Carnegie Hall

In 2018, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in Schubert’s Mass No. 6. It was only the second time the ensemble performed the complete work in its history, following a series of concerts overseen by Robert Shaw in 1997. “After the performance, everyone said, ‘Oh my God, we need to do that again,’” recalls Welser-Möst.

The power of Schubert’s final Mass, so well known in his native Austria, was a revelation to American audiences discovering it for the first time. Ironically, this large-scale work, brimming with the composer’s glorious melodies, may have suffered from what it left out—namely, lines of text from the Catholic liturgical Mass that traditionally appear in the Gloria and Credo sections.

Prefacing this grand Mass are two “incomplete” yet thoroughly polished and satisfying works: Alban Berg’s Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. Written just over one century apart, Schubert’s symphony finds resonance and perhaps a conclusion in Berg’s masterpiece of the Second Viennese School.

“Alban Berg, I often say, is sort of the musical grandson of Franz Schubert,” says Welser-Möst. “When you play them back-to-back, you can hear that they’re related—that what Schubert didn’t, or couldn’t, finish, Berg carried forward. It’s always rewarding to show where something comes from, where something goes to, and that music of different times is connected.”