Ruth Leon recommends: ‘Lost’ Schubert
Ruth Leon recommendsHere’s a nice ‘discovery’ story from American blogger and music journalist Alan Chapman via California classical music station KUSC.
When Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony finally came to light in 1865 (37 years after Schubert’s death), the news excited two Englishmen, musicologist George Grove and composer Arthur Sullivan (not yet half of Gilbert and Sullivan). Two years later they went to Vienna in search of the music Schubert had written for the play “Rosamunde.”
They visited the home of Dr. Schneider, a friend of the Schubert family. He gave them permission to look through a dusty cupboard.
And what did they find?…
Read on here.
Breaking News: The KUSC posting is five years old, and beyond that, Sullivan and Grove’s discovery has been well known since the 19th century.
Yes, but it’s still a great story of a wonderful find.
And the story never fails to raise the question, what else was there that was NOT found and revived? What else was in Hüttenbrenner’s closet after Johann von Herbeck found the “Unfinished Symphony?” Schubert’s brother Ferdinand preserved much, but what escaped his efforts?
Two years after the discovery in 1867, Grove recalled that he and Sullivan (with the assistance of Carl Ferdinand Pohl, archivist at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde) stayed up to two in the morning copying out the music. A later retelling three decades later added that, much to Pohl’s astonishment, “the two Englishmen finished up with a delicious game of leap-frog round the room in the early twilight.” Now THERE’S an image.