Schubert was nineteen when he composed his Fifth Symphony, begun in September 1816 and completed on October 3. A full-time, year-round schoolteacher, he was also taking composition lessons twice a week with the renowned composer Antonio Salieri and attending myriad musical events in Vienna. Yet he continued to compose at a remarkable rate—slightly less than during his “miracle year” of 1815—but still producing over 110 songs, two symphonies, a string quartet, and three violin sonatas.

Like his Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Fifth was composed for the private orchestra that had grown out of the Schubert family’s string quartet, in which he played viola. A significant shift in Schubert’s concentration from opera to instrumental ensemble music coincided with the orchestra’s move to the home of the conductor, Otto Hatwig, at the end of 1815. The impulse to compose his Fifth Symphony five months after completing his Fourth must have been sparked by the orchestra’s return to rehearsing after the summer break. Since there was enough space at the new venue for a small audience, Schubert may well have decided to join the listeners rather than lead the viola section as he usually did.

As with most of his orchestral endeavors, the first public performance took place many years later—in this case fifty-seven years later in London, conducted by August Manns on February 1, 1873; publication finally occurred in 1885.

The powerful influence of Beethoven’s symphonies—eight by then—flickered across the path of Schubert’s early symphonies, but more apparent is the younger composer’s absorption in Mozart’s style. He wrote in his diary on June 13, 1816: “As from afar the magic notes of Mozart’s music still gently haunt me. . . . Thus does our soul retain these fair impressions, which no time, no circumstances can efface, and they lighten our existence.”

The Fifth Symphony, using Schubert’s smallest orchestral ensemble thus far, sounds utterly Mozartean in its charming first theme, introduced by a brief in-tempo preface that figures importantly in the development section. The graceful second theme displays more rhythmic variety than was customary for Schubert but common in Mozart. The development shows the young composer completely at ease with the manipulating of motives, and the recapitulation presents his first departure from a perfunctory repetition of the exposition by the inclusion of glorious new material to conclude the movement.

Schubert’s lovely Andante con moto, following the experiment of his Fourth Symphony’s slow movement, alternates two contrasting sections to arrive at a five-part form. Again the inspiration sounds Mozartean—perhaps specifically the rondo of Mozart’s F major Violin Sonata, K. 377, as commentator Donald Francis Tovey suggests.

The Menuetto strides forth boldly in the manner of the minuet from Mozart’s great G minor Symphony, K. 550, and continues with a similarly gentle trio section. Yet Schubert’s treatment of his engaging, original themes adopts none of his predecessor’s celebrated irregular phrase-lengths or contrapuntal feats, and scholar Brian Newbold notes that both minuet and trio draw on the young composer’s opera Des Teufels Lustschloss (The devil’s pleasure palace), completed in 1814.

The spontaneous outpouring of merriment in the finale constitutes one of the great delights of this Symphony. Here Schubert employs sonata form with frequent ear-catching shifts between major and minor. The inspiration of Mozart set Schubert not on a path of slavish imitation but of perfecting his own original voice. The assurance and inventiveness of this jewel of a work makes it truly regrettable that his own generation did not recognize his symphonic genius.

—© Jane Vial Jaffe