You’d think Franz Schubert would get discouraged. He wrote eight or nine symphonies (we’re not absolutely sure), and never heard half of them performed.
He entrusted the greatest of these, which we call the Ninth, to a Viennese musical society, where it remained in a slushpile until ten years after Schubert’s death. Too long, they said, too hard to play. Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn rescued it, and we’ll hear it this Sunday.
