A Forgotten Symphony Finds Its Voice Again
How a set of nineteenth-century parts in the library of the Evangelisches Stift Tübingen became a full score – and paved the way for the Austrian premiere of Franz Danzi’s Symphony.
While searching specifically for repertoire for our coming season, I came across a set of parts in the archive of the library of the Evangelisches Stift Tübingen that has probably been in few hands for decades: Franz Danzi’s Symphony in C major, Op. 25, printed in 1803 by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. I had the material digitised so that I could work with it.
Today, Danzi is known above all as a forerunner of Romanticism and as a champion of the young Carl Maria von Weber, while his own symphonic works remain almost entirely in the shadows. That is precisely what made the discovery so appealing: a work that mediates between the Mannheim School, in which Danzi grew up, and the Viennese Classicism with which we, as an ensemble, are so intensively engaged.
Musically, the symphony has a great deal to offer. Like Mozart’s “Jupiter”, it is in C major and features a fully worked-out fugue in the fourth movement. Its ending, with festive trumpet fanfares, is strikingly reminiscent of the close of the “Jupiter” Symphony itself – a closeness to Viennese Classicism that is audible without Danzi ever copying it.
What lay in Tübingen was not a score – but a complete set of individual parts. To make the symphony playable again, a score first had to be created from them.
That was the real work of the past months: transferring the parts, one by one, into a single score, checking the instrumentation, and – wherever copyists had erred in the print or in manuscript copies – identifying and correcting the mistakes: wrong accidentals, misplaced barlines, the occasional missing transition. Editorial work of this kind has a good deal in common with detective work: every discrepancy between the parts raises the question of whether it is an error, a deliberate variant, or simply wear and tear on the source.
As far as I can tell, the symphony has never before been performed in Vienna or anywhere in Austria. On 20 October 2026 it will finally be presented to the Viennese public in the Great Hall of the Musikverein, a setting worthy of it – as an Austrian premiere and as the result of an editorial undertaking that is very close to my heart.
In the coming weeks, I would like to report here regularly from the rehearsal room – with impressions, photographs, and the small discoveries that so often emerge only at the podium.