Whatever happened to symphonies? (1st comment)

The Age of the Symphony can be precisely dated. It began in 1759 with Haydn's first symphony, and ended in 1971 with the 15th of Shostakovich, a work that, with its many quotations from the symphonic tradition, was not only personally elegiac (Shostakovich was gravely ill and would die four years later), but an elegy for the symphony itself.

To be sure, symphonies have been written since. Shostakovich's pupil Alfred Schnittke wrote eight of his own, the indefatigable Alan Hovhaness more than 70, and even Elliot Carter composed a Symphony for Three Orchestras. Witold Lutoslawksi's last two symphonies were also well received. But few composers these days seem willing to give the title of "symphony" to their works, and none I know of seems to regard writing a symphony as de rigueur, a rite of passage for anyone seeking to cultivate a serious musical reputation.

The symphony was and centrally remained an Austro-German creation. Over time, it developed important outliers in Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and the U.S. It never really caught on in France, and was almost ignored in southern Europe. Debussy and Ravel never wrote one, nor did De Falla or Respighi.

But the German tradition dominated concert halls (themselves a Nordic phenomenon). After Beethoven, the symphony became the centerpiece of most orchestral programs.

Trial and error

The classical symphony, as defined by Haydn and Mozart and redefined by Beethoven, was a work in four independent movements, typically a sonata-form allegro (sometimes with an overture), a minuet and trio, a slow movement in song form, and a rondo finale. Beethoven substituted the scherzo for the minuet and trio, but with the same A-B-A form.

Sometimes the order of the second and third movements was transposed (to this day there's no consensus on how to play the inner movements of Mahler's Sixth). Schubert's two-movement Eighth Symphony was so unorthodox that commentators dubbed it "The Unfinished," although it's obviously quite complete as a work of art.

Later, the two-movement form (as in Liszt's Dante Symphony, and Prokofiev's Second) became accepted. So did a variety of other arrangements, and symphonies ranging from a single movement to no fewer than 11 eventually appeared.

Beethoven's drama

The classical symphony mutated into the Romantic version in the early 19th Century, with Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique serving as the most obvious point of departure, although Beethoven was the indispensable precursor. With Beethoven, the symphony ceased to be a suite of contrasting movements obeying certain structural forms, and became a drama. The program symphony and the Leitmotif, transferred from Wagnerian opera, became the characteristic mode of the late Romantic symphony, although the older Beethovenian model persisted.

Classical symphonies had sometimes carried subtitles indicating distinguishing instrumental effects (Haydn's "Military" and "Drumroll" symphonies), or honoring certain cities or personalities. Romantic symphonies were subtitled to indicate unifying dramatic elements ("Titan," "Resurrection," "Pathétique"). Haydn's London Symphony simply denoted the source of his commission; Vaughan Williams's London Symphony was intended as a portrait of the city itself.

Competition emerges

As the classical symphony climaxed for some music lovers with Beethoven's nine in the early 19th Century, so the Romantic symphony does for many today with Mahler in the early 20th Century. Beginning with Liszt, the symphony had a strong competitor in the tone poem, typically a single-movement orchestral work of dramatic and sometimes overtly descriptive character.

Tchaikovsky and Sibelius alternated between these two forms, and Sibelius took the inevitable step of condensing the symphony into a single-movement work. He also introduced the idea of unfolding a principal theme from a single germinating phrase over the course of an entire symphony. This seemed to some critics a radical departure, although it had been anticipated in the overtures of certain classical-era symphonies.

Rich new variation, until…

In short, the symphony showed itself to be a protean genre capable of rich variation and development. By the 20th Century the symphony could look backward as well as forward, as in the neoclassical works of Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Hindemith wrote symphonies in both neoclassical and post-Romantic idioms. Shostakovich showed how Mahler could be extended in Modernist directions.

Nor was serialism (itself a neoclassical form) inimical to the symphony; Anton Webern wrote a symphony, although what he believed would be a full-length work played out at roughly nine minutes.

As the symphony metamorphosed, the lines dividing it from other musical forms blurred. Richard Strauss called some of what were plausibly symphonies tone poems, and vice versa. Mahler decided to call Das Lied von der Erde a song cycle instead of his Ninth Symphony, partly for superstitious reasons. Shostakovich called a song cycle for soprano, bass, strings and percussion his Fourteenth Symphony. The five-movement orchestral composition for which Bela BartÓ³k invented the name Concerto for Orchestra was surely a symphony by another name.

The "'nine' ideal

Bartok never did write a symphony, although he composed concertos and string quartets without qualm. Several other major 20th-Century composers also eschewed the symphony, and Stravinsky, Hindemith and Britten, though they wrote four symphonies apiece, never numbered them. They seem to have consciously repudiated the idea of symphonies as dramatic series. The Beethovenian ideal of nine symphonies— a burden on Bruckner and Mahler— was not for the Modernists.

Sibelius halted at seven, although an Eighth Symphony was long rumored and even announced. Glazunov stopped at eight in 1906, and when he tried to write a ninth a quarter century later, he got no further than a single movement. Shostakovich got his ninth out of the way in his 39th year, but Vaughan Williams only completed his ninth in his 85th, and died before he could hear it.

In short, at some point the symphony came to symbolize not something capable of renewal and extension but the dead hand of the past. Luciano Berio's once much-praised Sinfonia, with its pastiche of quotations from Mahler and others, seems now a parody of the form. Audiences may still love their Beethoven and Brahms, if not their Berio, but contemporary composers won't oblige them.

An AIDS symphony

The only symphony of the past 20 years that caught on, at least for a time, was John Corigliano's symphony dedicated to AIDS victims. Its popularity was due not so much to any intrinsic value in the score as to the AIDS constituency and the hunger of audiences for the kind of public statement the symphony used to provide.

It's surely odd that the symphony is the only classical form that seems on the verge of disappearing in our time. Beethoven was a tough act to follow— just ask Brahms— but many composers did follow him, and much splendid music was written in the symphonic form in the century and a half after his death. Shostakovich seems to have felt that something was coming to an end in him, but it's too late to ask him why.

Our art seems to shy away from grand statements now, but also from effusively personal (I don't mean narcissistic) ones: No Beethoven, but also no Tchaikovsky— or, for that matter, Chekhov.

Whether we live in a decadent era or merely a fallow one remains to be seen. But the death of the symphony, Western music's supreme form, may turn out to be the canary in the coal mine.

Anyone for some Haydn by the fire?♦


To read a reply by Dan Coren, click here.
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