Chapter One - Carl Czerny and Post-Classicism

Summary

“What would have happened, if …” is not a question that meets scholarly standards. But nevertheless, permit me to begin this scholarly contribution with the following question: What would have happened if Schubert had completed the symphony he drafted in October and November of 1828—in other words, immediately before his death? Even more: what if it had then immediately become musical common property? How would the history of music in the nineteenth century have progressed?

Pointless questions. Schubert did not complete this symphony, whose drafts anticipate almost everything of importance in the development of nineteenthcentury music up to Gustav Mahler. It did not become musical common property; the existence of these drafts has only become known since 1978. The history of music was thus spared this radical leap from Schubert to Mahler; it was able to develop slowly, and the question as to what would have happened with Schumann or Brahms is superfluous.

All the same, this pointless and unscholarly question can point out one fact quite clearly, and that is why we allow it here: the chain of individuals who championed (often radical) innovation in music in Vienna from preclassicism to Franz Schubert, and who were allowed to do so because they were thanked rather than blamed for those innovations, was broken with Schubert's sudden death. Like nowhere else, for some three generations, exponents of the avantgarde had lived in Vienna—although naturally not everything that was composed here belonged to the avant-garde. Experiments were made; new things were done. But only up to Schubert's last symphonic draft.

The last two exponents of the avant-garde were Beethoven and Schubert— despite all their differences, we name them together here. By the 1820s at the latest, Beethoven became a monument whose oeuvre was respected as a whole, even if individual works were not always understood. Although Schubert was performed much more frequently and was much more present on the musical scene than we have long been led to believe, those of his works that were too unusual were not able to find acceptance. To give only one example: the first public performance of his “Great” C-Major Symphony on March 12, 1829, at a “Concert Spirituel” in Vienna (after a private performance in 1827) was effectively ignored; it was passed over in such silence that to this day the legend can still circulate that this symphony was only discovered by Robert Schumann.