Rendering

a restoration of Schubert’s symphonic fragment in D major D936A

Allegro

Andante –

Allegro

Franz Schubert, the master of the “Unfinished,” left many works incomplete – songs, sonatas, quartets and, including the famous No.8 in B minor, as many as five symphonies. Born just over 100 years after Schubert’s death, Luciano Berio developed a very special relationship with music of the past. He not only made numerous arrangements or “recompositions” but also integrated earlier music into his own, most famously of all in the Sinfonia with its extensive quotations from Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and echoes of music by several other composers. So, in a way, Berio and the Symphony in D major, which Schubert was working on when he died, were made for each other. When Berio saw the sketches he was impressed by their “great beauty” and by indications of a new path in Schubert’s development. “Seduced by those sketches,” he wrote, “I decided to restore them, restore and not complete or reconstruct.”

The distinction he makes between restoration and completion or reconstruction is important. He rejected the idea of completing the symphony as Schubert himself might have done – and as, indeed, Brian Newbould convincingly has done – and chose instead to restore it as conscientious restorers of ancient frescos do, reviving the old colours but leaving empty patches where time has made the details too obscure to work on. Schubert’s sketches are written in short score on two staves with few indications of the intended instrumentation and with many, often large, gaps in the continuity. Filling in the missing harmonies and scoring Schubert’s material Berio could cope with; he did not attempt, however, to work out what Schubert would have written in the gaps. Here he supplied what he called “connective tissue” which would always be distinguishable as his own work by introducing them with the essentially non-Schubertian sound of the celesta and having them played pianissimo and at a distance. Although they contain numerous late Schubert references – to the Piano Sonata in B flat, for example, or the Piano Trio in the same key – there is no way that anyone could mistake these for original Schubert.

The sketches begin with what would have been the opening of the first movement, its forceful main theme introduced by strings and wind in unison, and extends to about half way through the exposition. The first item of “connective tissue” might come as a shock to those who do not know the work but it has its own poetry: “delicate musical cement” Berio called it. Anyway, it is effective in leading into the next sketch which includes further treatment of the main theme and then, introduced by cellos, the lovely second subject in A major. The transformation of this cello melody, after another connective item, into a stately chorale for trombones is one of the great moments of the Allegro before it accelerates into a brisk coda.

The opening bars of the slow movement are missing but Berio’s discreet introduction slides easily, by way of an accompaniment figure, into the the expressive main theme. It is presented in B minor by the oboe with a bassoon counterpoint and, later, Brucknerian comments from the horn section. There are three further connective interventions here, after the first of which a melody of near Elgarian tenderness is awarded by Berio to a solo clarinet. The last intervention replaces the missing closing bars of the movement.

The third movement, where scherzo and finale functions are combined in a kind of rondo form, follows without a break and with a loud pizzicato. After Berio’s first connective item, as after most of the others, attention is captured by the radiantly cheerful rondo theme. The special virtue of that theme, apart from its sheer tunefulness, is that it has such a distinctive profile that whatever contrapuntal treatment is applied to it – in a variety and in an abundance never before lavished on a Schubert symphony – it retains its irresistible buoyancy. The ending is Schubert’s, but only just.

The first two movements of Rendering were completed in 1989, the third movement a year later, and the first complete performance was given by Riccardo Chailly and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1990.

Gerald Larner © 2012