SCHUBERT AND THE HÜTTENBRENNERS: SOME PIANO RARITIES by Brian Newbould crat. […] Banowetz is very nicely recorded in this repertoire, which he plays with afection, complete technical command and a The Hüttenbrenner brothers, Anselm and Josef, were natives of Graz and friends of ine sense of its style.’ Schubert. Anselm (1794–1868), a prolific composer, worked first in local government at Graz, then in the civil service in Vienna. The eldest of three brothers, he first met Schubert in 1815 when they were both pupils of Anton Salieri, the Court Composer in Vienna. The youngest of the Hüttenbrenner brothers was Josef (1796–1882), likewise a civil servant but also an organist and dilettante composer; he first met Schubert in 1817 and did much to further his interests, acting as intermediary with publishers and promoters and making transcriptions for piano duet of some of his orchestral works. Anselm appears to have been a dear and trusted friend of the composer, meeting him frequently during Anselm’s years of study in Vienna. In 1818 Schubert inscribed a copy of his so-called Trauerwalzer (the Waltz in A flat, d365, No. 2) with the words ‘Aufgeschrieben für mein Kaffeh- Wein- und Punsch-Brüderl Anselm Hüttenbrenner, weltberühmten Compositeur’ (‘Written down for my brother in coffee, wine and punch, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, world-famous composer’). Anselm also took part in miniatures that leave one thirsting for more once their alloted ten concerts with Schubert as pianist. performance ฀฀฀฀฀sound ฀฀฀฀฀ In view of their evident camaraderie it is strange to find both brothers guilty of what would appear to be, at best, a sin of omission after their friend’s death. In late 1823 Schubert had sent to Anselm, via Josef, the half-finished score of his for the immense power of personality, oten expressed with B minor Symphony (the ‘Unfinished’), possibly as an expression of gratitude to the Styrian Music Society, which had awarded Schubert honorary membership and of which Anselm was director. Anselm and Josef recognised the quality of the work, Josef telling Josef Herbeck in a letter of 8 March 1860 that they considered it was the equal of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major and of any of Beethoven’s symphonies. Yet they 2 held on to it for decades, yielding it up – in circumstances which remain a matter of debate – for performance only in the 1860s. What came over the brothers? Whether they were incorrigible procrastinators or were consumed with professional jealousy, the truth may never be known. Schubert: Sonata in C major, d840 (‘Reliquie’), completed by Brian Newbould Although Anselm lived for several decades beyond Schubert’s death and was able to recognise in the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony a work of historic importance, many of his friend’s late works (fragments or not) will have remained unknown to him. One such piece is the unfinished Piano Sonata in C major, the last of his unfinished sonatas for the instrument. Schubert’s brother Ferdinand held the manuscript until 1839, when he passed it to Schumann. By 1861 it had reached the music-publisher Friedrich Whistling of Leipzig, who brought it out in that year. The subtitle ‘Reliquie’ (‘relic’) newly attached at this stage was presumably his. Schubert completed the first two movements, and left fragments of the remaining two. The work was clearly destined to be a work of symphonic proportions, though not quite as expansive as the ‘Great’ C major Symphony, begun some three months after the P Sonata, on his holiday-of-a-lifetime amid lake and mountain scenery near Gastein and Gmunden in Upper Austria in the summer of 1825. Schubert had set to work on the Sonata in April of that year and, if he set it aside when ideas for the Symphony came to him, it is understandable that it should have bitten the dust, since the composition and revision of the Symphony occupied him for a year and more. Anyone who has handled the weighty autograph score of the Symphony will wonder how a man worn down by syphilis and its treatment for three years, but at the same time actively involved in Viennese musical life and socialising with his friends, could have had such a vast project finally ready to offer to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde early in 1827. The first eight bars of the ‘Reliquie’ comprise four short ideas that provide the essential seeds from which the broader paragraphs of a spacious first movement will 3 germinate. Of special note is a rhythmic figure at the eighth-bar cadence, sounding like a throw-away gesture. It assumes a major and varied role later. For one thing, it provides the left-hand support for the second subject, itself a free distortion of the opening six-note idea. The key of this theme is B minor, the minor key on the leading-note of the home key – a remarkable and probably unprecedented choice for a second subject. After a clangorous tussle of ideas at the heart of the central development section, an extended coda ultimately returns the music to its unassuming roots. Schubert’s slow movement, an Andante in C minor, is concerned with the alternation and interaction of two ideas in the pattern ababa. The form is thus a kind of rondo, with a the recurring rondo theme and b a single recurring episode. But the persistence of traces of b as accompaniment to the returns of a knits the piece into something more intriguing than the plain concept of ‘rondo’ suggests. Schubert turns convention on its head in the following minuet, which he composed as far as the reprise within its second section. (He also wrote out the trio complete.) The traditional form for a minuet was binary – two sections, each repeated. But Schubert, instead of repeating his A flat major first section, presents a variation of it (only slightly more decorated) in the key a semitone above – that is, A major. What consequences might this have for the later stages of the minuet, one wonders? So far, the dynamic level has been piano. Now, in the second section, it rises to forte, and at the same time Schubert marks an accelerando. Anyone trying to complete the movement is now left with two problems. First, Schubert begins his reprise (all within the repeatable second section) not in him, Joseine Frohlich, Danish-trained the tonic, A flat major, but in the key in which he repeated his opening section, A major. This was a bold defiance of convention, which Beethoven would have admired; indeed, Schubert here out-Beethovens Beethoven. But at this point he breaks off. And yet the oten a guest. Standing, Johann problem soon vanishes, for Schubert’s known interest in mirror imagery (witness the onlookers may be (let to right) nineteen-bar palindrome in Die Zauberharfe and the palindromic outer frame of the A major Piano Sonata, d959) clearly implies that his reprise would have reversed the tonal plan of the first section and its repeat: A major would be followed directly by A flat 4 Europe. major – the closing key de rigueur in any case. (One day Schubert must be credited with a décrit son jeu comme « héroïque, ininiment talentueux, haut en couleurs, et feats of compositional bravura that go well beyond the old view of him as a receptacle for celui God-given pleasantries which passed through his head – with minimum intervention – to architecture be scrawled at once on the nearest café menu.) notamment The second problem presented by the minuet sketch is that Schubert’s accelerando récital is at no point cancelled: it would seem to suggest a steady acceleration right up to the Art of minuet’s final cadence. The likely intention was, rather, that the gathering of speed should soliste be arrested in time for the internal reprise within the second section, the solution adopted le in this recording. London Philharmonic en 1986. On a pu l’entendre sur les ondes de la BBC en direct ou en diféré, et The Allegro finale was to have been in sonata-form, despite the composer’s ‘rondo’ WFMT Radio Network a redifusé son interprétation du Premier concerto pour piano de Brahms heading, which became invalid as the sketch proceeded. The exposition is complete, and there is a page or so of the development section: that is all. The other large-scale works Mt written around this time may well offer clues: in the finale of the G major String Quartet également of the following year Schubert was heading for a similar degree of complexity and scale armi as when he set aside the ‘Reliquie’ finale. Keen ears may even fancy they detect the odd de kinship in rhythmic and textural ideas. The present version completes the development œuvre piano section, omits the first theme from the beginning of the recapitulation (as Schubert does Il if it has been extensively used in the development), and adds a coda with a there-and- back tonal excursion, thus anticipating both outer movements of the ‘Great’ C major de Symphony. Californie et de la Juilliard School. À l’âge de treize ans, il s’est vu atribué une bourse indéiniment One important consideration would be the length of the finished finale in relation son to that of the other movements and to that of Schubert’s other finales. What should one National expect to be the overall length of a Schubert finale whose exposition runs to 238 bars, Society of Arts and Leters. À quinze ans, il a remporté le Santa Barbara Symphony Young Artists and to what extent should the fifteen-minute duration of the first movement of the Reprints, ‘Reliquie’ influence the size of its finale? Long ago in my experience of finishing Schubert de symphonies I was confronted by one voice within me urging economy: the less I added George after the fragment broke off, the larger the proportion of the finished piece that would 2007 be by Schubert himself.