Felix Mendelssohn premiered Schubert's lost Great Symphony

Person: Felix Mendelssohn
Lived: 1809–1847
Field: Music
From: German

The story

Franz Schubert died in Vienna in 1828, aged only 31, leaving many of his works unperformed and unpublished. Among them was his last completed symphony, the Symphony in C major, now known as the Great to distinguish it from an earlier, shorter symphony in the same key. Sketched largely in the summer of 1825, it was unusually long and ambitious for its time. In 1836 Schubert's brother Ferdinand tried to have its final movement performed, but there is no evidence that a public performance took place.

In 1838, ten years after Schubert's death, Robert Schumann visited Vienna. At the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Ferdinand Schubert showed him the manuscript of the symphony. Ferdinand gave him a copy, and Schumann took it back with him to Leipzig, where his friend Felix Mendelssohn was director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Mendelssohn promptly prepared the work and conducted the first public performance of the entire symphony at the Gewandhaus on 21 March 1839. Schumann celebrated the event in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, with an enthusiastic article in which he praised the symphony's heavenly length, a phrase that has been linked with the work ever since.

Not everyone was ready for it. The long, repetitive string and wind parts were very difficult for the orchestras of the day. When Mendelssohn took the symphony to Paris in 1842 and London in 1844, the players refused to perform it, and in London the violinists are said to have collapsed in laughter during rehearsal. Mendelssohn persisted. The symphony was finally published in 1849.

The premiere was part of Mendelssohn's wider effort at the Gewandhaus, where he championed the great composers of the past alongside new music by Schumann, Berlioz, Niels Gade and others. He also revived wider interest in Schubert's music. Today the Great C major is regarded as one of the summits of the symphonic repertoire and is performed by orchestras around the world, a lasting result of two composers' generosity toward a third.