Gastein Symphony - Schubert

[Dave2002]

This weeks free download from Classic Select World contains a recording of a Schubert "oddity" - which I don't know - the Gastein Symphony.

https://www.classicselectworld.com/

See also https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-...rectedFrom=PDF

[Bryn]

This weeks free download from Classic Select World contains a recording of a Schubert "oddity" - which I don't know - the Gastein Symphony.

https://www.classicselectworld.com/

See also https://academic.oup.com/ml/article-...rectedFrom=PDF

Which 'Gastein' is it in the Big Box? The movement tempi do not appear to fit either the 'Great' C Major or the Grand Duo.

[Dave2002]

Which 'Gastein' is it in the Big Box? The movement tempi do not appear to fit either the 'Great' C Major or the Grand Duo.

Not sure. Won't be the Great C major.

You could always download it for not a lot, and find out. I'll check it later - but I don't know what to compare it with.

[Bryn]

Not sure. Won't be the Great C major.

You could always download it for not a lot, and find out. I'll check it later - but I don't know what to compare it with.

So far, I have been unable to sign up to the site. I keep getting error messages.

[cloughie]

So far, I have been unable to sign up to the site. I keep getting error messages.

Prohaska conducting VSOO arrangement of D812 Grand Duo Sonata!

[gurnemanz]

Prohaska conducting VSOO arrangement of D812 Grand Duo Sonata!

So not the mythical Gastein but still well worth a listen under Anna's grandad and VSSO. I got that Bach Guild Schubert download for 99 cents last year - I was robbed. I've always enjoyed the Grand Duo as piano duet and it was good to hear the orchestra version.

The download contains many interesting performances, including the E major Symphony - also not the Gastein but actually meant to be a symphony - called the 7th and in places sounding similar to the Great Ninth. It was orchestrated from Schubert’s sketches by Weingärtner and comes over very nicely in another 1952 recording, also VSSO, this time with Franz Litschauer.

Both those non-Gasteins are available in newer stereo recordings which I have not heard.

[Bryn]

Prohaska conducting VSOO arrangement of D812 Grand Duo Sonata!

Thanks. I wonder which of the movement tempo markings are Schubert's and which A. N. Other's.

[jayne lee wilson]

So not the mythical Gastein but still well worth a listen under Anna's grandad and VSSO. I got that Bach Guild Schubert download for 99 cents last year - I was robbed. I've always enjoyed the Grand Duo as piano duet and it was good to hear the orchestra version.

The download contains many interesting performances, including the E major Symphony - also not the Gastein but actually meant to be a symphony - called the 7th and in places sounding similar to the Great Ninth. It was orchestrated from Schubert’s sketches by Weingärtner and comes over very nicely in another 1952 recording, also VSSO, this time with Franz Litschauer.

Both those non-Gasteins are available in newer stereo recordings which I have not heard.

Schubert's D729 E Major Symphony actually is his 7th in order of composition, completed in sketch form with some instrumentation, but mysteriously left unfinished as with so much by the very fecund young composer.

Very attractive piece and essential listening for Schubertians wishing to understand his symphonic development which can be heard in the very persuasive Weingartner orchestration/arrangement in CD/lossless recordings on CPO (SWR/Francis) or Berlin Classics (Berlin RSO/Rogner - 2 CDs, usefully coupled with other late Schubert sketches etc with the Dresden Staatskapelle/Gülke)).
Both very good readings in excellent sound, you may feel the CPO has the richer more "Brahmsian" palette - about the only mild rebuke you may offer to the sound Weingartner creates here.
Newbould also took it up, but his arrangement sounds distinctly bareboned and underdeveloped by comparison, at least in the sole (rather uninspired) ASMF recording.

D729 knocks any arguments for calling the Great C Major 9th "No.8" into a cocked hat.
And is certainly more interesting than the supposedly mysterious "Gastein Symphony"......

[Braunschlag]

Not more unfinished please! Elgar 3, Mahler 10, Beethoven ‘10’ (what’s that all about?), next week I’ll be looking forward to Lief Segerstams incompletely.

[jayne lee wilson]

Not more unfinished please! Elgar 3, Mahler 10, Beethoven ‘10’ (what’s that all about?), next week I’ll be looking forward to Lief Segerstams incompletely.

All of these are vastly distinct in their stages of composition and/or orchestration. Some are actually complete as a sketch with some orchestration.

But it is vital to know the Schubert 7th in order to understand that amazing expressive journey from 5 to 6 to the new musical worlds of the 8th and the Great 9th, just as is the case with the Enescu 4 and 5 - so very different from his very elaborate and extended 2nd and 3rd.

Incidentally, what do you call the Schubert D759 and D944? 7 and 8, or 8 and 9?

[Braunschlag]

The entire completion business is redundant, pointless and conjectural. I’d rather hear what the composer wrote rather than a dry academic. Not for me thanks.

[mikealdren]

The entire completion business is redundant, pointless and conjectural. I’d rather hear what the composer wrote rather than a dry academic. Not for me thanks.

You have a point but I would not want to be without, for example, Mozart's requiem and Puccini's Turandot in completed versions.

[jayne lee wilson]

The entire completion business is redundant, pointless and conjectural. I’d rather hear what the composer wrote rather than a dry academic. Not for me thanks.

What "dry academic" do you refer to? Most of the "completions" (more accurately described as orchestration or arrrangement) we mentioned, including the Schubert, Mahler and those stunning late Enescu Symphonies were made by musicians and/or composers, deeply experienced and with a profound and arcane knowledge of the original composers themselves. (In Enescu's case, by a composer and close friend, like Tibor Serly with Bartok's Viola Concerto). Very little of it is "conjectural".

Maybe find your way to the CPO recordings of the Enescu 4 and 5, give them a go? You'll be in for a treat - perhaps even a true revelation...

[edashtav]

This is an abstract from Frederick Reece’s Oxford Lecture which was based on his Doctoral Thesis (it has become typographically challenged during transmission.)
Writing and Encoding
Frederick Reece (Harvard University)
Forging Schubert’s “Gastein”:
The Cold-War Quest for Truth in a Romantic Fantasy
For well over a century, Schubert’s “Gastein” symphony was the great white whale of nineteenth-century music. The mystique surrounding this missing composition began when Joseph von Spaun asserted in the Viennese press that his ailing friend had written “a great symphony at Gastein in the year 1825” which—although unknown to audiences—rightfully “belongs amongst the greatest works of the last century.”
In the 143 years that followed,the “Gastein” became a cultural obsession. Sir George Grove urged archivists across Europe to search every cupboard for the lost masterpiece while the Columbia Phonograph Company offered a $1,500 reward for its recovery. Yet it was not until 1971 that a set ofantique orchestral parts matching every specification for Schubert’s “Gastein” emerged from an attic in East Berlin. Or so it seemed.

This paper tells the story of how the “rediscovered” symphony rang false. Now universally considered a compositional forgery, in the 1970s and ‘80s the work was vehemently upheld as authentic by scholars in East Germany including Harry Goldschmidt. Western. musico plogists. , meanwhile, sought to use stylistic and material methodologies to repudiatenot only the composition, but also the authority of those in the East who claimed that it waslegitimate. Drawing on my own stylistic analysis of the symphony alongside original archival sources from the BundesarchivandStaatsbibliothekin Berlin, I situate this cold-war forgery as a key point of conflict in the struggle to control the authentic musical past of a fracturedAustro-German culture.

The full document is embargoed until 2022

Are we close to closing the GASTEIN FILES?

[Braunschlag]

What a shame you keep falling into the temptation of sweeping and inaccurate statements about things you scarcely know about...

Oh - I think I know more about that than you assume