt it. Although all that survives of the masterpiece are the first two sublime movements and some fragments. Symphony No 8 is one of the best-known incomplete pieces of work in musical history.

Instead, its missing pages may have been among manuscripts that were destroyed by a vengeful assistant with whom he had fallen out, a leading musicologist has concluded. Listen to the best of Schubert on Apple Music and Spotify.Franz Schubert did not leave his ‘Unfinished’ Symphony unfinished before his death in 1828, aged just 31, according to new research. However, after his death, his works were championed by a number of prominent German and French Romantic composers, and he became recognized as one of the greatest composers of Western classical music. During Schubert’s short lifetime, appreciation of his music was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna. Though chamber works like the ‘Trout’ Quintet, the Octet and the B Flat Piano Trio radiate charm and cordiality, the A Minor Sonata, the Winterreise song –cycle, and the ‘Death And The Maiden’ String Quartet vividly illustrate the composer’s tendency to depression and despair. In the 1860s further orchestral masterpieces such as the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and the C Major String Quintet received their premieres. The discovery of his wider output began in 1839, when Robert Schumann came across the manuscript of the ‘Great’ C Major Symphony, then unperformed. In his lifetime, Schubert was known for his songs, part-songs and shorter piano pieces. An image of a happy-go-lucky bohemian lingered well into the twentieth century. His early death, at the age of 31, inspired a welter of sentimental myths. His was a short, brilliant life, spent almost entirely in the city of Vienna. He composed prolifically, writing music in almost all of the major genres, and his songs set a standard that was unsurpassed for more than a century. Described by Liszt as “the most poetic of composers,” Franz Schubert became the quintessential composer of the early Romantic period.

Schubert composer