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 615 (Schubert) 615 and D 708A only survive as sketches in piano score. He returned to writing directly into orchestral score for his seventh symphony, although piano sketches exist for the eighth. These four unfinished symphonies thus show how Schubert was, as he stated in a letter from the mid-1820s, preoccupied with "planning a path to [write] a grand symphony [plans he would realize in the ninth symphony]", with his string quartets, octet and these unfinished symphonies as intermediate steps in this plan. The unusually large number of unfinished symphonies on the way to the ninth from the sixth show how preoccupied