Symphonies no. 3 and 8 unfinished

His greatest work was unfinished: his own life. And this was not only because, like so many of his brilliant contemporaries, he did not live beyond the age of forty. Franz Schubert was one of the most moving witnesses of the grandeur and longing in the heart of each man, chiefly because of his sense of the unfulfilled, of something in man that was never fully satisfied. This feeling accompanied him for the whole of his brief life, filling it with longing and at the same time forming a criterion by which he judged reality. (...)
His entire work, whether vocal or instrumental, bears the imprint of this feeling of restless search: ...and amid my sighs I ask constantly: where?/The sun no longer warms me./The flowers are withered, life faded, /and all words sound hollow. /Everywhere I am a stranger./Where are you, my beloved land?/Sought, imagined and never found?/Land, land green with hope,/Land where my roses bloom,/Where my friends are,/Where my dead rise again, /Land where my language is spoken, /O land, where are you?/I wander in silence, unhappy,/and amid my sighs I ask constantly: where?/The wind answers:/"There, where you are not, there is happiness". (...)
Schubert's legacy to mankind in the twenty-first century is a summing-up of the drama of existence: the possibility of contact with another world "beyond" during life on earth; in other words, the possibility of hope, nourished only by sure, tangible signs in the present: One thing of beauty should delight man for his entire life, it is true; but the splendour of this contact should illuminate all the rest.

(from The wanderer of the Absolute by Pier Paolo Bellini - excerpt from the booklet enclosed in the CD)