Octet in F Major, Op. 166, D. 803

Franz Schubert was born into a typical 19th-century family: music was simply part of everyday life. The composer began writing chamber music as a teenager, not because he was expected to be a virtuoso but to have new things to play with his family. He had two brothers who were accomplished violinists, his father played the cello, and Schubert filled out the quartet on the viola. Schubert was not thinking about anything beyond the walls of his own home when he composed this music, yet the early quartets display some of the characteristics that typify later masterpieces like the Death and the Maiden quartet, like frequent use of tremolo and dramatic key changes. Given the circumstances that led to his interest in chamber works, it makes complete sense that when Schubert was asked at the end of his life to whom he wished to dedicate his E-flat Piano Trio, D. 929, he responded, “This work is dedicated to nobody, save those who find pleasure in it.”

Schubert did write chamber music intended for more accomplished players, particularly between 1824 and 1828 in the last five years of his life. As he wrote to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser on March 31, 1824, “I have written very few new songs, but instead I have tried my hand at several kinds of instrumental music and composed two string quartets [no less than the great A-minor Rosamunde and Death and the Maiden] and an octet ...The latest news in Vienna is that Beethoven is giving a concert, at which his new symphony, three selections from the new Mass, and a new overture are to be performed.” (The works by Beethoven to which Schubert refers—all performed at the same concert—were the Ninth Symphony, the Consecration of the House Overture, and the Missa Solemnis.)

Commissioned by Count Ferdinand von Troyer, one of Beethoven’s students and chief steward to Archduke Rudolph, Emperor Leopold II’s youngest brother, Schubert’s Octet came to life in just a few weeks between February and March 1824. The first performance occurred privately in April at the home of one of Troyer’s friends in Vienna, with Troyer himself on clarinet and Ignaz Schuppanzigh, whose string quartet premiered nearly all of Beethoven’s late string quartets, as first violin. Schuppanzigh led the Octet’s first public performance in 1827, too. The complete score was not published until the late 1880s.

A clarinet player, Troyer asked Schubert for a work modeled on Beethoven’s popular Septet for Winds and Strings, and Schubert complied. The instrumentation is nearly identical—clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, and cello—though Schubert adds a second violin. He also retains Beethoven’s six-movement form, based on the 18th-century serenade. And like Beethoven, Schubert begins the outer movements with slow introductions and uses both the outmoded minuet and forward-looking scherzo forms. Schubert’s unique flair for drama is entirely on display throughout the hour-long work, however. In the final movement, Schubert incorporates a quote from his song, “The Gods of Greece,” a setting of a poem about loss and the restorative powers of music:

Fair world, where are you? Return again,
sweet springtime of nature!
Alas, only in the magic land of song
does your fabled memory live on.

During the Octet’s composition, Schubert was going through personal travails. As he divulged to a friend, “I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this makes things worse and worse instead of better.” As in “The Gods of Greece,” the “magic land of song” saves the day, and the dark mood of the Octet’s final movement ultimately gives way to light. As Schubert famously said, “When I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And when I tried to sing of sorrow, it turned to love.”