Those slow introductions to symphonies

Getting into a symphony:
Why does the composer take so long?

DAN COREN

Third in a series of articles about sonata-form.

Slow introductions to symphonies, when they occur at all, typically precede first movements only. And many pieces – Mozart’s 40th and 41st symphonies, for example– dispense with them entirely. But many of the most famous symphonies in the literature do begin this way, among them:

• Mozart’s 38th and 39th.
• Beethoven’s First, Second, Fourth and Seventh.
• Schubert’s Ninth.
• The great majority of Haydn’s London Symphonies.
• Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
• The first and last movements of the Brahms First.

But for a good teaching example, let’s consider Mozart’s 36th Symphony, the Linz. I’ve chosen the Linz (performed here by Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic) for several reasons:

—It’s a balanced and lucid example, even by Mozart’s standards of elegance, exemplifying all the possible sections of a sonata-form movement particularly well.

—The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia will perform it on January 26th and 27th.

—And, of course, it’s music I love.

Here's the way the Linz Symphony begins. These slow introductions tend to be, like this one, gorgeous, mysterious, majestic, elaborate, sensuous– in short, some of the best music in the literature. And, in terms of actual elapsed time, they take up a sizeable chunk of the movements they precede. But, for all their beauty and complexity, they’re analogous to the ceremonial pageantry that often precedes a sports event, like the warm-up lap at the Indianapolis 500 or the parade at the Kentucky Derby before the horses are brought into the starting gates. They make you anticipate the main event, but they themselves don’t belong to it. Unlike practically every other bit of musical material in the rest of the movement— some of which you get to hear three times– (sonata-form is the paradigm of economical recycling), this introduction, once it has run its course, is gone for good.

OK, OK— there are some exceptions: The first movements of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata and Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony, for example, bring back material from their introductions for dramatic effect. But these cases really stand out as special devices that make you think: “Oh, how novel! A quotation from the introduction.”

So the first critical juncture in the Linz is that magical moment when we cross the boundary from introduction to exposition. Here it is. Transitions like these can be understated, like this one; violently daemonic, as in Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111; exuberant, as in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony; or enigmatic and minimalist, as in Beethoven’s third Rasumovsky quartet, Op. 59 #3. But whatever their character, they communicate the sense that we’re finally under way.

For me, that moment of transition to the exposition is like a switch from blank verse to metric rhyme; it makes me feel that the sonata-form game clock is finally running. It’s at this moment that the form begins to have a narrative history. Next time, we’ll begin looking at how that narrative takes shape.

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To read the next article in this series, click here.