Symphony No. 8 (Schubert) by default incomplete), and the even more undeniable fact that Schubert had begun a third movement in B minor (leaving precisely 30 bars of fully orchestrated scherzo and 112 succeeding bars in short score), stands against the view that the two completed movements can legitimately stand alone. Reviewing the premiere of the symphony in 1865, the music critic Eduard Hanslick wrote: He ended by stressing that the symphony is among Schubert's most beautiful instrumental works. In 1927–28, Felix Weingartner—better known as a classical conductor and the first to record all nine Beethoven symphonies and the second, after Stokowski, to record
Symphony, D 708A (Schubert) for another seven years. British conductor and composer Brian Newbould, an authority on Schubert's music, has speculated that the symphony was left incomplete due to problems Schubert faced in orchestrating the sketch. In 2012, Newbould was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to complete the symphony. He had previously completed three other unfinished symphonies by Schubert (the seventh (D 729), eighth (D 759), and tenth (D 936A). At that time he had done work to make the existing fragments of D 708A performable, but this was his first attempt to go beyond the fragments and complete the entire structure. His completed