I just returned from a weekend in Newport full of music, laughter and friendship. What a great time!

The weather was beautiful. For November, it was delightfully clear and not cold.

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I was in town to play viola in the Newport Symphony. Our program consisted of two marvelous works: Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso, and Schubert’s Great Symphony in C. I’d like to share some thoughts about the latter.

Franz Schubert is one of my favorites composers. He died at age 31, yet left us a prodigious amount of music, some of which was not discovered and appreciated until well after his death; Such was the case for the Symphony in C.

Consider this photograph of the last measures of the last page of the viola part:

Those who read music may notice the number of measures: 1154 in total! Considering several lengthy repeats in the work, performing it can take nearly an hour. Some sections (e.g. wind and brass) may enjoy lengthy periods where they don’t play – called “rests,” which is especially appropriate for and appreciated by musicians in this work – string players such as myself enjoyed very few. We were exhausted by the sheer magnitude of the work, but played it with joy because it is such a rapturous work.

Although there are pages of repeated ideas and phrases within a section, I don’t find the work as a whole repetitive or overly long from a listener’s perspective. That being said, some enthusiastic audience members told me afterwards that they were exhausted – so emotional and great was the lengthy musical journey.

What boggles my mind is the thought of writing this thing, by hand – over 1100 measures’ worth of music. Now multiply that by the number of individual parts: 5 string parts, 8 woodwind parts, 7 brass parts, and timpani – 21 parts in total. That amounts to over 24,000 measures. So first you write the score. Then you have to write out the individual parts (for which you need multiple copies). Today, using computer transcription software that will still be a Herculean task. Hearing all that music in one’s head and writing it down by hand – I cannot imagine it.

I cannot find a photo of Schubert’s manuscript for this work, but here’s an image from his Symphony No. 8 (“Unfinished”):

There is a dual tragedy of Schubert’s brief life.

First, he never got to hear this great work performed. He struggled in relative obscurity and suffered poor health and poverty most of his short life. Appreciation for his musical genius didn’t arrive until he was already gone. Ten years after his death, Schubert’s brother showed Robert Schumann a copy of the work, and Schumann took the copy back to Leipzig where it was performed by none other than Felix Mendelssohn. Just imagine how much music Schubert wrote that was lost forever.

Moreover, one can only imagine what wondrous more music Schubert would have composed had he lived another 5 or 10 years.

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