Nova Daily - 1 April 2026: Abtausch & Vorstoss

Hi!

It is September 1842. The Eighth Symphony by Franz Schubert was performed in the Vienna State Opera. The first movement has just finished, and the conductor prepares for the start of the second movement.

Two gentlemen attracted a lot of attention from the other attendants in their loge. These two gentlemen were there by high invitation, but didn't seem to be even mildly interested in the music being played that day. Instead, they were frantically moving wooden figures over a square wooden board.

Subtlety was not the middle-name of these two figures. They didn't even bother doing their wood-moving quietly, and the scrapes of their pieces over the wooden board became louder and louder. Likewise, the requests of their fellow audience members became progressively louder. In the end it affected the conductor to such a degree that the entire performance got derailed. The conductor turned around in anger, threw the score of the third and fourth movements into the auditorium, and stalked off the stage in utter bewilderment.

In the world of classical music, this incident has become infamous. The conductor, a well-respected Hungarian maestro, had felt like a pitiful loser that day. His failure to convey this beautiful orchestral work to the public in full quickly spread around Vienna, and then to the rest of the world of music. To his surprise, however, the audience had loved it. In his fury, the audience had felt the real artist, the real Schubert. Two movements without scherzo and finale. That's how it would remain from that point on. Never again would the third and fourth movement ever be played, until finally people had imagined that they have never been written. This Eighth Symphony would go down in history as Die Unvollendete (The Unfinished).

By loudly playing their game with wooden pieces over a square wooden board, two chess-playing gentlemen had changed the course of music history forever. These two chess-players were Eduard Abtausch and Dietrich Vorstoss.

Abtausch & Vorstoss

Eduard Abtausch was born in 1812. His father had died in the war between Napoleon and the European forces in 1814, and young Ed was adopted by the family Vorstoss. The family Vorstoss, which had close ties to the family Von Metternich, were wealthy and powerful. Thanks to Klemens von Metternichs connection to Napoleon, the game of chess had made its entrance in the Vorstoss mansion.

The family Vorstoss had a son Dietrich, was one year older than Eduard. The two boys became like brothers. One could hardly ever be seen without the other. They went to the same school, they enjoyed the same music, they read the same novels.

Close as the two boys were growing up, and loving and reciprocal as their lives have always been, they were also very different. These differences mostly showed up whenever conflict would arise. Dietrich was the older, taller, broader, and calmer of the two. He insisted that with a good campaign of driving opponents in a corner and physically domineering them by standing over them and taking away their escape routes, they would eventually relent. Eduard had a much more pugnacious temperament and was quick to provide for himself a reputation of flying off the handle whatever the occasion. As such, it often happened that Dietrich had to break up Eduard's brawls.

Marcus, the son of the neighbours, reached the age of puberty and developed a very fine instinct of how to become as insufferable a nuisance as the world had hardly ever seen since the days of Napoleon. Eduard had wanted to punch Marcus in the face, but Dietrich had shown a better way and stood intimidatingly over the troublemaker, which silenced him and made him retreat.

Thanks to father Vorstoss, the boys learned to channel their boyishly aggressive impulses through chess. In chess, too, the difference in temperament between the two boys became apparent. In a consultation game played in 1842 against Herr Ösisch, the head of the local newspaper, the following position was reached after two moves from both sides:

"We should punch that pawn off the board!" Ed said right away without thinking. "Let me take the card, write down the move, and send it back immediately. No further discussion necessary."

"Stop," said Dieter. "We have more interesting options, such as moving the pawn forward."

"But that gives such a closed position. That's no fun! I want to fight this out. Come on, head to head."

"But that gives such a symmetrical position with nothing to play for." 

"Rubbish! We can immediately attack them again with c2-c4 if they take back with the pawn."

"That sounds like a lot of risk."

"But what's life without risk? A boring process from the cradle to the grave."

Because the postcard with their answer would be due only in two weeks, they had a lot of time to analyse and discuss the position between themselves before taking a decision. Wherever they would find the time and the opportunity to do so, Ed and Dieter showed their findings.

"You know what?" Dieter said, "This Friday evening we have the Schubert concert in the Vienna State Opera. Why don't we take our board, pieces and analyses to the Opera and analyse our findings there?"

Because of the kerfuffle that took place at the Vienna State Opera, a definitive decision had not been reached. And so they sent Herr Ösisch a postcard with both moves, requesting that both players would continue independently and each would play their own preferred line.

Dieter was the first to finish his game:

The variation with 3.e5 caught on. It was realised very quickly that white's space advantage definitely counts for something. This variation would be named for Dietrich and enter the books as the Vorstossvariant. 

Ed took a bit longer to finish his game, but he won as well:

From this moment onward, the variation with 3.exd5 would be known in Austria and other German-speaking territory as the Abtauschvariant.

Epilogue

Eduard and Dietrich continued to play together for years. Their differences made that each developed a following of his own. Well after their deaths in the late 1880s, people still to this day refer to these variations as the Abtauschvariant and the Vorstossvariant, and many later openings that saw the light were named for these two gentlemen.

Eduard Abtausch and Dietrich Vorstoss are forever intertwined with chess opening theory. The last contribution of their lives was against this kid that used to be their neighbour. Marcus Kann had joined forces with the Englishman Horatio Caro and invented an opening that looked completely new but had an idea similar to the French. And in this Caro-Kann, too, they contributed an Abtauschvariant and a Vorstossvariant: