Octet (Schubert)

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The Octet in F major, D. 803 was composed by Franz Schubert in March 1824. It was commissioned by the renowned clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer and came from the same period as two of Schubert's other masterpieces, the Rosamunde and the Death and the Maiden string quartets.

Schubert's autograph of the Octet in F (D.803)

[edit] The music

Consisting of six movements, the Octet takes almost an hour to perform.

Adagio – Allegro – Più allegro ;
Adagio ;
Allegro vivace – Trio – Allegro vivace ;
Andante – variations. Un poco più mosso – Più lento ;
Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio – Menuetto – Coda ;
Andante molto – Allegro – Andante molto – Allegro molto.

The Octet boasts the largest scale for any chamber work by Schubert. It is scored for a clarinet, a bassoon, a horn, two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass. Schubert probably took Beethoven's Septet, Op. 20, as the model for his Octet and added a second violin to the instrumentation. The theme of the first movement is derived from Schubert’s song Der Wanderer.

[edit] 7th symphony?

Around the time he composed this Octet, Schubert informed his friends he was working on a new "Grand Symphony". As none of Schubert's surviving scores written in this epoch matches a "symphony" properly speaking, it was sometimes assumed that this Octet and/or the Grand Duo in C major (D.812, op. 140) might have been preliminary versions of the "Grand Symphony" Schubert mentioned in 1824.

Both of the chamber music compositions being complete in themselves, and of an exceptionally "symphonic" character, it was further supposed that Schubert never started the score for symphonic orchestra, or abandoned drafts in such sense in an early stage. The fact that many scholars numbered Schubert's next symphony No. 8, appeared nonetheless to express some hope to recover the full score of this 1824 symphony - sometimes referred to as the 'Gastein Symphony' - one day. (However, this numbering ignored the existence of the structurally complete but only partly scored Symphony in E which is nowadays accepted as No.7 in the Schubert symphonic canon.) It is now known that Schubert was in fact referring to starting work on the symphony that became No. 9. Schubert's letter of 31 March 1824 to his friend Leopold Kupelweiser states explicitly both (a) that he has completed the Octet and (b) that he "intend[ed] to pave my way towards a grand symphony in that manner", which seems a definitive statement that the octet and any as-yet-unwritten symphony would be unrelated except by their "grand" manner.