Beginnings

The influence of the Hapsburgs stretched far and wide, geographically as well as culturally. Vienna was a cultural crossroads and acted as a magnet for composers from parts of Germany, the Czech lands, present-day Slovenia and northern Italy. In the eighteenth century the region of Lombardy was a Hapsburg dominion and this goes some way towards explaining the early stylistic development of the symphony in Vienna, which owes much to the three-movement operatic overture of the type found in the work of Leo, Sammartini, Jommelli and Galuppi (this repertoire is considered in more detail in chapters 3 and 6). Their overtures during the 1740s and 1750s typically feature in their opening movements a clearly coordinated approach to thematic and tonal statement, contrast and return in which uniformity of baroque rhythmic patterning has been sacrificed for an overall symmetry of four- and eight-bar phrase and cadence schemes delineated by relatively slow and regular harmonic rhythms and an almost stereotypical functional hierarchy within the orchestration (leading melodies stated by the upper strings, perhaps reinforced by a pair of oboes, to which an energetic bass line of lower strings – perhaps with bassoon, though not necessarily a sixteen-foot string bass – acted as a counter-pole with a harmonic filler often supplied by long notes in the horns, doubled, with a dash of rhythmic activity, by the violas). While binary designs in the first movements of Italian opera overtures are still numerically in the minority (behind ritornello forms) by mid-century, such traits made no small impact on contemporary Viennese symphonists.

Contrast between two principal themes is particularly common in the work of the Italian-trained Georg Christoph Wagenseil, whose early career in Vienna was substantially as an operatic composer.⁴ Almost all of Wagenseil’s symphonies are in three movements, and the fact that many were published widely (both in France and England) shows that their appeal transcended the local circumstances of their production for the court of Maria Theresa. Among such works are his Six Simphonies a Quatre Parties Avec les Cors de Chasses Ad libitum . . . Oeuvre III . . . (Paris, c. 1760). At the foot of the title page is the comment ‘On vend les Cors de Chasses séparément’ – a token of the relative hierarchy within the orchestral texture that was to remain fundamental to the conception of the Viennese symphony for some years to come. Perhaps their popularity rested partly on their relatively slight, yet convincingly proportioned dimensions, especially in respect of thematic recapitulation, partly on the catchy and unpretentious minuet finales with which many conclude.

Wagenseil, court composer from 1739 until his death, was a crucial figure in the development of the symphony.⁵ He composed over seventy such works, the majority of which are in three movements: fast–slow–fast (typically a 3/8 time or 3/4 time minuet). In terms of formal organisation, he favoured full, rather than curtailed, recapitulations, allowing space for thematic and tonal contrast sometimes featuring subdominant recapitulations and digressions to the minor mode. That suggests a forward-looking mindset (along with his adoption of a galant idiom, especially within the central slow movements), which had consigned the undifferentiated surface and harmonic rhythms of baroque ritornello practice to the past. Ultimately, Wagenseil achieved a convincing level of segmentation within his movement forms that was to bear further fruit in the symphonies of later Viennese generations.

Wagenseil’s Viennese contemporary Georg Matthias Monn (1717–50) was perhaps less influential, both internationally and locally.⁶ None of his symphonies was published during his lifetime, though that is not a reflection of their general quality, which is comparable with Wagenseil, especially in the design of first movements, which frequently have two clearly defined and contrasting themes, a clear sense of periodic phrasing and tonal logic (including, as in Wagenseil, excursions to the minor mode) and full recapitulations. Monn’s first-movement forms arguably feature a more strongly defined developmental purpose to the material immediately following the central dominant or equivalent cadence than those of his contemporary. Monn is credited with composing the earliest-known four-movement symphony (in which the minuet comes in third place). This work in D major, dating from 1740, is however the only four-movement symphony in Monn’s surviving output of sixteen and although it survives in autograph, the designation ‘sinfonia’ is in a later hand. It must therefore be regarded as atypical, and while many of the emergent features of what may loosely be termed the ‘Viennese classical style’ are to be found in the symphonies of Monn and Wagenseil, the four-movement model apparently arose in Mannheim, where it was gradually established in the symphonies of Johann Stamitz between 1740 and 1750,⁷ works widely circulated in print across musical Europe and ultimately influential on Viennese composers too.

Developments

So far the contribution of what may be termed the ‘first-generation’ Viennese symphonists has been investigated through an assessment of constructional features, especially first movements, the organisation of which may be read in part as a record of advancing coordination in the handling of internal elements, and in part as a record of transmission of material between different genres (opera overture, but equally church sonata and partita, to symphony). That complex generic trace reflects something of the relationship of the composer with his material, either on a point-to-point scale or on a broader sweep of (usually three) successive movements. But whether constructional features such as the separation of thematic presentation into two contrasting aspects, or the coordination of thematic return with tonal return were dictated in any sense by the circumstances of their presentation in court, chamber or church we may doubt. At this stage in its development, performance settings for the Viennese symphony did not determine it compositionally to a strong degree. That is to say, for the earliest Viennese symphonists, no stable tradition of listening determined in advance their manipulation of musical materials as a response. By contrast, effects such as Haydn’s use of high horns in his Symphony No. 60, the shocking fortissimo chords in the Andante of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony, No. 94, Mozart’s theatrical late recapitulation of the opening theme (premier coup d’archet) in the first movement of the ‘Paris’ Symphony, K 297, Beethoven’s exhilarating recapitulation of the main theme over a dominant pedal in the first movement of the Symphony No. 7 – all of these are rhetorical elements of classical symphonic language and derive from usage in a concert situation in which rhetoric was expected by attentive listeners. In 1760 that was still not really the case. On the title page of Wagenseil’s Op. 3 symphonies of c. 1760 referred to above, the four (string) parts are sufficient on their own without the two horns, whose parts could be purchased separately and therefore optionally. Clearly in such a context the contribution of the horns is not so essential to the effect as it was some forty years later in the first-movement recapitulation of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Wagenseil’s musical materials do not exist in an essential relation with their representation in sound; in Beethoven’s they most assuredly do. That observation is an interesting marker of generic difference (and distance travelled).

What we may establish as generic traits of the symphony in Vienna by c. 1760 include:

1. 1. A tendency to derive first-movement structures from binary form models, rather than ritornellos, usually involving at least two contrasting themes, both of which are recapitulated, and negligible ‘development’ of material immediately after the central double-bar.

2. 2. An emerging recognition of the importance of key contrast and the vital role of cadential punctuation in achieving this; clear separation between different kinds of thematic functionality, contained within a steadily moving harmonic rhythm; symmetry and proportion as regulative elements of the structure, which operates in an interconnected way on the levels of local phrase, sentence and paragraph. Contrast, rather than uniformity, became a key element of coherence.

3. 3. A succession of three (fast–slow–fast) rather than four movements, the third (final) movement often resembling a minuet: short, unpretentious and generally in binary form.

4. 4. A presumed hierarchy of orchestral functions, in which winds are secondary to strings, and in which horn parts are often dispensable. At this stage, details that were soon to become relatively standard, such as the four-part string basis (the bass part comprising cello, string bass and potentially a bassoon), supplemented by a pair of oboes (or flutes), and a pair of horns, were still in flux; Wagenseil’s published symphonies include his Op. 2 (1756) entitled ‘trios en symphonie’ (i.e. trio-symphonies for two violins and bass).

At this point in its development, the Viennese symphony as a genre exists somewhere between internally conceived constructional boundaries on the one hand and a plethora of contrasting performance contexts on the other. The former are emerging into quite clear patterns. By contrast, the latter must surely have detracted from the establishment of a clear generic focus. There was, as yet, no single institutional context for its presentation, and what we may call the ‘practice of public reception’ counts for a lot in this regard. While the expressive rhetoric of the later Viennese symphony was significantly shaped in the concert hall, presentations of the works of Monn or Wagenseil and their contemporaries within courtly, and primarily social, contexts tended to diminish recognition of an independent generic value. For instance, in a performance of a symphony as a kind of background music at a Viennese banquet, any guests who were paying careful attention, however fleetingly, to the symphony would probably have related what they heard to their existing social experience of music, and the likeliest connection would have been with the opera overture. Thus, their reception perspective is not likely to have exerted any strong generic impetus upon symphonic development. Likewise, the performance of symphonies – for example, the four extant Sinfonie Pastorale of Leopold Hofmann (1738–93), or his small-scale B-flat symphony of c. 1763 (Badley B♭1)⁸ – within Catholic liturgical contexts (in which the focus is on the celebration of the Eucharist, to which, momentarily, the music is a background) will not have assisted the symphony’s generic separation from the church sonata, from which, in formal terms, Viennese symphonies trace some of their material ingredients. Moreover, performance practice impinges strongly on reception: surviving (usually single) sets of manuscript playing parts, for instance in monastery libraries, repeatedly hint that the numbers of strings involved in performances of symphonies in such contexts were small (sometimes even one to a part), suggesting that there was no strong distinction to be made between a symphony and other genres of predominantly string chamber music. For example, when he first joined the musical establishment at Esterhaza (1761), Haydn’s orchestral complement amounted to a total of thirteen to fifteen players: six violins, one viola, one cello, one bass, two oboes, two horns and a bassoon (some flexibility existed within this scheme, since most of the players could offer more than one instrument: a flute, for instance is employed in Symphony No. 6, Le Matin). Subsequently, during the 1770s, the size of the Esterhaza band increased, and there are documented performances of symphonies in Vienna by the Tonkünstlersocietät (founded 1771) with sizeable numbers of performers. But the link between the symphony genre and chamber music persisted remarkably long. At the end of the century, Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies were subsequently issued in various chamber-music arrangements by Johann Peter Salomon (most popularly for flute, string quartet and piano ad libitum). The difference between this situation (in which Haydn’s symphonies could still be a chamber-music experience) and the looser generic situation of the 1750s was that these were clearly adaptations for domestic purposes of something originally experienced in a public concert setting and whose expressive parameters were decisively dictated by that original setting. In the case of the early Viennese symphony it is not so clear from the music that there was any or much difference between a domestic and any other imaginable forum of presentation in the first place.

All of this prompts the realisation that we must look elsewhere for reception stimuli impinging upon the development of the Viennese symphonic genre. Arguably, this is to be found in an examination of influence. The institutional framework for musical instruction in eighteenth-century Vienna revolved around the choir schools (for instance, at St Stephen’s Cathedral, or the Michaelerkirche) and, ultimately, it was centred on the personnel of the Hofkapelle. Among the more important connections are these: Fux (1660–1741) was Wagenseil’s teacher; in turn Wagenseil taught at least one member of a later generation of Viennese symphonists, Leopold Hofmann; Dittersdorf’s (1739–99) teacher was the Imperial Kapellmeister, Giuseppe Bonno (1711–88); Dittersdorf is said to have contributed to Johann Vaňhal’s (1739–1813) musical training after the latter had moved to Vienna in 1760–1; Josef Leopold Eybler (1765–1846) trained initially at St Stephen’s, and subsequently with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809), who had received his training in the choir school of the Augustinian monastery at Klosterneuburg and subsequently as a pupil of Monn; Albrechtsberger (revered by Mozart as an organist) became a colleague of Hofmann, succeeding him as Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s in 1793; his most famous pupil was Beethoven (from 1794, his previous teacher, Haydn, having left Vienna temporarily for his second London visit). In such a close-knit environment, it is understandable that the generic hallmarks of the Viennese symphony might to a large extent have been determined internally, in a progressive, influential dialogue between professionals working with the materials of their symphonic craft and defining the genre constructionally from within. That ongoing dialogue bore fruit in the increasing sophistication with which segmented formal functions within movements (especially first movements) are handled in the work of, for instance, Hofmann, Ordonez, Vaňhal and Dittersdorf. This ultimately led to a less casual relation between the different movements, in particular to a balanced conception in which the finale was regarded as providing a firm sense of closure to the three- (or four-) movement work, a kind of counterpole to the opening movement. As a result, the finale was now far less frequently in binary form, longer, and tending towards rondo structure, or, from the 1770s, sonata-rondo (in which sonata form maps onto the tonal logic of the refrains and episodes), and occasionally fugal types or even themes and variations.

Understanding this journey is not without its frustrations, principally because the surviving sources do not allow us to piece together a reliable chronology. Almost half of Leopold Hofmann’s fifty symphonies – a significant number of which may have been primarily intended for liturgical use, to judge from the quantity of sources surviving in monasteries such as Göttweig – have four (not three) movements; he was among the earliest of Viennese composers to adopt this expanded outline (though we should remember that some of these are in a slow–fast–slow–fast sequence and that others are effectively three-movement works with slow introductions).⁹ More contemporary sources survive for Hofmann’s symphonies than for any other composer of the era save Haydn and Pleyel (like those of his teacher, Wagenseil, Hofmann’s symphonies appeared in print in Paris; four were published there by Sieber in 1760, for example). But a chronology for his symphonies is not easy to establish with certainty, and it is not safe to assume that, for instance, his three-movement works were superseded by four-movement ones. Perhaps the innovatory aspect of a four-movement plan contributed to their popularity, but it is perhaps their sure command of texture and form that guaranteed their wide appeal. Concertante elements are occasionally found, for example in the F major symphony of c. 1760 (Badley F2), a three-movement work whose second-placed minuet features a central trio specifically for solo viola, cello and bass, contrasting with surrounding tuttis (strings and oboes). Similar concertante elements are found elsewhere within the emergent Viennese symphonic tradition, notably in Haydn’s slightly later programmatic set, Le Matin, Le Midi and Le Soir (c. 1761–2) and subsequently in such works as the Larghetto of Dittersdorf’s four-movement A minor Symphony (Grave a1, c. 1770–5),¹⁰ which features prominent cello solos along with punctuating interjections for a pair of horns, and the Adagio molto of Vaňhal’s D major Symphony (Bryan D17)¹¹ of 1779 (in three, not four, movements), which may as well be the slow movement of an oboe concerto. Hofmann also preceded Haydn in the employment of a slow introduction to first movements, for example in the D major symphony of c. 1762 (Badley D4), in which the relatively lightweight and pithy character of the extremely economical Allegro molto is contextualised by a preceding Adagio of considerable gravitas. The main Allegro molto discriminates effectively between its primary, secondary, connective and cadential materials. Interestingly, there are quite clear resemblances between the second-movement Andante and the opening Adagio introduction. Interrelations between thematic elements is likewise a characteristic of the symphonies of Florian Leopold Gassmann (whose position as Imperial Kapellmeister Hofmann failed to secure on Gassmann’s death in 1774),¹² though here the references are typically between the successive themes within an exposition in a quasi-organic succession as the tonal narrative away from the opening tonic unfolds.

For the Viennese symphony emergent between c. 1760 and 1780 (the period spanned by the production of symphonies by Dittersdorf and his contemporary, Vaňhal), growing confidence in the coordination and proportioning of theme, rhythm, harmony, tonality and texture contributes substantially to the impression of an overall trend towards a narrative whose unfolding features emerge as a logical succession of elements specifically designed to be noticed by listeners: Vaňhal’s C major Sinfonia Comista (Bryan C11, c. 1775–8) affords a clear example. In the concertante Larghetto of Dittersdorf’s A minor Symphony, mentioned above, repeating cadential refrains supplied by the two horns are not simply an attractive colouristic device, contrasting with the solo cello’s episodes, but are precisely coordinated with the arrival of moments of tonal articulation upon which the overall form depends. Both sound and structure are surely meant to be recognised by a listener; an element of meaning derives from dialogue between the abstract musical conception and a listener paying attention to it in real time. That listener would also have noted the currency of Dittersdorf’s opening Vivace (which employs three horns), which is firmly in the tempestuous Sturm-und-Drang idiom that was sweeping Viennese music in the early 1770s. Sturm und Drang is a feature too of some symphonies by Vaňhal from this period. His G minor Symphony (Bryan g1), published in Paris in 1773–4, but perhaps dating from the late 1760s, is a case in point. It makes prominent use of tone colour (notably two pairs of horns tuned in G and high B flat, and concertante parts for violin and viola in the second of its four movements, Andante cantabile) in addition to the expressive harmonic colours obtainable from the minor mode, its driving syncopations and sudden dramatic contrasts of dynamic, register, texture and accentuation, reminiscent in character of more famous symphonies in G minor by Haydn (Hob. I:39) and Mozart (K 183). Moreover, Vaňhal’s orchestration is pioneering. In a D minor Symphony (Bryan d2), one of five symphonies of his advertised for sale by Breitkopf in Supplement XII (1778) of their Thematic Catalogue, he uses no fewer than five horns (in two pairs, crooked in F and D, with an additional one in A), giving him a wide range of notes and once again allowing the horns’ full participation in the exploitation of expressive harmonic potential. And several symphonies (among them Bryan D17 and C11, mentioned above, and C3, D2 and A9) use pairs of clarino trumpets.

Conclusions

Vaňhal’s output marks an important point of arrival in the development of the Viennese symphony. His are works of considerable individuality, technically assured, inventive, substantial in length and also in intellectual concentration, requiring, indeed, a certain degree of concentration on the part of the listener if they are to be satisfactorily realised. His symphony Bryan D2 (c. 1763–5) has, in its first movement, a genuine development section, which introduces a new theme during its course. Symphony A9, of uncertain date, is a single-movement symphony in three sections (fast–slow–fast), though its dimensions and expressive range far exceed those of the Italian opera overtures that were once a prototype for the earlier Viennese symphony; its opening and closing sections include unmistakable cross-references, the Finale’s closing material returning to the opening bars of the work. The majority are in four movements, a scheme within which there is purposeful regard for the overall proportions, the finales sometimes being considerably extended and typically in rondo, sonata-rondo or sonata form. They may well have been known to Haydn (ten of Vaňhal’s symphonies are preserved in the Esterházy archives) and also to Mozart (who played chamber music with Vaňhal); certainly the 62-bar slow introduction (in the minor mode) to Vaňhal’s D major symphony (Bryan D17) has strong similarities both to the introduction of the ‘Linz’ Symphony, K 425 and to that of the ‘Prague’ Symphony, K 504.

While the symphonies of Vaňhal may, in sum, be claimed to represent a maturity in the development of the Viennese classical symphony that served as a platform from which were launched the final achievements of the genre’s four greatest exponents, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, that claim requires substantial qualification. First, Vaňhal’s symphonies are exemplary of an achievement stemming from an environment of fairly loose, intertextual progress among Viennese composers generally towards mastery of technique allied to form, rather than the product of a single, paradigm-shifting individual. Secondly, an agenda of progress towards Haydn and Mozart, followed by Beethoven and Schubert and their lesser adjuncts, Czerny, Ries, Spohr, Cherubini, Gyrowetz, et al., is one whose motives (originating perhaps in a conflation of nineteenth-century political, aesthetic and especially nationalist debates) are highly questionable. Such debates redefined the symphonic genre in an act of retrospective Rezeptionsgeschichte that was bound up with the invention of a Viennese classical canon supported by institutions such as the professional concert, the complete edition, the founding of conservatoires, the discipline of musical Formenlehre and the rapid rise of serious musical criticism. As a consequence, the Viennese symphony at the turn of the nineteenth century assumed what would remain its destiny as the most prestigious among instrumental genres. Within this species of Rezeptionsgeschichte, the symphony was expected to be individual, to possess inherently dramatic qualities, to encapsulate in addition to mere technical control of its materials an aesthetic of progress beyond ‘absolute music’. In Beethoven’s symphonies, which played a pivotal role in launching the Viennese symphony into this exciting uncharted territory, the genre is once more redefined as a public demonstration – celebration, even – of topics such as the sublime (for example, the first movement of the Eroica, which at nearly 700 bars, is the longest symphonic movement Beethoven ever composed); of overarching unity in diversity, expressed cyclically in the Fifth Symphony through thematic transformation of theme, through the linking of different movements and, indeed, through the dissolution of boundaries separating movements, as the Scherzo gives way to the culminating finale; of ‘fate’ and ‘strife-to-victory’ (exemplified in some readings of the same symphony); of the naturalistic as a retreat from the dehumanising perspectives of war and industrialisation in the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony; and, in the Ninth’s Finale, the transformation of the genre through the medium of the human voice singing of an imagined redemption attainable only beyond the material realm.¹³ Poetic ideas, to be sure; and such was now expected of the symphony. Crucially, the baritone addresses the audience as ‘Friends’, directly inviting their involvement, for it is within that shared framework of endeavour that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony must have its meaning if all men are to be brothers, rejecting past agendas (as Beethoven, metaphorically, has just rejected his previous themes in turn) and striding confidently forth into joy. This moment is a turning point in the symphonic genre; the symphony as civic agency has remained a powerful reception metaphor ever since (this event is considered below in chapters 8 and 9).

One casualty of this historiographical agenda was Schubert, whose symphonies were eclipsed throughout the nineteenth century and beyond by the mighty achievement of his idol, Beethoven. Like Beethoven’s nine symphonies, Schubert’s eight travel a path away from late eighteenth-century classical purity, symmetry and elegance towards the frontier of transcendence articulated in the writings of the German Romantics, Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Schlegels. But Schubert’s ‘Beyond’ arguably lay deep within himself. His ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Great’ C major symphonies conform uneasily to early nineteenth-century expectations of the symphonic genre, and this may be a contributory cause to their painfully slow acceptance into the canon (they were only even premiered in 1839 and 1865 respectively), for they trace a path not towards the attainment of a public and civic spiritual brotherhood of all mankind, but a private and interior world of half-lights and self-doubts whose technical musical language is often not far removed from the lied. While there are no voices in Schubert’s symphonies, the vocality of his personal symphonic genre is unmistakable. In his hands, as in Beethoven’s, the Viennese symphony had travelled far.

Regions of composition

The symphony was found all over Europe as well as in lands where European culture was imported, and the composers themselves were a peripatetic lot. Italians and Bohemians, and to a lesser extent musicians from the German states, could be found everywhere (see Table 3.1). Luigi Boccherini (1742–1805) and Gaetano Brunetti (1744–98) both abandoned their native Italy for service in Spain; the Bohemian Josef Mysliveček (1737–81) spent much of his career in Italy; and his compatriot Johann Stamitz (1717–57) established his reputation in the palatinate of Mannheim, in southern Germany. The Mannheim-born Franz Beck (1734–1809) was active in France; the Swedish-born Johan Agrell (1701–65) in Kassel and Nuremberg; and the Scotsman Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809), of Austrian descent, immigrated to Philadelphia, in the newly formed United States. Such travels make a narrowly focussed study of ethnic or regional characteristics in symphonic composition tricky and perhaps of questionable value, although some differences in regional preferences and patterns of cultivation can be identified.

It is useful to distinguish between the composition and the cultivation of the symphony. For most of the century, composition was done by resident composers at courts or aristocratic households and thus occurred in relatively few places. These composers wrote for a specific orchestra and often for a specific occasion, even though their symphonies might later travel to other places in manuscript copies or in prints (often pirated). Cultivation was done by the thousands of institutions (including courts with resident composers) who purchased or otherwise acquired symphonies for performance at their concerts or celebrations or theatres or church services. These places created the demand that sparked the century’s symphonic fecundity. In the early part of the century, most symphonies were distributed in manuscript parts, often acquired during the course of travel. After the middle of the century, distribution channels increasingly ran through music publishers and music sellers, most of whom offered both manuscript and printed parts and were eager to sell works that would have a wide market, a point to which I shall return later.

Table 3.1 Selected immigrant composers of symphonies

In Italy, the opera sinfonia – generally in three movements until the one-movement form emerged in the late 1770s – remained a major outlet for Italian symphonic creativity for most of the century. Opera sinfonie by composers like Niccolò Jommelli (1714–74) can be found in eighteenth-century symphony collections throughout the continent. The three-movement form, well established by the 1730s, favoured first movements with a noisy primary theme using tutti strings and winds leading to transitions with tremolos and crescendos, quieter contrasting second themes and bustling closing sections. The melody-based slow movements, often in the parallel minor, gave way to quick and lively finales, frequently in triple meter. The ceremonial function of the opera sinfonia meant that it was not – and indeed should not – be tied to the operatic subject (something never understood or acknowledged by eighteenth-century German writers), an approach that meant it could easily be transferred to the chamber, or even to the church. Early Italian sinfonie originally intended for chamber or church settings tended to call for three- or four-part strings and boasted a more flexible texture and structure than the opera sinfonia. During the 1740s and 1750s, wind parts became more common in chamber symphonies: nearly one third of Giovanni Battista Sammartini’s (1700/01–75) sixty-eight symphonies, many from before 1760, add two horns or trumpets to the string choir.⁴ Although Italian composers wrote for larger ensembles as the century progressed, wind instruments do not appear to have played as significant a role in Italy as they did in Northern Europe, perhaps because the instruments themselves were harder to find.⁵The imaginative use of the winds by the Italian emigrants Gaetano Brunetti and Luigi Boccherini clearly demonstrates that with the proper resources, Italians could easily hold their own in the area of orchestration.

The impact of Italian symphonies was widely felt, particularly in the first half of the century. In the lands of the Hapsburg monarchy, the impact was both direct – with the presence in Vienna of figures like Bartolomeo Conti (1682–1732), Antonio Caldara (c. 1670–1736) and later Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) – and indirect (with the importation of Sammartini’s symphonies by the Count Harrach and the acquisition of Italian symphonies by the Esterházy family, documented in the Esterházy catalogues from 1740 and 1759–62).⁶Outside of Vienna, the symphony was composed and cultivated not only in cities like Pressburg and Prague, but also on the private estates of the nobility and in the numerous monasteries and convents. During the first half of the century, a strong fugal tradition threaded through Austrian symphonic composition and the liking for counterpoint never completely died out, although increasingly it was incorporated into a more homophonic style. As early as the 1760s, Austrian composers chose three- and four-movement formats with about the same frequency, but later turned to the four-movement F–S–M/T–F format with a sustained intensity not found in other regions of Europe. Perhaps because of the strong Bohemian wind tradition, works for strings alone were in the minority – even in the early part of the century – and disappeared almost entirely from the 1760s.

Much of the symphonic composition in southern Germany stemmed from its courts – the efforts of Johan Agrell in the free city of Nuremberg notwithstanding – particularly those in Mannheim, Wallerstein, Munich, Mainz, Trier and Cologne. Their musical establishments not only employed local composers, but also absorbed a whole flotilla of Bohemians, including Johann Stamitz (1717–57) and Antonio Rosetti (c. 1750–92), both known for their imaginative and varied use of the wind instruments. Stamitz and his colleagues in Mannheim made effective use of Italian techniques – including string tremolos and crescendos – using winds both for sonic and harmonic reinforcement and for melody. Rosetti had a particular knack for orchestration, often enriching the string texture by dividing the violas and using the winds with delicacy and finesse. Both composers had access to excellent orchestras (at the courts in Mannheim and Wallerstein, respectively), a fact that no doubt helped to stimulate their orchestral imaginations. (As Niccolò Jommelli observed, if you have a good orchestra, you must keep them busy or they will start to give you trouble.) The later Mannheim composers, for example Christian Cannabich (1731–98), Carl Joseph Toeschi (1731–88) and Franz Fränzl (1736–1811), have sometimes been accused of merely dabbling in colourful orchestral effects, but such comments belie the importance of such effects. In fact, particularly with composers like Rosetti, the skilful use of the orchestra to delineate structural function and create tension often goes hand in hand with the simple delight in the play of sonorities.

In northern Germany, the courts and aristocratic patrons sponsored most symphonic composition, although free cities like Hamburg and Leipzig certainly contributed to publication and performance. The Italian opera sinfonia had its effect here as well, but the north-German repertoire, particularly in the first two thirds of the century, showed great diversity in terms of movement structure. In the 1730s and 1740s Johann Gottlob Harrer (1703–55) composed a number of three-movement quasi-programmatic symphonies (some with large wind sections) intended for specific occasions, weaving hunting calls and well-known dance tunes into a mostly homophonic compositional fabric. At the court of Hessen-Darmstadt, Johann Christoph Graupner (1683–1760) and Johann Samuel Endler (1694–1762) showed a preference for symphonies with four or more movements (such large-scale works make up nearly half of Graupner’s 113 symphonies), often with very large ensembles sometimes requiring three trumpets.⁷ Much of the symphonic activity here appears to have taken place in the first part of the century, with the rate of production dropping sharply after around 1770.

France and Britain had more in common with each other than with the rest of Europe in terms of the cultivation of the symphony. For both, the centre of symphony composition, performance and publication was in their capital cities, though their smaller cities could also boast of musical societies that required symphonies for concerts. In the first two thirds of the century, the sheer number of music publishers in Paris and London completely dwarfed that of all competing cities except, perhaps, for Amsterdam. Paris and London also had a flourishing concert life – both public and private – and eagerly welcomed musical immigrants into their midst. Native composers like Simon Le Duc (1742–77) and the French-speaking immigrant from the Netherlands François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829) grafted the metric patterns of the French language onto the Italian opera sinfonia style to create symphonic ‘Frenchness’. In the later part of the century, French composers showed a definite preference for the grand and brilliant, particularly with regard to orchestration.⁸ British taste favoured tuneful, diatonic melodies with lively dance-like rhythms,⁹ but audiences were also not unmindful of the charms of well-placed counterpoint, preferences that help to explain the popularity of the immigrant J. C. Bach (1735–82) and the adulation that greeted the symphonies of Joseph Haydn.

Areas on the geographical periphery of Europe and those on other continents participated in both the composition and the cultivation of symphonies, though the latter was more frequent than the former. Even if immigrant composers dominated the compositional scene (as did Luigi Boccherini and Gaetano Brunetti in Spain), native-born talents also participated (as with the group of Catelonian composers active around Barcelona after about 1770).¹⁰ Lands with music-loving monarchs and established musical institutions, such as Sweden, produced their own local symphony composers even early in the century – for example Johan Helmich Roman (1694–1758) and Johan Agrell – but other places, particularly in the colonial world, did so only towards the century’s close. Immigrant composers completely dominated the musical world of the North-American colonies and the young United States; in South America, the only known symphony by a native-born Brazilian, for example, was written by José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767–1830) in 1790.¹¹

Symphonic style and form

Any attempt to describe general (as opposed to composer-specific) patterns and trends in eighteenth-century symphonic composition is in some ways a foolhardy undertaking, given the number of works involved and the fact that so many of them have never been studied. What follows can thus not be considered definitive, but is offered as a possible narrative framework for understanding and interpreting the symphonic data that we do have. Briefly stated, the first half of the century witnessed a variety of approaches – on every level of composition – to works labelled ‘symphony’. Although a few patterns can be identified, particularly locally, the differences in everything from number of movements to texture to formal procedures were considerable. By the end of the 1750s, recognisable patterns and conventions common across all the regions of composition had begun to coalesce, giving the genre a more definite shape. These conventions proved advantageous both to composers and listeners; the best composers were those who could exploit them by playing on the expectations they created. Whereas we have tended to view conventional patterns as straight-jackets for the imagination (a sign of our continuing attachment to nineteenth-century aesthetic values), for eighteenth-century composers they appear to have functioned as a stimulus, providing a basic framework upon which they could construct endless delightful and subtle variations.

Early eighteenth-century approaches

From the beginning, most composers chose the three-movement, F–S–F format commonly found in the Italian opera sinfonia for the overwhelming majority of their works, although one- and two-movement works remained a strong second choice. (It should be noted that many of the latter had two-tempo movements, so that they could also be heard as having three or four connected movements.) Four-movement symphonies were less common before the 1750s and can be found in a variety of patterns (not just F–S–M/T–F), as seen in the sampling given in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 Examples of four-movement plans before 1760

North-German composers, as indicated above, had a particular fondness for works in four or more movements, sometimes with programmatic titles. Graupner’s Symphony in E flat (Nagel 64 from c. 1747–50) features five quick movements: Vivace, Poco Allegro, Allegro, Poco Allegro, Tempo di Gavotte. Endler’s Symphony in E flat (E♭4 from 1757) has both dance and programmatic components: Allegro molto; Menuet I and II, Marche, Contentement, Bourrée I and II, Le bon vivant I and II. For interior slow movements, composers seem to have preferred the tonic or relative minor – a choice that maintained tonal unity and was potentially less jarring to the sensibilities when the movements were very brief – but occasionally chose the subdominant or dominant.

During this period, strings in an a 3 (two violins and basso) or a 4 (two violins, viola and basso) configuration formed the core of performance forces, although a 3 works became rarer by the 1740s. When available, wind instruments (most commonly horns, oboes or trumpets) could join this core string group, particularly in Italian opera sinfonie and for ceremonial occasions at court or in church. For example, the Symphony in C by Georg Reutter the Younger (1708–72) calls for a 4 strings, organ and two brass choirs, each with two clarini, two trombe and timpani.¹² Endler’s Symphony in D (D4), written for a New Year’s Day celebration in 1750, requires a 3 strings, oboe, two horns, three clarini and timpani. The use of winds in more ordinary circumstances increased gradually throughout the period, although instrumentation often remained flexible: the title page of Jean-Férry Rebel’s 1737 Symphony, Les eléments, announces that ‘This symphony is engraved in such a way that it can be played in concert by two violins, two flutes, and one bass’, adding that a harpsichord could also play it alone. Moreover, the score itself indicates a number of places where other instruments – specifically two violas, basso continuo, piccolos (petites flutes), oboes, horns and bassoons – could be added.¹³ Although Rebel’s work is unusual in the extent of its suggested alternatives, flexibility with regard to wind parts was widespread. Published works often had ad libitum wind parts to make them more marketable and – conversely – trumpet or horn parts could be added to make a work more festive or to cater for a patron’s wishes.¹⁴

Although wind instruments in this repertoire tend to play either colla parte with the strings or to reinforce the harmony, we should not discount the effect that they had on the listener’s sonic experience. Moreover, composers often highlighted the wind instruments or used them in a more subtle interplay. In Johann David Heinichen’s (1683–1729) Symphony in D (written after 1717), pairs of flutes and oboes play colla parte with the strings, but the two horns have occasional solos. Agrell’s woodwinds usually play colla parte with the strings, but in his Symphony in C major (from the early 1740s), he makes sophisticated use of their penetrating sonority, with the oboes reinforcing the syncopated harmonic shifts made by the strings and the horns entering in alternation with punctuation that drives to the downbeat (Example 3.1). Rightly known for his imaginative orchestral effects, Johann Stamitz frequently used winds as solo instruments in secondary themes, temporarily relegating the normally dominant strings to an accompaniment role. During this period, wind instruments often dropped out for middle slow movements, thus creating a sonic contrast with the surrounding tutti fast ones, although sometimes, as in Giovanni Battista Lampugnani’s (c. 1708–c. 1788) Symphony in D (D6, c. 1750) and some of Graupner’s early works, the horns continue the harmonic supporting role evident in the outer movements.

Example 3.1 Johan Agrell, Symphony in C major, I, bars 15–23.

Early symphonies exploited a wide variety of textures, from strictly fugal to essentially contrapuntal to purely homophonic. The preference for fugues in instrumental composition has been associated with Vienna; however the technique can be found across the continent. The Swedish composer Ferdinand Zellbell, Jr (1719–80) opened his D minor Symphony with a first movement slow introduction leading to a fugue followed by a sarabande and gigue, and several composers in England – Francesco Barsanti (1690–1772), Thomas Arne (1710–88), Maurice Green (1696–1755) – incorporated fugal movements in their symphonies from the 1740s and 1750s. (Interestingly, Padre Giovanni Battista Martini (1706–84), famous all over Europe for his counterpoint treatise, did not include any fugal movements in his twenty-four symphonies.) Although arrangements like Zellbell’s follow the pattern of the French overture and suite, with slow dotted openings leading to fugues followed by dance movements, not all fugal movements fall into that category: Wenzel Birck’s (1718–63) Sinfonia No. 9 has a 107-bar Presto before its fugue,¹⁵and most of Franz Xaver Richter’s (1709–89) symphonic fugues appear in finales.¹⁶ Even in the early part of the century, fugues and fugal textures appear in only a tiny fraction of all symphony movements; I have considered them at some length here because their persistent presence in the repertoire helps to explain the continuing importance of counterpoint in later eighteenth-century works.

The predominant symphonic texture was of course homophony, both in the unison/massed sound and the melody-with-accompaniment varieties. Throughout the first half of the century, however, composers consistently mixed a soupçon of counterpoint into their symphonies, often to articulate structural functions. Antonio Brioschi (fl. c. 1725–c. 1750) commonly turned contrapuntal in his development sections, while Sammartini often used contrapuntal transitions that contrast with the unison or homophonic primary and closing sections. By way of contrast, Agrell often distinguished his secondary themes by introducing counterpoint, along with reduced orchestration and dynamics. These examples show that fugal and contrapuntal techniques were quickly absorbed into the newer formal procedures that began to dot the symphonic landscape.

In terms of formal structure, most early first movements fell somewhere along the continuum of binary to sonata forms (mostly the latter), but some are ritornello-based and others blend aspects of ritornello and sonata construction. Slow movements and other fast movements rarely made use of ritornello techniques and mostly fall towards the binary end of the continuum. Conventions for delineating the sections of sonata movements were just beginning to emerge, but the first three basic sonata types described by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy for the later eighteenth century can easily be identified in this repertoire as well.¹⁷ In general, composers of this period were establishing the rules of the game (à la Leonard Meyer) with great vitality and spirit, exploring possibilities for generating tension and excitement (tremolos, crescendos, rising lines, etc.) and for expressivity.¹⁸ Often, the expressive centre of the work was in the (frequently) minor-mode slow movement, which habitually featured nuanced dynamic contrast, sighing appoggiaturas and cantabile melodies. Georg Benda (1722–95) makes the most of the sonic possibilities of the strings in the slow movement his Sinfonia I in F major by juxtaposing pizzicato and arco motives, ending with a delightfully quizzical pizzicato weak-beat afterthought (Example 3.2).¹⁹

Example 3.2 Georg Benda, Sinfonia No. 1 in F major, I, bars 12–15; 24–6.

Expressive choices, however, were not limited to the slow movement. Opening major-mode movements often featured diversions to the minor dominant in S (the subordinate theme), a tactic particularly popular in Italian opera sinfonie of the 1730s as seen in Leonardo Leo’s Amor vuol sofferenza from 1736 (Example 3.3a and b). Similar techniques are employed by such diverse composers as Agrell, Harrer, Leopold Mozart (1719–87) and Georg Wagenseil (1715–77). The long primary section of Sammartini’s Symphony No. 10 in F major even encompasses a plaintive contrasting section in the tonic minor. Development sections frequently traverse minor-mode areas, often with a strong cadence to the relative minor just before the recapitulation. In many cases, this expressivity relies on local-level contrast, nowhere more strongly than in the symphonies of C. P. E. Bach (1714–88). In his Symphony in F of 1755 (Wq 175) rests, chromatic excursions and dynamic contrasts enhanced by changes of orchestration all combine to create local-level drama and structural-level tension. The piano trills in bar 7 give way in the next measure to a minor-mode variant of bar 6, which is followed by a forte outburst on V⁷/V to begin the transition. Its path to V, however, is continually derailed by further chromatic diversions and piano interpolations, delaying the cadence in the dominant until bar 32 (Example 3.4).

Example 3.3a Leonardo Leo, Overture to Amor vuol sofferenza, I, bars 1–5.

Example 3.3b Leonardo Leo, Overture to Amor vuol sofferenza, I, bars 12–17.

Example 3.4 C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in F major, Wq 175, I, bars 1–36.

Bach’s symphonies, like many others from the first part of the century, derive their energy from such local-level contrasts, together with lively and engaging motives, a consistent quaver pulse and a forward trajectory that minimises sectional and functional delineation. Such techniques, particularly when used skilfully, work very well in shorter movements; for more extended compositions, other organisational strategies needed to be devised. Many of the formal conventions we associate with sonata form emerged as composers began to incorporate these local contrasts into a larger compositional trajectory in which the various sections of the movement assumed particular functional responsibilities. The trajectory was created in large part by the creation of expectations, which could then be fulfilled, deflected, or even subverted. This approach became the defining feature of late eighteenth-century symphonic style.

Late eighteenth-century conventions

By the 1760s, conventional practices in all elements of symphonic composition had coalesced into patterns discernible throughout the European continent. The three-movement F–S–F pattern continued as the most common movement format, with the four-movement scheme (mostly, though not always, F–S–M/T–F) the strong second choice. Only at the very end of the century did the F–S–M/T–F format start to dominate, and even then some composers who had flirted with the four-movement pattern early in their careers chose the three-movement variety in their later works, among them Cannabich, Toeschi and Ignaz Pleyel (1757–1831). Rather than seeing their choice as a ‘reversion’ to an outdated practice (as has generally been the case), we might more profitably ask what advantages or disadvantages the two options might have had. Composers like Joseph Haydn took advantage of the minuet’s compact and absolutely predictable form to stretch and play with musical parameters like rhythm and texture. For others, the inclusion of the minuet might simply have expanded the symphony beyond a usable length, especially given the increasing length and complexity of the other movements (something that probably explains the nearly complete disappearance of symphonies in more than four movements). One- and two-movement symphonies still maintained a presence in the repertoire in France, the Austrian lands and especially in Italy, where they continued to be of importance in church settings. For example, twenty-four of the Franciscan priest Stanislao Mattei’s (1750–1825) twenty-seven symphonies are single-movement works intended for church performances in Bologna.²⁰

In the area of orchestration, the a 8 configuration (a 4 strings plus two oboes and two horns) emerged as the overwhelming favourite. This particular convention may well have been driven by market forces: music publishers and dealers clearly preferred symphonies with instrumental requirements that most ensembles could cover. Although strings-only symphonies continued to appear well into the second half of the century, by the 1790s the theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch could state that audiences generally expected to hear winds in symphonies.²¹ Works requiring large wind ensembles still tended to come from courts with substantial orchestras (e.g. Mannheim and Wallerstein), and some evidence suggests that such large-scale pieces were much less likely to see publication. The Cannabich symphonies published by Götz in the 1770s call for the standard a 8 orchestra, but those written just for the Mannheim court often add two clarinets, and the unpublished No. 44 is for a double orchestra.²² Nonetheless, a number of Cannabich’s unpublished symphonies require only the a 8 ensemble, perhaps because of its practicality or because it was the most effective choice for relatively small spaces. Separate parts for flutes, bassoons and cellos became increasingly common (clarinet parts remained rare), and trumpets and timpani still seem to have been reserved for works intended to convey ceremony and splendour. In fact, although instrumental requirements grew steadily, a ‘full’ wind complement of pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets did not become a standard choice until the early nineteenth century.

The variety of formal approaches found in the early part of the century had by now coalesced into the sonata types described by Hepokoski and Darcy, particularly for opening fast movements. Sonata forms also predominate in slow movements and finales, though rondos or other part forms, and occasionally simple binaries, can be found as well. Although the Type 3 sonata (having a recapitulation beginning with P in the tonic) seems to have been increasingly preferred, the Type 2 (in which the return to the tonic coincides with post-P materials) was also very common. It would be anachronistic to assume (as has often been done) that the Type 2 was ‘more primitive’ than the ‘full’ Type 3, since a single symphony could easily have both, and neither individually nor collectively did composers ‘progress’ from Type 2s to Type 3s. One suspects, in fact, that the choice of a Type 2 might have been practical as well as aesthetic, keeping the performance time manageable as movement length increased.

Sonata form proved to be the ideal solution to the organisational challenge of longer movements, providing both the framework and flexibility for creating works that were both immediately understandable as types yet distinctly different as pieces. In the exposition, for example, the two main patterns (two-part and continuous) described by Hepokoski and Darcy are ubiquitous. Many composers, like J. C. Bach, preferred the two-part approach with its clearly delineated secondary theme articulated by a strong medial caesura, dynamic and textural changes (often to piano and reduced orchestra) and sometimes contrasting material. This pattern (which incorporated the local contrasts described above into a larger structure) provided aural guidance to listeners but nonetheless allowed for the small yet piquant variations so essential to the style. The C minor slow movement of Bach’s Op. 6, No. 5 reaches a v:HC medial caesura in bar 14, but instead of a second theme in v, we hear one in III.²³ The frequency with which transition material led to a medial caesura made it possible for composers (particularly Joseph Haydn) to subvert this expected pattern with a continuous exposition that avoided a secondary theme entirely. These continuous expositions typically have a very different sound and trajectory from the continuity described above in the C. P. E. Bach symphony because their transitions, which continue past the temporal point where a secondary theme would normally have appeared, have a relentlessness that creates an ever greater need for the tonal closure the exposition requires. Here too, the techniques for creating this tension (crescendos, addition of instruments, motivic shortening, sequences, deceptive cadences, etc.) could be combined in an infinite variety of ways, so that each work could provide a new listening experience. All parts of the sonata structure could be manipulated in this fashion: ‘development’ sections could present new material; ‘recapitulations’ could undertake further development. Procedures found in Gossec’s recapitulations, for example, range from more-or-less exact repetitions to those that reorder the exposition themes, or incorporate new material that had been introduced in the development, or involve considerable recomposition.²⁴ In creating these variations on the sonata theme, individual composers differed widely both in degree and techniques, but all except the worst usually managed to devise an unexpected twist or an artfully different sound to delight both the ear and the mind.

Orchestration often played a significant role in this manipulation of conventions and in the overall success of the work. Many first-movement primary themes are noisy, exciting, triadic affairs played by the full ensemble, but the first movement of Cannabich’s Symphony No. 57 in E flat opens with violins and clarinets sustaining an E♭ over the moving bass line; by bar 7, the clarinet has taken over the melody, while the violins and basso line punctuate with turn figures. At any point in the movement, this configuration would be arresting, but it is particularly so for an opening. Like Cannabich, Rosetti had a knack for configuring the orchestra in unexpected ways and using the winds at exactly the right moment. His D major Symphony from c. 1788 opens with a single noise-killing chord before the violas, cellos, basses and bassoons enter with the theme, punctuated by the violins and upper winds. The third movements of Brunetti’s four-movement symphonies – all dances but not all minuets – use a wind quintet for the A section and strings for the second, an inversion of the often-used procedure of featuring winds in the B section (or trio) of the minuet. In the Symphony No. 9 in D, the Allegro Minuetto first section, scored for two oboes, two horns and bassoon, leads to a B section for strings and timpani.

In the late eighteenth century, texture was closely related to orchestration and wind usage, because subtle use of instrumentation could create variety in an essentially homophonic texture. Purely fugal movements are relatively rare and tend to call attention to themselves. Luigi Borghi’s rondo Finale to his Op. 6, No. 6, published in 1787, dissolves into a fugue, as if to defy conventional expectations.²⁵Joseph Martin Kraus’s 1789 one-movement Sinfonia per la chiesa, written for the blessing of the parliament in Sweden, opens with a slow introduction followed by a fugue, albeit one in two sections (the first repeated!), ending with a substantial section presenting the fugue theme homophonically. More commonly, composers wove counterpoint and a variety of textures into the fabric of formal procedures, using the differences and shadings to delineate formal areas (just as earlier composers had done), but also to complicate them. In the first movement of his F major Symphony (Mennicke 97 from before 1762), Johann Gottlieb Graun (1702/3–71) introduces a brief contrapuntal interchange just at the point when a secondary theme seems to be emerging (bar 30) to convert from a two-part to a continuous exposition (Example 3.5). The transition in the first movement of Cannabich’s Symphony No. 73 in C moves noisily and homophonically towards V as expected, but at the moment when V/V arrives and S should appear, he switches to the minor mode and reduces the texture to piano contrapuntal lines, in effect derailing the transitional train and stretching the tension over another 20 bars (Example 3.6). The contrapuntal minuets that turn up in the symphonies of Joseph Haydn, W. A. Mozart, Wenzel Pichl (1741–1805), Gossec and Brunetti count as sly tweaks to convention in their conflation of the most learned of musical styles with the most courtly and galant of dances.

Example 3.5 Johann Gottlieb Graun, Symphony in F major (Mennicke 97), I, bars 24–42.

Example 3.6 Christian Cannabich, Symphony No. 73 in C major, I, bars 31–66.

The increasing length of individual movements and the variety of textures and styles they incorporated meant that composers needed to develop new strategies for creating unity even beyond the trajectory provided by sonata form. Perhaps the most common technique was the derivation of transition and closing materials from the opening primary material, a practice so ubiquitous it is found even in melody-rich compositions like those of W. A. Mozart. Composers as disparate as Karl d’Ordonez (1734–86) and Gossec were fond of constructing intricate motivic connections among seemingly contrasting themes. Although Pichl’s slow introduction to the first movement of his Op. 1, No. 5 has no motivic connection to the material that begins in bar 67, the slow, regular quaver motion, the restricted range, the legato markings and piano dynamic level call up the aural memory from earlier in an even more compelling way than a motivic recurrence could have done (Example 3.7a and b). Sometimes such techniques connected movements as well. Nearly all of Michael Haydn’s (1737–1806) late symphonies share motives among all the movements, a procedure also found in the works of Pichl and Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763–1850) among others. Although sometimes the shared motives can seem too generic to be convincing as cyclic links, when used in combination with parallels of texture and articulation, they signal a clear connective intention on the part of the composer.²⁶Beginning as early as 1771, Boccherini explored even more extreme manifestations of unity, sometimes reprising large sections of earlier movements in the later ones. The Finale of his Symphony No. 21 (G. 496) comprises a complete repetition of the first movement’s recapitulation.²⁷These instances should put the often cited cyclic aspects of some of Haydn’s and Beethoven’s symphonies in perspective. Such techniques were part of a new set of symphonic conventions just beginning to emerge at the end of the century.

Example 3.7a Wenzel Pichl, Symphony in F major, Op. 1/5, I, bars 1–8.

Example 3.7b Wenzel Pichl, Symphony in F major, Op. 1/5, I, bars 67–79.

Expressive choices during the later part of the century also broadened and deepened the paths laid out by earlier composers. In addition to the minor mode, composers increasingly made use of distantly related tonalities, particularly third-related or Neapolitan keys, both for brief chromatic digressions and for longer excursions away from the tonic. For example, the C major Symphony (from the 1770s or 1780s) of the Norwegian composer Johan Heinrich Berlin (1741–1807) reaches B major as the point of furthest remove in the development section of the first movement. Often these keys were introduced as a way of subverting convention, an act which itself became an expressive choice. If you expect the development section to begin with some form of P in V, then it will come as quite a shock when a three-bar unison fortissimo string semibreve on ♭VII/V follows directly on the close of the exposition. This technique can be found in the first movement of one of Rosetti’s most popular works, the Symphony in F major (F1), from c. 1776 (Example 3.8).²⁸Of course, Rosetti had a fondness for this type of disruption (it is also found in the first movement of his B♭1), and once the listener begins to expect disruption, then its expressive value can begin to fade. But for eighteenth-century symphony composers, the trick to continuing effectiveness, whether in the use or the disruption of convention, was not in that you did it but in how. For example, Pasquale Anfossi’s (1727–97) Sinfonia in B flat (B♭5) from 1776 has an ingenious disruption of expectations in the middle of the first movement’s secondary theme. S begins quite properly in V (F major) in bar 25 with a two-bar motive repeated exactly to create a four-bar phrase ending with a V:IAC. After a crotchet rest, however, comes a jarring unison forte C♯ and a two-bar diversion to D minor that loses its punch and returns to a relentlessly regular eight-bar consequent in F major (Example 3.9).

Example 3.8 Antonio Rosetti, Symphony in F major (F1), I, bars 64–71.

Example 3.9 Pasquale Anfossi, Sinfonia in B flat (B♭5), I, bars 25–49.

The piquancy of the brief moment, however, disappears when the whole section is repeated exactly, thus regularising the disruption and robbing it of its power. On the other hand, in the first movement of J. C. Bach’s Symphony in E flat, Op. 6, No. 5, the sudden appearance of D♭ unison fortissimo tremolos at the beginning of the development after the conclusion of the exposition in B-flat major gains in effectiveness because the movement is a non-repeating sonata form. Thus, although the subsequent music absorbs it into a relatively normal progression, its initially shocking quality remains, undiminished by repetition.

Conclusion

In 1713, Johann Mattheson defined a symphony as an instrumental piece without restrictions, and though he went on to describe a typical Italian opera sinfonia as having a brilliant opening movement and a dance-like finale, he made it clear that composers were entirely free to follow their own inspiration as long as the music did not thereby become chaotic.²⁹ As indicated above, composers did just that in the early decades of the century; for them the possibilities were – if not limitless – then excitingly vast, even if tidy modern historians might see the situation as chaotic. The extensive circulation of manuscript parts throughout Europe, however, meant that most composers were not working in isolation; as a result, by the middle of the century the symphony had begun to coalesce into a recognisable genre, with conventions governing everything from the number of movements to orchestration to formal procedures. Yet even if later eighteenth-century composers perhaps had less freedom to do what they wanted in a symphony, they gained the power that such conventions provide: a basic structure that did not have to be invented anew with each composition. With this structure ensuring intelligibility, composers could then concentrate on subtlety and nuance, delighting their listeners with small changes and surprises in each new piece. For it should be emphasised that the symphony in the eighteenth century was meant to be comprehended on the very first listening.³⁰ That was its true function, whether in the church, theatre or chamber, and that was what made it so successful. It requires a certain retraining of our post-Mahlerian ears to appreciate fully the artistry and feel the excitement that so enchanted eighteenth-century audiences, but once you’ve managed that, you may find yourself thinking, as I have over the past few years: ‘so many symphonies, so little time’.

After Beethoven

The late A. Peter Brown described Leipzig as the ‘epicentre of symphonic compositions’ in the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.⁶ The presence in the city of several music publishers and important music journals, as well as one of Europe’s leading conservatories, contributed to its pre-eminence, but pride of place in this account must fall to the Gewandhaus Orchestra. This venerable institution (founded in 1781) occupied the leading edge of a gradual trend away from the miscellaneous concert programming of the past, with its preference for ‘entertaining’ admixtures of instrumental and vocal pieces, concerted and solo numbers, not always played in their entirety, towards the new, more ‘serious’ approach that eventually came to define the modern symphony concert, with an overture and a concerto in the first half, followed, in the second, by a symphony (which gained in prominence by coming last and standing alone).⁷By the 1820s subscribers could look forward to hearing complete performances of all nine Beethoven symphonies on a regular basis; selected symphonies by Haydn and Mozart were heard frequently as well. Nevertheless, room was still found for three or four new symphonies every season.

‘German music blooms so finely here’, wrote Robert Schumann in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, ‘that, without ignorance, our city may venture to compare its productions to those of the richest fruit and flower gardens of other cities’. He continued:

The unnamed famous composer was Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the orchestra from 1835 until his death in 1847. Although Mendelssohn’s programmes were dominated by the music of the Viennese classical composers, he also instituted a series of ‘historical concerts’ (each devoted to a grouping of composers from the more distant past) and made certain to perform several contemporary works each year.⁹ Within the subscription concerts, for example, Mendelssohn introduced no fewer than forty-five new symphonies, including three each by Louis Spohr (nos. 5–7), Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda (nos. 5–7) and Franz Lachner (nos. 5–7), two each by Niels Gade (nos. 1–2), Julius Rietz (nos. 1–2) and Robert Schumann (nos. 1–2), Franz Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony and his own Symphony No. 3 (‘Scottish’).¹⁰ Various benefit and extraordinary concerts provided the opportunity for introducing still other new works, including Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (Lobgesang), Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 (in its original orchestral dress from 1841), together with his Overture, Scherzo and Finale and, from France, Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Félicien David’s Le Désert (each conducted by its composer). Newly introduced works often were repeated in subsequent programmes; Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, for example, was heard twelve times during the Mendelssohn era.

In principle, the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra encouraged the silent aesthetic contemplation of music, the ‘selfless immersion into a music that manifested “another world”’, and so performed an educative and edifying function (Bildungsfunktion): in such a context, as Dahlhaus notes, music was intended to be ‘understood’ and not merely to be ‘enjoyed’.¹¹ Yet there was more to this than ‘vintage German transcendentalism’, inasmuch as the symphony was constituted ‘not only aesthetically but also as a relation of nations’.¹²This distinction comes through clearly in August Kahlert’s review of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, introduced at the Gewandhaus on 3 March 1842 and published a year later:

Seen in this way, then, the Bildungsfunktion of the symphony concert assumes not only an aesthetic, but also a national dimension that Dahlhaus, with his aversion to political interpretation, seems loath to acknowledge.

Complicating this picture, however, was the Symphonie fantastique. Introduced at the Gewandhaus on 4 February 1843 (and thus undoubtedly on Kahlert’s mind as he penned his review of the ‘Scottish’ Symphony), this work had in fact already been the subject of considerable interest in 1835, following the publication of Schumann’s lengthy and extravagant review of the work when it appeared in Franz Liszt’s piano reduction.¹⁴ Here (and not for the last time) Schumann offers his take on the recent historical development of the genre: ‘After Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, greatest of all instrumental works in external proportions, form and intention seemed to have been exhausted . . . Later symphonic composers sensed this, and some of them even took refuge in the comfortable forms of Haydn and Mozart’.¹⁵ Schumann goes on to list a number of more recent composers, regretting that ‘none . . . had ventured to make any significant modifications to the old forms – if we leave aside isolated attempts such as the most recent symphony of Spohr’.¹⁶ He finds more to praise in Mendelssohn’s development of the concert overture as an alternative to the symphony – Schumann appears to be unaware of the ‘Italian’ Symphony, performed by the London Philharmonic Society in March 1833 and immediately withdrawn by the composer – and then acknowledges that he had begun to doubt whether the symphony had any future at all.

With all this as background, Schumann turns to the form of Berlioz’s first movement, so strange on the surface. ‘Yet we ought always to look at a thing on its own terms’, he cautions. ‘The stranger and more ingenious a thing outwardly appears, the more carefully we ought to judge it.’ Reminding his readers that the outlines of Beethoven’s music, too, had once seemed unintelligible, he contrasts Berlioz’s unorthodox form with that of ‘the earlier norm’. He provides diagrams of both, finds nothing preferable about the latter in either variety or uniformity, and adds, ‘We only wish we possessed a truly colossal imagination and could then pursue it wherever it goes.’ Here – for all his doubts about programme music – Schumann seems to have discovered the step forward from Beethoven that he found lacking in so much contemporary symphonic fare.¹⁷

Having nothing to do with this idea, by contrast, was Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, editor of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Schumann’s nomination of a potential French successor to Beethoven in the realm of the symphony was by itself an affront; even worse, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik had recently published without comment a translation of an article from a recent French journal that made the claim that François-Joseph Gossec had ‘founded the true character of the symphony’ and that Haydn had merely been his ‘successor’.¹⁸ To this Fink responded indignantly:

Schumann probably would not have disagreed with this sentiment, the gist of which had already appeared in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (July 1810), with its claims that the German composer ‘unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable’.²⁰ But the two critics part company over the question of whether any real progress in the genre might be possible beyond that achieved by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (those ‘three heroes of our music’, as Fink described them).²¹ Again relying heavily on Hoffmann’s aesthetics of ‘pure’ instrumental music, the conservative Fink takes qualities such as large dimensions, expanded forms, richness of medium and elevated ideas that Hoffmann had extolled in Beethoven’s Fifth and subsumes them all under his notion of the grand symphony, presumably attempting to establish in this way standards for the genre that he knew the Romantics would find impossible to meet.²²

A prize symphony

This critical colloquy between the editors of Leipzig’s two music periodicals provides the best context in which to examine one of the most talked-about symphonies of the 1830s, Franz Lachner’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor (Sinfonia passionata), widely known as the ‘Prize Symphony’ by virtue of its having won a competition for new symphonies sponsored by the ‘concerts spirituels’ in Vienna in 1835.²³ Following its performance at the Gewandhaus on 27 October 1836, both Schumann and Fink weighed in with memorable reviews that tell us a good deal about the contemporary state of symphonic politics.

Schumann came first and took the unusual step of pitching his remarks as a response to a story told tongue-in-cheek by his friend Wilhelm Florentin von Zuccamaglio, published under the pseudonym Gottschalk Wedel as a kind of preface to Schumann’s review.²⁴Here the protagonist dreams that he has written a symphony for the competition in the style of the Symphonie fantastique, certain that the judges would favour this ‘new artistic fashion’, only to awaken in a cold sweat to learn with relief that the prize had already gone instead to a proper German composer, Franz Lachner of Munich. ‘Our gentle Gottschalk Wedel has worked himself into quite a rage over the Frenchman Berlioz!’ begins Schumann’s anonymous review.²⁵ He continues in jest for a few lines, but when he moves on to the music at hand, he turns serious – and unusually merciless. ‘[Lachner’s] symphony is lacking in style’, he writes, ‘a mixture of German, Italian and French, comparable to Romansh.’ The best comparison Schumann could find was Meyerbeer’s operas, but these works – which, for Schumann, epitomised the worst of Philistine culture – certainly offered no suitable model for the elevated genre of the German symphony. The critic could forgive neither the ‘sprawling breadth’ (the work runs about an hour), nor the overly obvious (and overused) allusion in the first two movements to the famous rhythmic motive of Beethoven’s Fifth and the associated lack of any real thematic substance. Even still, the first movement at least shows ‘a kind of passion, if perhaps not the most poetical source’. Not so the Adagio, ‘which ends on every page and never stops!’ And with that comes the coup de grâce: ‘Were there but uncouth blunders, formal weaknesses, excesses, then there would be something to talk about and improve, and some reason for encouragement. Here, though, one can only say things like “it is tedious”, or “it will pass”, or sigh, or think about something else.’

Fink took a very different stance. He begins by making a careful analysis of each movement, and though he shares some of Schumann’s reservations, he nevertheless concludes, ‘without fearing the slightest contradiction from connoisseurs I must therefore pronounce this symphony of Lachner’s a thoroughly capable and skilful work . . . The flow of ideas is natural, straightforward [unverschnörkelt], never tied together in confusion.’²⁶Fink notes with approval that Lachner’s ‘inner essence of musical poetry is more like that of Haydn and Mozart than of Beethoven’, and then explains the difference:

Fink explicitly associates the older (one might say, classical) style with the ‘Prize Symphony’: ‘[Lachner’s] passion’, he writes, ‘is not the so-called Romantic [passion]’. And while Fink ties the newer style to no musical work in particular, it is easy enough to associate it in a negative way with the programme of the Symphonie fantastique (‘terrible pain’, ‘externally rushing lust’) and the unusual music to which it gave rise. It thus seems clear enough whom the critic had in mind when he castigates those composers who falsely claim to be Beethoven’s disciples and who become ‘drunk on [Beethoven’s] wine [only to] sing, not in exaltation but in inebriation’.²⁸ Who else apart from Berlioz might have inspired such imagery?

A ‘new norm’

Two years later, in a review from July 1839 of recently published symphonies by Gottfried Preyer, Karl Gottlieb Reißiger and, again, Lachner (this time, the Sixth, in D major), Schumann trained his focus on a more sober group of Beethoven’s disciples. He begins by placing Beethoven’s symphonies at the very centre of German national identity:

As the critic continues, he implicitly takes note of the extent to which Beethoven’s symphonies had come to dominate the public concert and so, in effect, the self-understanding of the German bourgeoisie. Yet, in what seems a clear reference to his earlier criticism of the ‘Prize Symphony’, he laments the failure of any living German composer to come to terms with this patrimony and to build on it meaningfully in his own music:

After briefly mentioning Berlioz (a ‘phenomenon’ known more in Germany by hearsay than by his music itself) and Schubert (‘whose accomplishments in the area of the symphony [had] not yet become public’), Schumann turns to the works at hand. While he is fairly merciless with Preyer and Reißiger, he treats Lachner more kindly than before. Once again, however, Schumann chides the composer for his long-windedness, urging him not to milk each of ‘his beautiful ideas’ dry, but rather to mix them in with other ‘new, ever more beautiful ones’. He concludes: ‘everything as in Beethoven. And so we always come back to this godly [composer] and would add nothing further today than to hope that Lachner might move forward on the path towards the ideal of a modern symphony, which after Beethoven’s passing it is granted to us to arrange in a new norm. Long live the German symphony, and may it blossom and thrive anew!’ The contradiction lying at the heart of this admonition is evident. Mark Evan Bonds has suggested that for Schumann the new norm could only be measured against the standard set by Beethoven. Yet, as Siegfried Oechsle has noted, what the critic calls for here – beauty and diversity of thematic-motivic invention – is not exactly what one takes to be the defining properties of Beethoven’s symphonies.³⁰At all events, Schumann had already found something close to what he was looking for in Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony (1825–8), which he had ‘discovered’ in a visit during the previous winter to the Vienna home of Schubert’s brother Ferdinand.³¹ This work ‘matched Beethoven’s symphonies in length, drive, weight, and freshness of form but . . . with [Schubert’s] special brand of expansiveness, leisureliness, lyricism, instrumental colour, and harmonic finesse’.³²Whereas in 1835, in his review of the Symphonie fantastique, Schumann could only hope that ‘after Beethoven’s nine muses [Schubert] might have borne us a tenth’, five years later, in an equally remarkable review of the ‘Great’ C major, Schumann could write Berlioz out of the history of the German symphony once and for all as merely ‘an interesting foreigner and madman’.³³Here, too, was everything that the ‘Prize Symphony’ had not been: in contrast to Lachner’s ‘never-ending’ essay, with its feeble imitations of Beethoven’s manner, stands Schubert’s work, with its ‘heavenly length, like a novel in four volumes by Jean Paul’, and its ‘complete independence’ from Beethoven’s symphonies.³⁴

The ‘Great’ C major led directly to Schumann’s own breakthrough as a symphonist.³⁵ Drafted in a scant four days in January 1841 and introduced at the Gewandhaus to great acclaim two months later, Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (‘Spring’) shows a host of Schubertian influences, extending from its prominent use of a melodically similar introductory horn call to matters of tonal planning and musical rhetoric. Schumann was not alone in being swept up in the moment. Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony (many of whose themes can be described as ‘songs without words’) and Gade’s Symphony No. 1 (largely based on the Danish composer’s song ‘Paa Sjølunds fagre sletter’), both of which date from the following year, likewise respond in their own way to the Schubertian model.³⁶

By contrast, Dahlhaus discusses the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Spring’ symphonies – he leaves Gade’s enormously popular ‘Nordic’ work unmentioned – entirely in terms of Beethoven, and by that measure each inevitably falls short.³⁷ A brief digression will help to explain why. Dahlhaus argues for a close connection between the idea of aesthetic autonomy (Hoffmann’s ‘pure’ instrumental music) and the nineteenth century’s striving to Bildung, that quintessentially German ideal of education leading to character formation, which ‘fulfils no tangible function in everyday life’, but rather, by presuming an inner detachment from the ‘realm of necessity’, offers a ‘counter-instance’ to the alienating ‘functionalization of humankind’.³⁸Herder’s concept of Bildung zur Menschheit, in turn, helps to explain why Dahlhaus claims the symphony as the illustrative model of aesthetic autonomy. Menschheit (humanity) carries a double meaning; it refers not only to the totality of humankind, which commentators from the early nineteenth century on maintained was the symphony’s rightful intended audience, but also to the humanity of the individual. With their will towards monumentality (characterised by easily grasped thematic ideas that are intimately bound to the orchestral medium and are easy to follow in their subsequent development) and dramatic teleological form – the exoteric and esoteric sides of the ‘symphonic style’ – Beethoven’s symphonies seemed to encompass both sides of the humanity idea.³⁹ The composer’s chamber music likewise dealt in thematische Arbeit, but it was only his symphonies, because of their monumentality and association with the institution of the public concert (as opposed to private musical culture), that became the musical representative of bourgeois humanitarian ideas in the sense outlined above.

But here is where, for Dahlhaus, the Romantic composers come up short. To be sure, he praises Mendelssohn’s ability in the ‘Scottish’ Symphony to shape a successful symphonic movement through the use of lyrical themes, but these cannot give rise to an appropriately monumental edifice. By the same token, Dahlhaus draws a pointed contrast between the ‘sublime uniformity’ of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies, whose ostinato themes are the vehicle for real melodic development, and the rather different uniformity that characterises Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, which, because its main theme couples a motoric ostinato rhythm to a largely unchanged sequence of pitches, ‘falls short of its vindicating sublimity’.⁴⁰As Scott Burnham has noted, Schumann is faulted in this case ‘for trying to be Beethovenian without fully understanding the nature of Beethoven’s music’.⁴¹

Things look very different, however, when we let go of Dahlhaus’s idea that these works constitute the dying breath of an implied ‘first age of the symphony’ dominated by Beethoven and the idea of the sublime, and follow Oechsle in positing Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony and the idea of humanity (in the sense of the individual and not of the masses) as having sparked the beginning of a new era of the Romantic symphony.⁴² By 1839, Oechsle argues, during a period marked by social processes of liberalisation and equalisation in which the independence of the individual was more strongly accented than before, the genre was ‘ripe . . . for the reception of the revolutionary attempt to produce grand symphonic form on the basis of an “individual” that was initially absolutely unthematic and in and of itself not suited to represent the symphonic “masses”’.⁴³

Dahlhaus argues that the essence of a successful symphonic movement resides in the critical ‘double function of a symphonic main theme, which Beethoven elevated to the status of a rule’: it was to be broken down into its constituent parts in the development only to return intact at the beginning of the recapitulation as the ‘triumphant goal and result’ of what had come before it.⁴⁴ But none of the works under consideration follows this ‘rule’. Each begins with important cantabile material that is introduced ‘outside the form’ (that is, in a slow introduction) – the horn call, in the case of Schubert and Schumann; the song or song-like themes, in the case of Mendelssohn and Gade.⁴⁵ And in all four works, this material eventually recurs in the main body and even determines its form. This results in a distinctly non-Beethovenian ‘epic-lyrical monumentality’, whereby the symphonic structure is created, not through the dramatic working out of a main thematic idea, but rather, as Oechsle puts it, ‘as a process of integration of an originally extraterritorial, individual, “capricious” subject-matter that seems strictly limited in its [symphonic] working potential’.⁴⁶

Seen in this way, the ‘Great’ C major Symphony stands as the central work in a Problemgeschichte that is very different from Dahlhaus’s conception. With the discovery of Schubert’s Symphony and its ‘new norm’, a dike was opened through which a stream of new symphonies now might flow freely. (This is a very different metaphor, of course, from that having to do with Beethoven’s shadow.) Indeed, for all its reputation as a work in which the composer ‘overcomes difficulty’ in the manner of the heroic Beethoven, Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C (1846) is unthinkable in the absence of Schubert’s symphony in the same key, and the same thing can be said for Gade’s Second and Third symphonies (1843 and 1847).⁴⁷

The ‘dead era’

Yet Dahlhaus argues that the symphony fell into a ‘crisis’ around mid-century, in that some twenty years would pass following the appearance of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 (1850) before there would come another orchestral ‘work of distinction that represented absolute rather than program music’.⁴⁸With the deaths, not only of Mendelssohn and Schumann, but also, in Wagner’s provocative formulation in Opera and Drama (1851), of the genre itself, historical development in the orchestral realm now seemed to shift to the symphonic poem, established by Liszt and marked by features such as Mehrsätzigkeit in der Einsätzigkeit and thematic transformation.⁴⁹ This allows Dahlhaus to dispense with the ensuing ‘dead era’ in the history of the older genre simply by invoking the names of the popular Gade (eight symphonies altogether), Anton Rubinstein (six) and Joachim Raff (no fewer than eleven), while leaving their music and the broader context in which it was heard entirely unexamined.⁵⁰ To do otherwise, he explains, would be to give undue weight to ‘mere statistics’ at the expense of ‘music-historical facts’ based on ‘aesthetic judgments’.⁵¹

There is something to be gained, however, by not passing too quickly over this period. ‘Serious’ programming of the type that had characterised the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra during the Mendelssohn era gradually took hold elsewhere.⁵² Moreover, subscription concerts on the Leipzig model were established, not only in major urban centres such as Vienna, Berlin and Dresden, but in smaller towns as well. While the balance between living and dead composers in concert programmes continued to shift in favour of the latter – the music of Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, after all, had now joined that of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in the corpus of available repertoire from the past – works by contemporary composers still held a respectable share in concert programmes, in the order of 20 to 30 per cent, depending on the locale and decade.⁵³

Fearing that concerts might become too hidebound, critics used their pens to urge the inclusion of new works.⁵⁴ As a result, there was no dearth of orchestral Novitäten in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which witnessed the composition, premiere or publication of approximately 500 new orchestral compositions.⁵⁵ This list includes a range of programmatic types, including such once-popular works as Johann Joseph Abert’s ‘Columbus’ Symphony (1864), Joseph Rheinberger’s four-movement ‘symphonic tone painting’ Wallenstein (1866) and Heinrich Hofmann’s Fritjof Symphony (1874), but the lion’s share consists of more-or-less traditional multi-movement symphonies. And though fully half of these works were what Grotjahn calls ‘nine-day wonders’ (Eintagsfliegen), no small number achieved status as ‘short-term hits’ (kurzfristige Spitzenreitern) and some were heard often enough over a long enough period of time to warrant her characterisation of them as ‘living classics’ (lebende Classikern).

Among the works in this last-named category are several that attest to a continuing ‘Mendelssohn cult’. Heading this group is Gade’s Symphony No. 4 (1850), with ninety-one performances by 1875; the composer’s earlier First and Third symphonies retained their popularity as well, with fifty-five and thirty performances respectively. At eighty-nine performances during the same period, Anton Rubinstein’s ‘Ocean’ Symphony (1851, rev. 1863, 1880), a ‘characteristic’ work that shows clear affinities with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides and Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt overtures, was as familiar a presence in concert programmes as Gade’s Fourth.⁵⁶Other popular works in the Mendelssohn style include Ferdinand Hiller’s Symphony in E Minor (1849), inscribed with a motto from Emanuel Geibel (Es muß doch Frühling werden) and Julius Rietz’s Symphony No. 3 in E flat (1855).

Works that date from the 1860s, of course, had a more difficult furrow to plough: they had to compete, not only with the symphonies of the Viennese Classical composers and the first generation of Romantics, but also, almost as soon as they appeared, with those that came during Dahlhaus’s ‘second age of the symphony’. Yet even among this group, too, are several that could be heard with some frequency over the next several decades, including the Symphony No. 1 in D minor by Robert Volkmann (1863), a handful of works by Joachim Raff, as well as Max Bruch’s Symphony No. 1 (1868) and Albert Dietrich’s Symphony in D minor (1870), exemplifying the Mendelssohn and Schumann traditions respectively.⁵⁷

Conspicuous by his absence here was Brahms, but this composer carried unique burdens dating back to Schumann’s encomium ‘Neue Bahnen’ (1853), with its foretelling of a grand symphony to come from the then-unknown composer. Matters were only made worse in 1860, when, with no such work to show, Brahms instigated a public ‘Manifesto’ against the historical claims made on behalf of Liszt and the symphonic poem in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which, under the editorship of Franz Brendel, beginning in 1845, had coupled a progressive, anti-Romantic stance with a denial of the continued historical viability of traditional genres such as the symphony.⁵⁸ Relatively few critics took such an extreme position, however, and there is no reason to believe that most critics – despite the occasional reproach that the main theme of this symphony or that was not ‘truly symphonic’ (echt symphonisch) – were determined to find fault with composers for failing to meet a set of standards derived from middle-period Beethoven or as codified by the likes of Fink.⁵⁹

Indeed, the aesthetic demands of the symphony after 1850 seem on balance to have been reduced well beyond even the ‘new [non-Beethovenian] norm’ for which Schumann had once called. Writing about Woldemar Bargiel’s Symphony in C (1860), for example, one critic noted, with no particular regret, that ‘It is no “grand” work in the eminent sense that we have before us, since the “grand” in this sense, which is sometimes called the “monumental”, may in our times be hard to find in the realm of art.’⁶⁰What often comes across instead is a concept of the genre as mittlere Musik (music of an intermediary niveau), which allowed one to assume the proper attitude of a Bildungshörer without having to forgo simpler pleasures: one did not have to choose between art and entertainment.⁶¹ In such an environment, composers could respond to growing market demands for new music while knowing that they were not charged to seek a place in the canon. (That Brahms carried higher ambitions – and composed accordingly – helps to explain the lukewarm reception that often greeted his challenging symphonies.)⁶² Even mittlere works should demonstrate technical solidity, but they should steer clear of becoming overburdened with too much ‘art’. Terms frequently appearing in reviews that may now seem patronising – ‘pretty’, ‘fresh’, ‘interesting’ – were in fact in step with listeners’ expectations, while those that may now seem more favourable – ‘grand’, ‘deep’, ‘monumental’, ‘significant’ – were seldom used and then mostly as a way of negatively characterising works for their excesses in either length or instrumental forces.⁶³

By the same token, originality was not essential. When one critic wrote of Hiller’s Es muß doch Frühling werden Symphony that it was made up of motives taken from Mendelssohn, Schumann and others, this was not necessarily seen as a fault, since the work sprang from a ‘refined artistic spirit’ and showed ‘nothing of that morbidity that attaches to almost our entire modern literature and from which the productions of even our most highly honoured younger powers cannot completely be freed’.⁶⁴‘At all events’, as Grotjahn notes, ‘a workmanlike, cleanly executed “beautiful” symphony is preferred to works that expect their listeners to deal with complex contents and unusual musical effects.’⁶⁵Many of these themes are neatly summed up in Eduard Hanslick’s report on the first Viennese performance of the period’s most often played work of all:

Another prize symphony

If Gade’s eight symphonies extend from the age of Mendelssohn and Schumann clear through the 1860s, the eleven symphonies of Joachim Raff appeared, one every year or two, from the mid-1860s through the first decade of the genre’s ‘second age’. This composer claimed to follow a ‘middle way’ between the New German (Berlioz–Liszt) and conservative (Mendelssohn–Schumann) factions in the musical politics of the day. As Louis Köhler put it, ‘he is a New German (vulgo “Musician of the Future”) in classical guise’.⁶⁷Thus while nine of Raff’s symphonies carry a descriptive title, only the Fifth (Lenore), based on the famous Sturm-und-Drang ballad by Gottfried August Bürger, follows Liszt in having a programmatic basis in literature (Eine Faust-Symphonie, Dante Symphony, the symphonic poems). For the most part, as in the Symphony No. 3 (Im Walde), with its colourful delineation of the German forest, the composer aimed to realise traditional symphonic forms with the help of a scrupulous use of tone painting, an attempt ‘to write programme music that shall at the same time be absolute music’ that Hugo Riemann later contemptuously dismissed as ‘an aesthetic lie’.⁶⁸

Although the Symphony No. 1 (An das Vaterland) fell by the wayside long before either the Im Walde or Lenore symphonies, this earlier work warrants some further attention here. Evidently composed between 1859 and 1861, it was selected as the first-place winner in a competition for new symphonies announced by Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in April 1861. Reviewing the first performance, which took place in Vienna on 26 February 1863, Hanslick acknowledges that An das Vaterland contains ‘ingenious and absorbing features, poetic moments and original technical experiments’, but its ‘affectedness, bizarrerie and floridness’ made it impossible for the critic to want to hear any of its parts again.⁶⁹ He continues:

Hanslick’s comment about Raff’s portrayal of the Germans was prompted by the work’s programme, which the critic reproduces in full.⁷¹ The first three movements are poetic in nature, depicting, in turn, the ‘German character’, ‘the German forest’ and the ‘homely hearth’. The fourth and fifth movements, by contrast, are explicitly political: the fourth concerns the ‘failed attempt to found the unity of the fatherland’, symbolised by quotation of Gustav Reichardt’s well-known setting of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s patriotic poem ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ (‘What is the German’s Fatherland?’); the Finale begins with a ‘lamentation’ on this defeat followed, at last, by a ‘renewed upswing’ in the ensuing Allegro trionfale, symbolised by a peroration on the borrowed patriotic hymn.

In view of Hanslick’s reputation as an opponent of programme music, what he makes of all this is naturally of some interest. In a review written only one month earlier, the critic had noted with approval that Rubinstein’s ‘Ocean’ Symphony ‘carries no poetic guide apart from the inscription “Ocean”. The composer is liberal enough to allow our fantasy full freedom.’⁷² It was precisely a lack of such freedom for the listener that irritated in the case at hand. ‘It requires a fair amount of self-control’, Hanslick begins, ‘not to be prejudiced against [Raff’s] music from the start on account of this poetic-political user’s manual [Gebrauchsanweisung].’ He continues:

Raff was not thinking solely about the failed revolution of 1848 and the dashed hopes of German national unity, however, but was also looking ahead. In the foreword to the first edition of the score, he reports that he had set to work on the Symphony under the first impression of the Armistice of Villafranca (1859), which ended active hostilities between the combined Franco-Italian forces of the Second Empire and the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia and those of Francis Josef’s Austrian Empire. As a result, Austria lost most of her Italian holdings and impetus was given to the movement towards Italian unification. These developments were not without ramifications elsewhere, and in the same year leading German liberal nationalists met in Frankfurt to form the Deutsche Nationalverein with the goal of unifying the German states in the kleindeutsch solution under Prussian leadership. Meanwhile, traditional Austrian hopes for hegemony in Germany under a großdeutsch solution were beginning to fade, and this may explain why Hanslick made no mention of the peroration of ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland’ coming at the end (the symbolism in that omission is palpable). However that may be, Wolfram Steinbeck seems on the right track when he posits An das Vaterland as one of the first truly national symphonies: ‘That it is a German work, what is more, that is locked into a concrete (and at that time moving) historical situation is remarkable. The universal claim of the symphony is destroyed through the particularly national subject matter.’⁷⁴ But while Europeans had long identified and accepted the symphony as being a German art – the enormous prestige of Beethoven had seen to that – Raff’s Symphony No. 1 was more than simply a national work; it was a self-consciously nationalist one.

The national symphony outside the German cultural sphere

The rise of important national schools, both to the east in Russia and to the west in France, is a defining feature of music history in the later decades of the century. (The situation in Bohemia stands somewhat apart on account of its close historical–cultural relations with Austria and Mitteleuropa more generally.) In Russia, the first symphonies by Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Porfirevich Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov date from the 1860s. There was a certain paradox in the timing of this development, coming as it did in the wake of the ‘death of the symphony’ and the transferral of the symphonic style into a new genre, the symphonic poem, that was seemingly more amenable to nationalist musical discourse. As Andreas Wehrmeyer has noted:

Among the members of the ‘Mighty Handful’ (moguchaya kuchka), Beethoven exercised a strong hold and provided a powerful model for cultural accreditation.

What for these composers was not valid, however, were the earlier accomplishments in the genre by their fellow Russian Anton Rubinstein, whose affinities with Mendelssohn in his early symphonies, among other works, made him unacceptably ‘German’. (That Rubinstein was born a Jew probably should not be overlooked either in explaining the antipathy towards him.) Reviewing a St Petersburg performance of the ‘Ocean’ Symphony in 1869, for example, Borodin claimed: ‘Here, as in most other works by Rubinstein, is shown this same repetition of banalities of a routine à la Mendelssohn. One finds in the ideas the same paltriness and shortness of breath, the same lack of colour in the instrumentation, the same conventional symmetry in the formal construction.’⁷⁶

Tchaikovsky, by contrast, was an admirer of the ‘Ocean’ Symphony and, more fundamentally, shared Rubinstein’s openness to Western principles of form. His Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies, of course, are staples of the standard repertory. The Fourth (1878) provides Dahlhaus with an example of how, in the ‘second age of the symphony’, a composer who employed un-Beethovenian materials could nevertheless create a large-scale symphonic form by adopting techniques from the symphonic poem. (This work and Dahlhaus’s assessment of it are considered again in Chapter 9.) The ‘fate motive’ played by the horn and trumpet at the outset appears at first to function as an introduction. By using the same theme to initiate the recapitulation, Dahlhaus argues, the composer contravenes Beethovenian norms by transferring it from an introductory to a formally constitutive role, thereby creating a ‘monumentality that remains a decorative façade unsupported by the internal form of the movement’.⁷⁷Yet Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (a work that Tchaikovsky was known to have admired) likewise opens, as we have seen, with a somewhat similar horn call that is originally presented ‘outside the movement’ and eventually becomes integrated into the form as a whole. Seen in this way, Tchaikovsky’s work provides another example of the ‘epic–lyrical monumentality’ that characterised an important group of symphonic works from the 1840s and so suggests a continuous historical development that is at odds with Dahlhaus’s dialectical model.⁷⁸

A handful of major French composers likewise took up the genre during these years (two examples each by Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Camille Saint-Saëns, with numerous echoes of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann), but operatic hegemony in France made this something of a thankless task, as did the overwhelming preference for older, mostly German repertoire in the programmes of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Société de Sainte-Cécile and Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires de Musique Classique. Moreover, although the composition of a ‘school symphony’ (symphonie d’école) formed a student’s capstone requirement at the Conservatoire, the genre itself was held in no special high regard.⁷⁹

It took military humiliation at German hands in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) to begin to turn matters around. The Société Nationale de Musique was founded on 25 February 1871 by Saint-Saëns and a number of other composers with the patriotic ‘intention to let French instrumental music speak for itself in a language of its own’.⁸⁰Yet under its motto ars gallica, the Society in fact ‘fostered the most thoroughgoing Germanification (or “New-Germanification”) French music ever endured’, as Richard Taruskin has wryly put it, whose ‘chief concern was to prove that the Germans, with their absolute music, had no lock on “lofty musical aims”’. The task, then, was nothing less than to produce a body of non-programmatic orchestral and chamber music designed ‘to rival the German and even surpass it in its demonstrative profundity of content’.⁸¹

In the event, however, it was the music of Berlioz and Wagner, respectively, that was more likely to be included in the orchestral programmes of the newly founded Concerts Colonne (1873) and Concerts Lamoureux (1881). Not until the later 1880s did the ‘New-Germanified’ French symphony really come into its own. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Organ’ Symphony (1886), Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886), César Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1886–8) and Ernest Chausson’s Symphony in B flat (1889–90) – these works share a number of features, none more prominent (nor more important in the effort to establish ‘lofty aims’ along New German lines) than cyclic form, characterised by the dramatic return of material from one movement to another, thematic transformation and a variety of other formal experiments.

Symphonic politics in Vienna

These same years saw Vienna reclaim the status it had ceded to Leipzig in the 1830s as the most important centre of symphonic activity in the German cultural sphere. In 1860 the Wiener Philharmoniker formally established a regular subscription series and elected Otto Dessoff as their conductor. Dessoff was followed, in 1875, by Hans Richter, who conducted the group over the last quarter of the century, during what one commentator has called its ‘golden era’.⁸² Most programmes contained at least one newer work, and nearly every season offered at least one premiere, most notably Johannes Brahms’s Second and Third symphonies (1877 and 1883, respectively) and Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 (1892). The opening of a new home for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in 1870 further shaped the city’s musical life; in its magnificent Großer Musikvereinssaal were given not only the Philharmonic’s concerts, but also those of the Society’s own series of choral and orchestral programmes, which included the first Viennese performances of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 (1876) and Bruckner’s Second and Third symphonies (1876 and 1877, respectively).

The familiar Brahms–Bruckner polemics of the day not only reflected a fundamental aesthetic disagreement – over the relative merits of ‘rational elaboration’ (Brahms) versus ‘inspired invention’ (Bruckner) – but also fell out along a growing political fault line within Vienna’s bourgeoisie.⁸³ Brahms’s tradition-orientated style suited the taste of Vienna’s older Bildungsbürgertum; indeed, as Margaret Notley has suggested, it seemed actually to project the typically middle-class values of logical thinking, self-restraint and accomplishment earned through hard work. Significantly, the cultural outlook of these ‘commercial, industrial, academic, professional meritocrats’, as Ernst Gellner put it, still reflected much of the liberal nationalist ideology of 1848.⁸⁴ For this social stratum, which included a disproportionate number of Jews, Germanness was not a birthright, but something that could theoretically be acquired by any ambitious Bürger through a conscious embracing of liberal cultural values such as education and property ownership. If this side of the cultural divide could make little sense of Bruckner’s sprawling symphonies, which seemed to be more a matter of emotional outpouring than of intellectual control, it was precisely that aspect of the music (along with Bruckner’s avowed worship of Wagner) which appealed to those musicians and music critics who reflected the more ethnically delineated German nationalist sentiment that began to form among younger segments of the bourgeoisie in the 1880s. Along with this form of German nationalism came a new völkisch cultural critique, whereby essentialist ‘German’ and ‘non-German’ traits were opposed in a set of binary oppositions that always privileged the former against an (implied liberal and Jewish) ‘other’: idealism as opposed to materialism; inwardness as opposed to superficiality; morality as opposed to intellect; rural as opposed to urban; and so on.⁸⁵ From this time forward, German identity became a matter of contention in the reception of new symphonies (that most German of genres).

Brahms’s long-awaited emergence as a symphonist – and with a work that invited comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth and was even dubbed ‘The Tenth Symphony’ – drew from Wagner a predictably vitriolic response, expressed in a series of essays published in the Bayreuther Blätter.⁸⁶ Of particular interest are Wagner’s biting comments in the essay ‘On the Application of Music to Drama’ regarding the ‘symphony compositions’ of Brahms and other composers of the ‘Romantic-Classical school’. No composer other than Beethoven is mentioned by name but the inferences are clear. All but Brahms were Jews and none was shown in a favourable light. After dismissive allusions to Anton Rubinstein’s ‘programmatic oceanic birds’ (‘Ocean’ Symphony), Joseph Joachim’s ‘Hungarian’ Concerto and Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, Wagner comes at last to the ‘sterling symphonist disguised in a Numero Zehn’ and with that to a less opaque style, so as not to be misunderstood:

And this was especially true, Wagner held, in the case of the absolute symphony, which took on a ‘clammy cast of melody’ that had been inappropriately transplanted from the chamber into the concert hall: ‘What had been fixed up as quintets and the like was now served up as symphonies. Paltry “melody-chaff”, comparable to a mixture of hay and old tea . . . ’

These essays gave intellectual ‘cover’ to a future strand of anti-Semitic musical discourse (while setting a precedent for lumping Brahms in with the Jews).⁸⁷ At the same time, they gave new life to old notions of the große Symphonie and sowed doubts about the generic propriety of the Romantic symphony, above all in terms of its themes, which were seen to fall short of the ‘truly symphonic’.⁸⁸ Although, as suggested earlier, it is easy to overstate the importance of this kind of essentialist thinking in the reception of new works introduced in the years following Wagner’s mid-century pronouncement of the death of the symphony, it seemed to take an especially strong hold in the 1880s and 1890s among Vienna’s Wagnerian critics.⁸⁹ Brahms had more powerful champions in the liberal press, especially Hanslick, but even in this quarter certain doubts about his symphonic style occasionally came to the surface.⁹⁰

Still, it is important to stress that the symphony was not inevitably a high-stakes affair. Consider the case of Robert Fuchs, a genuinely popular composer with Viennese audiences who, with two symphonies, several orchestral serenades and a piano concerto under his belt by the end of the 1880s, was heard as often in the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts as any other living composer apart from Brahms himself. Fuchs’s breakthrough as a symphonist came in November 1884 with the premiere of the Symphony No. 1, Op. 37. To be sure, for the critic Theodor Helm (a recent convert to Bruckner’s cause and clearly reflecting the Wagnerian line described above), this was little more than a ‘very pretty, charming work’; its main theme, he acknowledged, was ‘truly symphonically conceived’, but overall the composition left him with ‘the feeling that Fuchs’s creative power [was] insufficient for the wide scope of a grand symphony’.⁹¹Yet Hanslick (echoing the sentiments expressed a quarter of a century earlier in his review of Gade’s Fourth) offers a considerably different take:

What evidently mattered to this important critic – and, no doubt, to the majority of the orchestra’s well-heeled subscribers – was that the composer had set his sights on expressing the beautiful, not the sublime. As for Brahms, he described the Symphony as Fuchs’s ‘best larger work, and far better, more buoyant, and polished than I ever expected . . . He carries on in such a cosy, intimate way.’⁹³

Cosiness and intimacy is not what one associates with Bruckner’s symphonies, of course. Owing to Hanslick’s opposition, these were largely kept off the Philharmonic’s subscription programmes throughout the 1880s, and it fell to the Vienna Academic Wagner Society to keep Bruckner the symphonist in the public eye.⁹⁴ It was, after all, easy enough to associate Bruckner with the deceased ‘Master’ (despite the latter’s limited interest in the former). In part, this had to do with certain musical similarities involving outward features such as size and scope, instrumentation and harmonic language. But, as Thomas Leibnitz has argued, Bruckner’s devotees seem to have recognised a certain spiritual kinship between the music of the two, in that both ‘demanded total devotion from the listener’, although not of the critical, rational sort required fully to apprehend the work of Brahms.⁹⁵ On the contrary, Bruckner’s symphonies, in the Wagnerian manner, ‘aroused a state of overwhelming feeling that brought listening into the vicinity of a mystical and cultic experience’ – a far cry indeed from the bourgeois sensibilities of the Philharmonic’s patrons.⁹⁶

Not until 21 March 1886, with the Symphony No. 7, did the Philharmonic’s subscribers have the opportunity to hear a Bruckner symphony in its entirety. (No doubt the orchestra was responding here at least in part to the recent breakthrough performances of this work in Leipzig and Munich.) The Vienna Academic Wagner Society afterwards presented Bruckner with a laurel wreath inscribed ‘To the German symphonist, Master Anton Bruckner, in faith and veneration’.⁹⁷ In an earlier time, of course, the expression ‘German symphonist’ would have amounted to a tautology, but in the politicised environment of the moment, it carried pointed meaning among the Viennese Wagnerians, as suggested above. Yet the liberal critics Hanslick (who likened the work to a ‘symphonic boa-constrictor’), Gustav Dömpke (who asserted that ‘Bruckner composes like a drunkard’) and Max Kalbeck (who described the work as ‘no more than an impromptu comedy’) found less flattering ways to characterise the composer and his music, and Bruckner disappeared once more from the subscription concerts.⁹⁸Dahlhaus termed this period ‘one of the sorriest chapters in the history of music criticism’, although he might have noted that Bruckner could at least count on the strong support of Helm, critic for the German-nationalist Deutsche Zeitung.⁹⁹Moreover, by 1890, when the composer’s symphonies finally began to appear regularly in the Philharmonic’s programmes, Helm had been joined by a new, younger breed of national–liberal (and anti-Semitic) critics who published in the newly established Deutsches Volksblatt (1889) and Ostdeutsche Rundschau (1890), for whom Bruckner represented nothing less than the Aryan ideal of a symphonic composer.¹⁰⁰

Was ist deutsch?

Far removed from this Aryan ideal, but enjoying a place at the very centre of late Hapsburg musical culture, was Carl Goldmark, best known for The Queen of Sheba, which opened at the Vienna Court Opera on 10 March 1875. Goldmark’s debut as a symphonist came one year later, on 5 March 1876, when the Philharmonic players introduced Ländliche Hochzeit (Rustic Wedding), a colourful symphony in five suite-like movements that likewise was highly popular in its day.¹⁰¹Our concern here, however, is with the composer’s less well-known Symphony No. 2, heard in the Philharmonic concerts on 26 February 1888, during a period when Viennese anti-Semitism, in a new racialist manifestation, was beginning to gather some political force, and in particular with the work’s reception by the critic Ludwig Speidel, who, along with Hanslick, was the most influential of Vienna’s liberal critics.

‘With Goldmark’, notes Speidel, ‘the East is doubly present: by birth and heritage; he is Hebrew and Hungarian, Jew and gypsy’. He continues:

For Speidel, the supposed lingering influence in the opera of Goldmark’s traditional Jewish upbringing was unseemly, too redolent of the ghetto, and the critic is only too happy to note how, in the new symphony, no trace of this aspect of the composer’s heritage can be detected.¹⁰³

There could be no denying, by contrast, that the second movement, marked by two outbursts in the verbunkos style, looks towards the other side of Goldmark’s Eastern heritage. Yet this was a matter of no special dismay; after all, as Speidel notes, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert had long ago incorporated gypsy music ‘as an interesting province into the empire of German music’. (The implication, of course, is that a musical style that might somehow reflect Ostjudentum, with its assumed religious obscurantism, was fundamentally incompatible with that empire.) And with that, the critic turns happily from the subject of Goldmark’s Eastern heritage to his firm embrace of liberal German culture:

The end of this passage almost reads like an account of a Beethovenian sonata form, and it clearly recalls Dahlhaus’s notion of a Beethovenian ‘rule’ regarding the ‘double function’ of a symphonic main theme as something to be broken down in the development and then triumphantly recombined at the outset of the recapitulation. Thus, striking as Speidel’s comments about oriental inclinations and musical imperialism may be, what seems really at stake for him is to establish Goldmark’s German credentials. The Jew has been assimilated; the gypsy, colonised; the German, celebrated. And we have no reason to think that Goldmark – who utterly embraced a German cultural identity – would have objected.¹⁰⁴

Antonín Dvořák, by contrast, would never have counted himself among the Germans, but that did not stop Hanslick, the Czech composer’s greatest Viennese champion, from writing about his music as though he did.¹⁰⁵ Hanslick’s determination to treat Dvořák as an acculturated German betrays, of course, his continuing commitment to traditional liberal nationalist ideology. The younger Helm, by contrast, who came of age in the 1860s, after the Czech national movement had begun to threaten traditional German prerogatives in Bohemia, tended to see difference based in ethnicity where Hanslick did not.¹⁰⁶ And among those still-younger critics of the Deutsches Volksblatt and Ostdeutsche Rundschau who evince the radical ideology of pan-Germanism in their work, we see the tendency to denigrate both the Jews and the Czechs, treated more or less interchangeably as aliens within the German nation and enjoying undue favourable treatment under the Hapsburg state.

The critical response to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, heard in the Philharmonic series on 3 January 1891, illustrates every aspect of this complex picture. Whereas Hanslick writes favourably about the work, Helm looks disparagingly at Dvořák’s ‘addiction to Slavic national composition’.¹⁰⁷This last remark pales, however, in comparison to the over-the-top rhetoric employed by Camillo Horn (a German Bohemian) in his review for the Ostdeutsche Rundschau.¹⁰⁸ Much of this scathing account consists of a gloss on Hanslick’s review, in which the deutschnational critic interweaves passages adapted from that account with his own caustic commentary. Horn then takes wider aim at the liberal critic as a ‘foreign’ representative of the despised supranational monarchy:

Here Horn treats Hanslick (whose mother was a baptised Jew) not as a fellow German but as one ‘who wanted to be numbered among them’. And this ‘imposter’ had not only sat on the state commission that awarded the Slavic composer several stipends in the 1870s, but was also largely responsible for impeding Bruckner’s fortunes in the Imperial capital. To a pan-Germanist like Horn, then, the critic of the Neue freie Presse was an almost irresistible target – as both a Jew (however Hanslick might have thought of himself) and a powerful representative of the hated liberal nationalist elite, and as both an opponent of an unjustly neglected echt German composer and a champion of an unworthy Slavic one. Just how unworthy becomes clear, finally, in the essay’s concluding lines, wherein, by likening Dvořák to Meyerbeer, Horn in effect condemns him as a Jew:

Although coarse rhetoric of this kind is scarcely representative of Viennese society as a whole, much less of the elite that retained its hold over the institutions of culture, it cannot escape notice that the 1890s, which saw Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party rise to municipal power on an openly anti-Semitic appeal, marked the securing at last of a firm place in the Philharmonic’s repertoire for Bruckner, capped by the triumphant premiere of the Symphony No. 8 on 18 December 1892. Subscribers trickled out of the hall after each of the movements (Hanslick himself before the Finale), but this evidence of discomfort on the part of the city’s ‘meritocrats’ only encouraged the large crowd of some 300 Bruckner partisans, including many students with pan-German sympathies who gathered in the standing room and gallery of the Großer Musikvereinssaal. Writing this time in the Deutsches Volksblatt, Horn praised the ‘German feeling and thinking, which endowed the second movement that the composer himself had christened “the German Michael”, with eloquent expression’, while the composer’s triumph stimulated an anonymous writer for the Ostdeutsche Rundschau to enthuse in a manner worthy of Wagner himself: ‘What makes Bruckner so valuable a musician is his unconscious recognition of the true mission of music, namely the direct illustration of the primordial shaping, destroying, conflicting world-feeling-elements.’¹⁰⁹ An account less apt to describe the music of Brahms, not to speak of Fuchs, Goldmark or Dvořák, is difficult to imagine.

Epilogue

In September 1898, Hans Richter abruptly resigned the position he had held for more than twenty years as director of the concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic and was replaced by Gustav Mahler, then entering his second season as director of the Imperial Court Opera.¹¹⁰The presence in Lueger’s Vienna of a thriving anti-Semitic press meant that Mahler’s status as a Jew (despite the baptism he had recently undergone in order to work at the court) would not go unmentioned in discussions of his work in these two key appointments. The Deutsche Zeitung pulled no punches: ‘In our view, in a German city only a German appears qualified to interpret German music, [and this is] a condition that Mahler is just not able to fulfill’.¹¹¹ Nevertheless, in an era in which Jews dominated Vienna’s public life more than ever, the power and influence that Mahler exercised as head of both the Court Opera and the Philharmonic concerts was beyond question, and despite all the controversy he engendered (much of it having little to do with anti-Semitism), Mahler was undoubtedly ‘one of the city’s few authentic celebrities, with many more admirers than detractors’.¹¹²

In one sense, Mahler’s association with the Wiener Philharmoniker reminds us of our starting point. As had been the case sixty years earlier with Mendelssohn and the Gewandhaus Orchestra, once again we find a composer of the first rank in a position of leadership of a pre-eminent orchestral series. Like those of Mendelssohn, Mahler’s programmes were dominated by the music of Beethoven but also included selected symphonies by Haydn and Mozart as well as works by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn himself. To this established canon was added music by the recently deceased Brahms (including the Second and Third symphonies) and Bruckner (abridged versions of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies). On the other hand, the once-popular Fuchs now lost his place entirely in the orchestra’s repertoire, while Goldmark and Dvořák, the other two living favourites of the Richter era, were represented only by shorter, non-symphonic works (mostly concert overtures and other programmatic compositions). To be sure, Mahler widened the orchestra’s repertoire by conducting its first performances of a number of other compositions from the preceding half-century, including Liszt’s Festklänge, Hermann Goetz’s Symphony in F, César Franck’s Variations symphoniques, as well as pieces by Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Smetana. But apart from Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien, the only ‘modernist’ works that were heard during Mahler’s time at the orchestra’s helm were two symphonies of his own, the Second, in the annual Nicolai benefit concert, in April 1899, and the First, in a subscription concert in November 1900.

In April 1901 Mahler resigned his position as director of the Philharmonic concerts after only three turbulent seasons.¹¹³Although his symphonies remained a notable presence on Viennese concert bills for several years thereafter – each of the first seven was heard at least once in the Imperial city between 1902 and 1909; the Ninth received its première there posthumously in 1912 – it cannot be said that any of these works went down especially well with the largely conservative Viennese audiences, nor with many of the city’s music critics.¹¹⁴By the turn of the century, Vienna was gripped by the same ‘suspicion of new music’, as William Weber has put it, that now characterised public concert life more generally. Unfamiliar works of any kind – still more those of the ‘modernist’ stripe – were anathema to audiences, and most critics were quick to denounce new music ‘in and of itself’.¹¹⁵ To be sure, Mahler could always count on support from a vocal minority of mostly younger listeners. Moreover, certain liberal critics such as Richard Heuberger, Max Kalbeck and Julius Korngold, Hanslick’s successor at the Neue freie Presse, consistently accorded the composer a measure of guarded respect, despite their aesthetic misgivings.¹¹⁶ After all, if the aesthetic core of the earlier Bruckner–Brahms debate had had to do with the relative merits of ‘inspired invention’ as opposed to ‘logical elaboration’, then it is easy enough to see how Mahler’s characteristic (and virtuosic) technique of breaking down his tunes into their constituent motives and then recombining them in ever new melodic and contrapuntal patterns would now have its appeal for the same critics who had always supported Brahms at Bruckner’s expense.¹¹⁷ Yet at a time when even Brahms’s works were only now becoming an ‘easier sell’ in Vienna, we can scarcely wonder at the puzzlement caused by Mahler’s symphonies, with their unheard-of dimensions, idiosyncratic formal designs and many stylistic discontinuities (which the composer made all the more puzzling by resolutely refusing to ‘explain’ them by means of a programme).

Hanslick was in attendance at the Philharmonic’s performance of the Symphony No. 1 in 1900. Like Kalbeck and the other younger liberal critics mentioned above, he seems to have wanted to give the composer’s work its due, yet he scarcely knew how to go about it. (For once, he regretted the absence of a programme that might show the way.) In conveying this state of affairs, the aging critic began with a brief anecdote and ended with a frank acknowledgment of his own limitations:

Several years later Mahler would find himself in a somewhat similar situation after hearing the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s taut, one-movement Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, given at the Musikverein on 8 February 1907. In a public display of his own guarded respect for the younger composer, Mahler came to Schoenberg’s defence as the expected hue and cry broke out in the hall, just as he had done three days earlier when a similar scene erupted during the premiere of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet.¹¹⁹ But, like Hanslick, he could only go so far in his own appreciation. ‘I don’t understand his music’, Mahler confessed afterwards to his wife, Alma, ‘but he’s young and perhaps he’s right. I am old and I dare say my ear is not sensitive enough.’¹²⁰

The very notion of a ‘chamber symphony’, something that Brahms but certainly not Wagner might have imagined (although Schoenberg’s work was indebted to both), is clearly at odds with concepts such as the symphonic style and monumentality. At the same time, it is emblematic of what Dahlhaus characterises as ‘a shift in accent in the system of musical genres’ that took place in the early twentieth century in the transition from musical modernism to the New Music: in a ‘tricky dialectics’ (vertrackte Dialektik), chamber music – that erstwhile ‘reserve of conservatives who clung to the old because they were baffled by the new’ – now displaced the Lisztian symphonic poem and Wagnerian music drama as the principal means of ‘progressive’ musical expression.¹²¹ But when Dahlhaus goes on to argue that the symphony as represented by Bruckner and Mahler had formed a ‘quasi-neutral’ genre in the party polemics at the turn of the century we have reason once again to take pause.¹²²In Vienna, at any rate, the highly charged question of who counted as German was never far from the surface in any critical account of that most ‘German’ of genres.

Priorities and principles

In 1918, the influential German critic Paul Bekker summed up symphonic composition since Beethoven as the fragmentation of the latter’s legacy into various national and regional traditions and its reintegration by Gustav Mahler.¹ Nearly a century further on, any comparable summary of the welter of symphonies since Mahler would be hopelessly reductive. For one thing, it would have to have a dual starting-point, placing Sibelius alongside Mahler to represent the state of the art in 1911 (the year of Mahler’s death and of the darkest and most radical of Sibelius’s seven numbered symphonies, No. 4). Then it would have to recognise that national traditions of the kind Bekker identified in the nineteenth century have become ever harder to distinguish, thanks to the globalisation of communications, travel and information exchange, and to the spread of symphonic composition to almost all corners of the planet, leaving only Africa and parts of Asia untouched. Finally, unless something extraordinary has been going on beneath the musicological and critical radar, it would have to acknowledge that no symphonist active in the twenty-first century so far commands anything like the stature of a Mahler or a Sibelius. Even the stand-out composers and works chosen for consideration below may seem an odd choice in a hundred years’ time (or less!), when reputations have been weighed, sifted and rebalanced.

Nonetheless, Bekker’s study is not such a bad place to start. In the course of a mere sixty pages, based on public lectures, he put his finger on the humanist idealism that links Beethoven and Mahler and that has been one of the running threads in symphonic composition up to the present day (the course of this thread has been addressed in Chapter 1). This ethical and social dimension – what Bekker called the symphony’s gemeinschaftsbildende Kraft (literally ‘community-building power’), using a term that goes back through Mahler himself to Wagner, and a concept that was established in Beethoven reception as early as the 1830s² – was something that would be taken up with special enthusiasm in Soviet Russia, where Bekker’s book was published in translation in 1926. In that country, especially after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, all the arts were, broadly speaking, validated according to their potential contribution to the project of forming a new society. It was accordingly there that the symphony retained – in adapted and increasingly distorted forms, but still to a greater degree than anywhere else – the high-mindedness and social ambition that all but fizzled out in Austria and Germany with the death of Mahler.

Related and overlapping imperatives operate in all other geographical branches of twentieth-century symphonism. They have to do with mapping the expressive range of the post-Beethovenian symphony onto large existential issues, often by means of grand-scale dualisms such as good/evil, life/death, light/dark, movement/stasis, mental/physical, old/new. These concepts are all more or less covered by the Russian translation of gemeinschaftsbildend, the even more tongue-defying obobshchestvlyayushchiy, which is usually translated back into English as ‘generalising’, but which actually carries the entirely positive sense of embodying archetypal significance or taking something to a higher plane. It describes symphonic ‘content’, but content at the opposite extreme from anecdote or pictorialism. In the USSR the term, together with its breadth of connotation, was established by Boris Asafyev in a number of key articles in the 1920s as well as in his translation of Bekker’s essay. It was adopted thereafter by virtually all Soviet commentators expounding their own ongoing symphonic tradition. It served to validate the symphony across a broad stylistic, technical and even ideological spectrum. So long as the composer’s application was high-minded, the adjective could be used to encompass and affirm, at one extreme, programmatic symphony-cantatas overtly aligned with the Bolshevik project (such as Shostakovich’s Second and Third) and at another the purely instrumental, post-Tchaikovskian, essentially apolitical symphony as cultivated by Nikolay Myaskovsky and many of his pupils.

Understood in this broad sense, the community-forming aspect of the symphony is a core belief at least as central to Mahler’s symphonies as his more oft-repeated aphorisms, such as, ‘To me “symphony” means constructing a world with all the technical means at one’s disposal’ (summer 1895, while working on the Third Symphony)³and, in reported conversation with Sibelius, ‘Symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’ (1907; this conversation is variously considered in chapters 9, 12 and 13 below).⁴ If we take a step further and relate the community-forming dimension to the notion of positive and negative poles, we acquire a useful tool for discussing the relative status of individual symphonies and symphonists after Mahler – be it assigned by their contemporaries or afterwards. Those symphonies in which one or other pole is only weakly defined are unlikely to find more than local and ephemeral resonance, since the lack of strong dualisms in effect precludes engagement with existential issues and hence the ability to speak to large audiences. Debates over unjustified neglect (such as might be conducted over the likes of Havergal Brian, Edmund Rubbra or Andrzej Panufnik; Franz Schmidt, Karl Amadeus Hartmann or Hans Werner Henze; Roy Harris, Walter Piston or William Schuman; Myaskovsky, Gavriil Popov or Mieczysław Weinberg, and so on) cannot get very far without taking this aspirational aspect into account, at least as much as style, structure and craftsmanship.

Given the availability through recordings of several thousand symphonies composed since the death of Mahler, it is hardly surprising that few attempts have been made to justify or contradict notions of canonic status; not outside the Soviet Union, at least, where the centralised structures of reward virtually dictated that kind of discourse. Nevertheless, at least one prominent commentator has put his head above the parapet and flagged up a set of principles. Sixty years after Bekker, Robert Simpson – whose own symphonies have a strong claim to higher status than they currently enjoy – listed ‘those elements of music a composer must master if he is to write a true symphony’. He proposed: ‘the fusion of diverse elements into an organic whole . . . the continuous control of pace . . . reserves of strength . . . such as to suggest size . . . the dynamic treatment of tonality . . . [and the quality of being] active in all possible ways’.⁵ The conspicuous omission here is the ethical dimension identified by Bekker and stressed over and over by Soviet Russian commentators. For precisely this reason, while Simpson’s criteria may be helpful in identifying aberrant kinds of symphonies (such as Stravinsky’s, which Simpson was determined to marginalise), they only provide blunt tools for critical evaluation.

Simpson looked on Mahler with distaste for what he diagnosed as chronic self-indulgence. His criteria for the ‘true symphony’ implicitly drew on the counter-examples of Sibelius and Nielsen (his writings about their symphonies do in fact touch on ethos, even if his symphonic desiderata do not). These two near-contemporaries of Mahler continued to write symphonies for fifteen years after the Austrian’s death, grappling with the problem of symphonic composition in the post-First World War era in a way that other distinguished figures of their generation such as Elgar, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss for one reason or another chose not to. Between them, Sibelius and Nielsen spearheaded a distinct brand of Nordic symphonism with markedly alternative priorities to those of their Austro-German forebears. Those priorities proved attractive to many, especially in Britain and the USA, the other principal centres of twentieth-century symphonic composition, though by the time of Nielsen’s international breakthrough in the 1950s, twenty years after his death, it was too late for his idiosyncratic brand of empathy and adventure to be as influential as Sibelius’s elementalism had been throughout the 1930s and 40s. Broadly speaking, the Nordic alternative represented a different kind of interface with the ‘world’ from Mahler’s. Its overriding priority was motion rather than emotion, expressed in the image of ‘current’, which both Sibelius and Nielsen explicitly related to natural phenomena. Like Mahler, they too could trace their priorities back to Beethoven. Indeed, when Sibelius, in the famous exchange already quoted from Mahler’s side, expressed his view of the essence of symphony as ‘severity of style and the profound logic that create[s] an inner connection between the motifs’,⁶ he was simply highlighting another dimension inherited from Beethoven, placing the emphasis on means rather than ends. For many years Sibelius lacked a critical advocate as eloquent as Bekker had been for Mahler – someone who might have pointed out that Sibelian ‘profound logic’ was in practice by no means an end in itself, and still less a means of embodying some kind of Nordic racial suprematism, as an influential strand of American reception had it in the first half of the century.⁷ Rather it was the technical manifestation of an elemental outlook on Nature, allied to a stoical humanism and expressed in a paradoxical stylistic fusion of opposed kinds of musical pace, as represented by Beethoven and Wagner. It was Simpson himself who identified that crucial duality in Sibelius’s most conspicuously stoical work, the Fourth Symphony.⁸

Clearly Sibelius’s and Mahler’s concerns as symphonists were by no means as mutually exclusive as their famous conversation might suggest. Sibelius’s connection with Nature was as fundamental and passionate as Mahler’s, and the motivic interconnections in Mahler’s symphonies are as far-reaching as those in Sibelius’s. But their articulation of distinct priorities and emphases still defines a polarity that remains useful to any broad historical survey. It also helps to explain why some major composers with very different outlooks – such as Debussy, Schoenberg, Janáček, Bartók and almost everyone associated with the 1950s serial avant-garde – made little or no contribution to the symphony. The general hostility of these composers towards the genre on grounds of its supposed outdatedness masked a simple absence of temperamental affinity. In a century the middle years of which were overshadowed by dictatorships and world war, socio-ethical concerns and the symphonic genre were if anything more relevant to one another, not less. And this is precisely where Mahler, with his unprecedented gift for musical angst and irony, became such a powerful enabling force for the likes of Shostakovich and Schnittke. For them the imagery of conflict, suffering, doubt and compassion – all so close to the surface in Mahler – could be appropriated with a particularly good conscience, since artists in the Soviet Union were officially mandated to comment in those areas. At the same time the quintessentially Mahlerian trope of irony gave them a voice with which to speak to the ‘non-official’ audience in their homeland. On the other hand, in an age where conceptions of travel and motion, and of cosmos and ecology, evolved just as dramatically as conflict and the capacity for self-destruction, the attractions of the Sibelian outlook to later composers are equally obvious. In this case, admittedly, the archetypal power generally lies deeper beneath the surface, and major symphonists as heterogeneous as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Robert Simpson, Peter Maxwell Davies and Per Nørgård have on the whole tapped into it at the level of large-scale process rather than surface image or style.

So far as the problematic concept of national traditions in twentieth-century symphonism is concerned, it has left traces at least in the sense that Sibelius was taken up with enthusiasm principally in the UK and the USA, while being regarded with widespread incomprehension (at least among critics) in France and Germany. In the latter countries, contributions to the symphony shrank dramatically, in direct proportion both to suspicion of the symphonic ethos and to the turn to alternative aesthetic priorities – such as epicureanism, entertainment, scepticism, alienation and fetishistic games with timbre. In addition, symphonic composition in France had to contend with its inherited association with political conservatism, for which active participants in the tradition such as D’Indy were as much responsible as any commentator.⁹This is one reason why Debussy eschewed the genre, declaring in 1900 that ‘the proof of the futility of the symphony has been established since Beethoven’.¹⁰ Blame for premature obituaries of the symphony cannot be laid at the door of critics alone.

Mega-symphonies and anti-symphonies

Bekker offered no comment on the state of symphonic composition in 1918, no diagnosis of or prescription for what in retrospect looks unmistakably like a crisis, and no prognostications of the kind that were much in vogue at this time of competing newly defined –isms. Neither Sibelius nor Nielsen appeared on his intellectual horizons. Indeed they barely did for any Germanic commentator at the time. And had Bekker taken soundings of the Austro-Germanic tradition at almost any point from then until his death in 1937, he could hardly have avoided the conclusion that Mahler proved to be as much a disabling force for symphonists there as he was an enabling one elsewhere. From Bekker’s point of view it would have come as a nasty shock to observe that Strauss’s ‘Alpine’ Symphony (1915) – a work as pictorial, self-confident and affirmative as Mahler is philosophical, angst-ridden and doubt-laden – would be the last symphony from that tradition to retain a place in the standard concert repertory.

Not that others in Austria and Germany did not attempt to don the Mahlerian mantle.¹¹Arnold Schoenberg for one regarded Mahler as a messianic figure, and his obituary essay is a thinly veiled manifesto, designed to portray himself in the same light as his hero.¹²Having concluded his essay with the battle-cry ‘we must fight on, since the Tenth has not yet been revealed to us’ (not knowing at that time how much of Mahler’s Tenth had actually been composed), Schoenberg set about putting actions to his words. Between 1912 and 1915 he sketched out a symphony that clearly measured itself against the example of Mahler’s Eighth, including as it did, at various points in its evolution, vocal settings of Richard Dehmel, Rabindranath Tagore and the Old Testament books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, to be performed by colossal forces.¹³ He abandoned the project with only some elements co-opted into his Jakobsleiter oratorio – itself incomplete and un-orchestrated – to show for his pains. Evidently the horizons of the ‘world’ Mahler had sought to encompass symphonically had now become impossibly broad. In fact Schoenberg’s desk drawers were littered with unfinished symphonies, the only one of which he returned to was the rebarbative Second Chamber Symphony, begun in 1906, sporadically revisited in the 1910s and finally completed in 1939.

Also emblematic of the crisis was the failure of Schoenberg’s pupil Berg to get beyond forty-one bars of the 30- to 45-minute single-movement symphony he planned at roughly the same time as Schoenberg was wrestling with his intractable magnum opus.¹⁴Those bars are cut from the same cloth as Schoenberg’s Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909), and although this tortured language was perfectly adapted to the expression of alienation, Berg evidently found it impractical to expand to symphonic proportions – not helped by the presence of the overpowering superego of Schoenberg himself. Berg’s symphonic impulses deflected instead into the Three Orchestral Pieces of 1913–14, whose title captures their avoidance of the symphonic genre’s implicit demand to add up to more than the sum of its parts, in terms of conveying an overarching message or ethos. Those impulses also informed the second act of his opera Wozzeck (1914–21), whose five scenes are a simulacrum of a Mahlerian symphony – acknowledged in Berg’s programme notes and lectures on the work – albeit largely as a passive container for a drama that is played out by theatrical means.

Equally held in Schoenbergian thrall was Anton Webern, who in 1928 entitled a two-movement chamber work ‘Symphony’ (a planned third movement was to be summatory, but was abandoned on grounds of tautology with the first). Here again the generic term is applied to what is no more than another passive container, this time for the exploration of abstract polyphony and variation principles by chamber forces, on what was for him admittedly a relatively large canvas. Webern’s back was resolutely turned on the symphonic ethos of the post-Beethovenian or post-Mahlerian kinds.

Insofar as the Austro-German symphony survived at all, it was largely within the more modest terms of reference of Hindemith. Hindemith’s musical language, derived from Bach by way of Reger and Strauss, was well adapted to the expression of urbanity and cynicism but made for a poor fit with the traditional ethical aspirations of the symphony, which in any case his self-proclaimed emphasis on craftsmanship resisted on principle. Of his five works entitled ‘symphony’, two are derived from his operas and two are primarily Gebrauchsmusik (music for performers’ recreation rather than for listeners’ edification). His Mathis der Maler Symphony (1933–4) is a noble and stirring work, but very much a suite travelling on upgrade, barely distinguishable in generic terms from the ‘Symphonic Suite’ from Berg’s Lulu and not angled towards symphonic wholeness even to the limited extent of Prokofiev’s opera-derived Third Symphony. In fact, Hindemith’s only full-on engagement with the genre was his punchy Symphony in E flat of 1940. The general influence of his pungent linear counterpoint and energetic rhythms on symphonists worldwide was certainly huge, but apart from Mathis der Mahler his own symphonies have fallen into a disuse that currently shows no sign of reversing.

As much in the news as Hindemith in the early 1920s, the young Ernst Krenek produced three highly talented symphonies in rapid succession, all of which attempt a continuation of the Mahlerian tone but in the accents of post-Regerian linear counterpoint. The result is a curious sense of disempowerment and despondency that is itself emblematic of the German symphonic crisis. Krenek’s two subsequent symphonies from the late 1940s have an unapologetic, gutsy energy but insufficient range of further qualities to earn repertoire status. Such qualities are arguably to be found in Alexander Zemlinsky’s exuberantly neo-Romantic Lyric Symphony (1922–3) and Kurt Weill’s acidic Second (1933–4), the latter written on the cusp of its composer’s move from Nazi Germany and lent some degree of symphonic tension by that fraught context. It was, however, not until Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s eight numbered symphonies, composed between 1936 and 1962, that Germany again produced a symphonist of something close to international standing, thanks to his creatively potent brews of expressionist and neo-classical ingredients. Yet for all their sterling qualities, these are hardly works that can be ranked for imagination and boldness alongside the contemporary symphonies of Vaughan Williams, Copland, Shostakovich or Prokofiev. Similarly, in the next generation, Hans Werner Henze’s ten symphonies (1947–2000), which developed from modest neo-classical beginnings to increasingly expressionist richness and high-flown political and philosophical manifestos, lack the sharp focus of contemporary examples by Michael Tippett, Robert Simpson, Valentin Silvestrov, Giya Kancheli and others to be considered below. Even the three symphonies from the 1970s by Wolfgang Rihm, surely the finest German composer of orchestral and chamber music over the past forty years, are far from the most successful of his works.¹⁵

The symphonic crisis following the First World War was by no means exclusively an Austro-German phenomenon. So far as utopianism and the aspirations of the ‘community-forming’ symphony are concerned, it found expression in the United States with the work of the maverick Charles Ives. He managed to bring off the near-impossible in his magnificently sprawling Fourth Symphony (1909–16), which confronts vision and reality in layered textures as prescient aesthetically of Schnittke’s First Symphony (1968–72) as they are technically comparable to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. But Ives bit off more than even he could chew with his ‘Universe Symphony’, sketched between c. 1911 and his death in 1954. Here he set out, in full awareness that it could never be more than an aspiration, ‘to cast eternal history, the physical universe of all humanity past, present and future, physical and spiritual, to cast them [in] a “universe of tones”’.¹⁶

Even more obviously doomed to failure was the project known as Mysterium that Aleksandr Skryabin was working on in pre-Revolutionary Russia during the twelve years leading up to his untimely death in 1915. With an envisaged performance that would ‘involve all people as votaries in a ritual enacting the miracle of terrestrial and cosmic transformation’, this was the augmentatio ad absurdum of community-forming art.¹⁷ One part of its reconstruction, undertaken by Aleksandr Nemtin from 1970 to 1996, was entitled ‘Universe’. Skryabin had already long since abandoned the term ‘symphony’ in favour of ‘poem’ (the Third Symphony of 1904, also known as The Divine Poem, is pivotal), and his hubristic conception embraced opera, oratorio and symphony in the unique higher form of Mystery. But he did repeatedly talk of his necessarily unfinished magnum opus in terms of symphonies of colours, costumes, gauzes and the like.¹⁸

It seems that projects of such explicitly cosmic scope needed an additional focal point if completion was going to be a realistic possibility. Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (1909), to poems of Walt Whitman, is a fine demonstration of precisely that. Intermittently as inspiring, but far less convincingly sustained, are the symphonic colossi of Charles Tournemire (No. 7, Les Danses de la Vie of 1918–22, tracing the history of mankind from primitive pre-history to the future), Havergal Brian (No. 1, ‘Gothic’, 1919–27 – in its combination of a Faust-inspired instrumental movement and a choral setting of the Te Deum, very obviously another would-be successor to Mahler’s Eighth), Olivier Messiaen (Turangalîla, 1945, a celebration of cosmic-divine love, expanded from its initially planned four movements into ten) and Henri Sauguet (No. 2, Symphonie allégorique or ‘The Seasons’, 1949, conceived as an oratorio–ballet–symphony). The French examples come at the far end of a specific national tradition of ‘message symphonies’ with polemical import, an outgrowth of Beethovenian ethical symphonism that has only recently received its scholarly due.¹⁹

Expressions of the symphonic crisis are to be found equally at the opposite extreme from such mega-symphonies, in works that in various ways turned away from high-flown existential ambitions. In post-Great War central Europe, not only was the institutional infrastructure that had supported symphonic composition now under severe strain, but its underlying cultural assumptions and self-confidence had largely drained away too. Symptomatic of a wave of anti-symphonic disgust are the two-minute Symphonia germanica (1919) by the Bohemian-born Erwin Schulhoff (a vicious send-up of the German national anthem) and other Dada-associated phenomena such as Russian émigré Jef Golisheff’s Anti-Symphony: Musical-Circular Guillotine (1919), whose title refers to the implement designed to saw off the rusted-over ears of the concert-goer. Milder anti-authoritarian manifestations characteristic of the post-war age also help to define symphonism through its negative image. These include Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (1917), designed, according to the composer, to ‘tease the geese’ rather than saw off their ears. This ever-popular work completely ignores the positive polarities of social/national/cosmic affirmation and substitutes playful insouciance and balletic physicality; at the same time, the virtual lack of a negative pole other than that same insouciance places it outside the symphonic mainstream. It would take Prokofiev another twenty-five years to overcome his suspicion of the ‘long’ symphony, already expressed in his early correspondence with his lifelong friend and specialist in protracted symphonic gloom, Myaskovsky. In June 1908, at work on a pre-first symphony and contemplating the 120 score-pages of Myaskovsky’s First, Prokofiev responded:

Prokofiev did not have the grace to apologise when three months later his own apprentice-piece symphony weighed in at 131 pages.

At almost exactly the same time as Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’, Stravinsky, then domiciled in Paris but partaking in the broadly based cultural project known as ‘Russia abroad’, took an even more drastic swerve away from the academicised silver-age Russian symphony he had grown up with (and of which he had produced a talented but routine and derivative example as a student in 1905–7 with his Symphony in E flat). This swerve produced his Symphonies of Wind Instruments of 1920, an assembly of folk-archaic and religious materials cut-and-pasted into an episodic design that flew in the face of almost every definition of symphonism before or since (except, possibly, at a bizarre tangent, its community-forming power).²¹ This was in effect yet another anti-symphony characteristic of the escapism of the time. Its collage-style discontinuities would be hugely influential on resolute symphonic abstainers later in the century, such as Harrison Birtwistle, and so far as actual symphonies are concerned it supplied at least one vital ingredient for the idiosyncratic and maximalised responses of Messiaen’s Turangalîla and Tippett’s Fourth (1976–7).

Nordic and transatlantic renewals

For symphonists looking to get out from under the Austro-German-centred crisis, national distinctiveness remained a tempting option, but by no means a straightforward one. In the United States, it awaited composers who could respond to Dvořák’s call to American music to ‘strike roots deeply in its own soil’ and develop an indigenous concert music based on its own folk heritage.²²The search for the ‘Great American Symphony’ that followed was for something less bizarrely individualistic than, yet as open and democratic as, the visionary Ives (whose work remained little known prior to his posthumous rediscovery and whose influence on the symphony in America was negligible until the 1960s), and at the same time for something as well-crafted as, yet less stultifyingly academic than, the nineteenth-century examples of the likes of John Knowles Paine, George F. Bristow, George Templeton Strong and George Chadwick. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky played a sizeable part in commissioning and performing works to that end during his tenure at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. And Nadia Boulanger’s school in Paris had a catalytic role in nurturing the technique and neo-classical outlook of numerous Americans who pursued the elusive goal, whether they resisted her influence (as in the case of Roy Harris, who hit something very close to the bull’s-eye with his post-Sibelian Third Symphony in 1938) or embraced it (as did Aaron Copland, whose impressive Third Symphony of 1946 creaked under the burden of striving to be an adequate victory symphony).²³Other musically more developed nations such as Poland, which, like the United States, neverthless lacked a vigorous nineteenth-century symphonic tradition, had shown signs of evolving one from nationalistic roots, as in Ignaz Paderewski’s Polonia (1903–7) and Mieczysław Karłowicz’s Rebirth (1907). But an alternative career and early death, respectively, prevented those individuals from developing as symphonists, while the more richly talented Karol Szymanowski adopted the tag of symphony mainly as an intensifier of other genres (tone poem, cantata, piano concerto in his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies, respectively).

The boldest and most direct confrontations with the central-European symphonic malaise came from the North. Carl Nielsen, who had an ongoing project to renew Danish national song, nevertheless had to recognise during the Great War (in which his country was neutral) that ‘nationalism, formerly the object of such pride, has become a kind of spiritual syphilis’.²⁴Like Schulhoff, he experienced the need to enshrine that disillusionment in a kind of anti-symphonism, but in his case that led not to escapism or cynicism but to an enhancement of the negative dramatic pole, which in turn demanded to be balanced by enhanced positives. Allied to a strong creative will and to trust in intuition rather than inherited schemes, this produced a uniquely energetic sense of renewal, prophetic of later developments in the Soviet Union. Yet it was only decades after Nielsen’s death that his music gained a receptive audience outside the Nordic region, and even then few in France or Germany could find the wavelength.

Nielsen and Sibelius had remarkably little contact with one other, and their mutual respect only burgeoned into outright influence in a minor way from Nielsen’s point of view and not at all from Sibelius’s. Nevertheless the coincidental parallels in their symphonic careers are illuminating. Each produced a symphonic masterwork in 1911 that would prove pivotal in their output. For Nielsen it was his Third Symphony, the Sinfonia espansiva, whose title encapsulates the outward-looking energy that makes this one of the most invigorating symphonies since Beethoven and Brahms (who are among its main stylistic progenitors). For Sibelius it was his untitled Fourth, examined in detail by Daniel Grimley in Chapter 12, whose resolutely stoical outlook is symbolised in its blankly staring mezzo-forte ending, after the possibility of a Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet-style lyrical consummation has been glimpsed but rejected. At the heart of Sibelius’s profoundly discomfiting symphonic drama is a fusion of Wagnerian, Brucknerian and Tchaikovskian elements. ‘Anti-modern’ it may be, in the composer’s words, but only in the sense of turning its back on luxuriance, self-indulgence and exhibitionism.

The follow-ups to these symphonies were each composed while war was raging in Europe. Engaging with that experience at anything deeper than a surface level entailed the most intense creative struggles of Nielsen’s and Sibelius’s symphonic careers. Those struggles are reflected both in the music itself and in various documented layers of the creative process, but the result in each case – Nielsen’s Fourth and Sibelius’s Fifth – is a reaffirmation of the Beethovenian per ardua ad astra archetype. Such is the risk level along the way, and the willpower exerted in order to achieve reaffirmation, that each work has gained a firm foothold in the permanent repertoire, and together they confirm a fundamental shift in the symphony’s geographical centre of activity.

In Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, the title The Inextinguishable is a neuter noun: that which is inextinguishable, i.e. the Life Force. Here the honest-to-goodness exhilaration of the Sinfonia espansiva is confronted with far more explicit negativity than ever before in Nielsen’s output, memorably externalised in the Finale by two sets of timpani pitted both against each other and in tandem against the rest of the orchestra. The outcome is a blazing reassertion of a lyrical theme in Sibelian thirds whose adaptability has marked it out along the way for Darwinian survival. Sibelius’s Fifth, untitled as are all his numbered symphonies, overcomes directionless lethargy and works its way round to a pantheistic celebration of tonality and the perfect cadence.²⁵As in Sibelius’s Second Symphony, the trajectory is towards hymn-like breakthrough, but this is no longer a hymn swelled with nationalist pride, still less with religious faith, but rather one that conveys euphoria through the coordination of layers of motion. That euphoria is redoubled by the presence of associative meaning, since the layers in question comprise runic chant and symbols of Nature both in its immediate manifestation (the famous horn theme inspired by a flock of swans) and in its underlying rock-like permanence (the augmentation of that same theme in the bass register).

Both Nielsen’s and Sibelius’s symphonies work with the inherited assumptions of large-scale symphonic form, but not within them. Ever since his First Symphony (1891–2), Nielsen had taken a pragmatic approach to tonal layout, allowing movements or works to end elsewhere than their starting-points. This phenomenon has been labelled ‘progressive tonality’. But more important than any calculated directional strategy involved is the sense of adventure and openness to experience that motivates it. Mahler, too, was prepared to end in a different key from where he had begun (as he did in symphonies nos. 2, 4, 5, 7 and 9, as Chapter 10 investigates below), and there too the idea is evidently to give primacy to the psychological journey over the imperative to return home. In Nielsen’s case, the journey is as intensely experienced within movements as between them, and the effect is arguably more immediate than with Mahler, thanks to greater concentration and focus, arising from more transparent textures and more classical time-scales. For Sibelius, even if he fashioned the drama of the Fifth Symphony out of resistance to and ultimate affirmation of a goal tonality, the return home remained an unchallenged given. But the large-scale layout of his symphonic movements was by no means so predestined. Only after a painful process of revision did he come up with the Fifth Symphony’s masterly elision of first movement and Scherzo, while the design of the Scherzo in itself stakes his claim to being the finest exponent of the large-scale accelerando in musical history. Whereas Mahler could not easily sustain an affirmative tone and had to let his material fragment, Sibelius could not easily sustain a mood of fragmentation and felt driven to reaffirm. Different temperaments and world views may lean towards one or the other outlook (it is striking that few conductors have been equally at home with both). But the point is that both Mahler and Sibelius squared up to the polarity of affirmation and fragmentation so symbolic of the modern world, and fashioned mighty symphonic dramas out of it.

Nielsen revisited the existential drama of ‘The Inextinguishable’ in his Fifth Symphony (1920–2), now with even greater programmatic explicitness matched by even surer structural mastery. ‘Bloody trenches music’ was the response of one of his friends to the mayhem of the first movement, where the side drum attempts a coup against the rest of the orchestra. But behind the Symphony’s conflict-torn surfaces, the fundamental dualism was something more abstract, noted by Nielsen in his draft score as ‘dark, resting forces; awoken forces’ and in an interview as ‘resting forces in contrast to active ones’.²⁶For Sibelius, the balance shifted back in favour of darkness in the comparatively rarefied world of his Sixth Symphony (1923), a remarkable instance of four supposedly fast(-ish) movements that nevertheless leave a fundamental impression of inwardness and self-denial, as if predicting the composer’s ultimate retreat into creative silence. In the mid-1920s, when new kinds of cultural polarity offered themselves – shallow, hedonistic positives and deep, suppressed negatives – Nielsen and Sibelius pursued their respective strategies of engagement and disengagement. Nielsen struck out on a path of proto-polystylism in his Sinfonia semplice (1924–5), whose surfaces are riven by protest, panic, wistfulness and satire. In the process he drew – entirely coincidentally – similar implications from the spirit of the age as the teenage Shostakovich was doing while composing his First Symphony at exactly the same time. Meanwhile, Sibelius was tapping ever deeper into elemental forces of Nature and tying the symphonic threads more tightly than ever before in his single-movement Seventh (1924). Nielsen’s angina and Sibelius’s chronic self-doubt saw to it that their contributions to the symphony each finished before the second quarter of the century.

With the conclusion of those two symphonic careers came, in effect, the end of the generation of symphonists that had grown up alongside the later symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. The adaptability from which Nielsen and Sibelius both drew strength, and which in turn lent force to their renewal of the symphony as a genre, came partly from their openness of attitude, but also from other fundamental qualities. For Nielsen, these were empathy and an expanding world-view, which steered him around the temptations of megalomaniac utopian subjectivity and of brittle, cynical objectivity – the chief cause and aftershock, respectively, of the general symphonic crisis. With Sibelius, it was an ability to suggest more than he stated – something none of his many followers managed to emulate successfully. For Nielsen, the symphony was the vehicle for adventures into the unknown, in which the range of new experience was not merely welcomed but also actively processed, with nothing discarded in terms of style, and with reach and grasp advancing synergetically. His symphonic career can be roughly conceptualised as an ever-widening wedge-shape. For Sibelius it was more a matter of digging ever deeper towards a core of truth, discarding inessentials, spurning comfort, human presence and ultimately the vehicle of symphonic composition altogether. For Nielsen the symphony was a manifestation of the human mind’s capacity for growth; for Sibelius it was the capacity for penetration.

It was the exhilaration of Nielsen’s and Sibelius’s symphonic journeys, and the sense of their inner necessity and immunity from fashion statement, that gave impulse to their careers in the post-Great War era. This was a time when the Western world’s self-confidence was being rebuilt in material terms but was still groping for new spiritual, cultural and aesthetic bases. It was also a time when near-contemporaries such as Elgar, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, Reinhold Glière and Josef Suk – all of whom had composed superb symphonies in the Mahlerian age – put their symphonic careers on hold or abandoned them altogether. Nielsen and Sibelius stand head and shoulders above their symphonic contemporaries because they not only asked fundamental questions of the symphony and its idealist conceptions but also proposed hard-won solutions that neither leant on the crutches of delusion nor represented a lowering of sights. In effect they built in, and dealt with, the negativity that German symphonists in the wake of Mahler found disabling. Ultimately, the symbolism of their symphonies reflects precisely the kind of inclusiveness and self-reliance that Ives was preaching in America but could not match with symphonic know-how. The natural, if unwitting, heir to Nielsen’s humanism-under-threat would be Shostakovich. The heirs to Sibelius, in many cases fully conscious of their debt, were many and varied, including Arnold Bax, William Walton and Vaughan Williams in Britain, Howard Hanson and Roy Harris in America, later Aulis Sallinen in Finland, and later still Peter Maxwell Davies – testimony in itself to the archetypal power of his symphonic explorations of motion.

Around Nielsen and Sibelius in the post-war era a host of more minor symphonists were cultivating various brands of escapism, iconoclasm and avoidance strategies – exemplified in the so-called Celtic twilight of Bax, Rutland Boughton and Granville Bantock, in the hedonistic nostalgia of Zemlinsky’s ‘Lyric’ Symphony and Szymanowski’s Third (‘Song of the Night’, 1914–16) and in the edgy Parisian style mécanique of Prokofiev’s Second (1924–5). Such symphonies were capable of producing stunning effects, and they stand far above dozens of their contemporaries. The pre-war cult of ecstasy and euphoria lives on in them, as it did in the more embattled arenas favoured by Sibelius and Nielsen. In the Nordic cases, however, ecstasy was earned through struggle, and euphoria arose from coordinated motion, which they derived from the world around them; those are the qualities that have probably helped them secure repertoire status. In the ten-year period after their last symphonies it is hard to detect achievements on a comparable level. While the musical world waited in vain for Sibelius’s Eighth – whose manuscript he eventually immolated – unease was growing that the very capacity of the symphony to produce durable goods was disappearing and that Sibelius’s much-lauded model for renewal might after all not prove viable. It was against this background that a startling re-engagement with symphonic ideals would emerge in the 1930s.

Competitions, commissions and discussions

In 1927 the Columbia Broadcasting Company announced a competition for the best completion of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ B minor Symphony, with a view to the following year’s centenary of the composer’s death. The parameters were soon widened, to include any new symphony in the Schubertian lyrical spirit. Regional juries were appointed, to which at least 500 works were submitted for preliminary assessment. Final deliberations seem to have been between Czesław Marek’s Sinfonia, Franz Schmidt’s Third, and the eventual winner, Kurt Atterberg’s Sixth. Interviewed after his award of $10,000, the Swede claimed not to have taken the competition too seriously (the piece is indeed feeble), and in the resulting mini-scandal his prize-winning work became known as the ‘Dollar’ Symphony.

The significant thing about the Schubert competition is not so much that it produced no outstanding works, though it could be argued that among the also-rans Havergal Brian’s Gothic (whose first movement only was submitted) was a good deal more worthy of an award than any of the actual finalists. Rather it was the perceived need for a new lyrical symphony at all. This perception evidently reflected a widespread dissatisfaction – well before the decade was out – with the iconoclasm of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, whose symphonic representatives include Aaron Copland’s Organ Symphony, George Antheil’s Jazz Symphony, Prokofiev’s Second and even Nielsen’s Sinfonia semplice (in which, however, iconoclasm is objectified as the negative pole). Over the next few years a spirit of re-engagement filtered into the symphonic tradition, given social impetus by new challenges: the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe, the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the subsequent economic Depression. The partial re-bourgeoisification of the Soviet Union under Stalin played its part, too, as did emigration from France and Germany to the United States, where the institution of the symphony concert was younger and more vital – albeit in largely conservative ways – than in Central Europe. Re-engagement with the symphony can be traced in the work of composers as diverse as Prokofiev, who was trumpeting the slogan ‘New Simplicity’ well before his Fourth Symphony actually embodied it in 1930, Hindemith, Copland (already in his Second Symphony of 1932–3), Shostakovich and Walton. And it has parallels in the work of those who continued to shun the symphony, such as Schoenberg and Bartók.

If the Columbia Schubert competition produced no lasting additions to the symphonic repertoire, Serge Koussevitzky had better fortune in 1930 when he commissioned new symphonic works for the fiftieth anniversary of his orchestra, the Boston Symphony. Apart from such estimable pieces as Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand, Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody and Copland’s Symphonic Ode, Koussevitzky was rewarded with at least two symphonies that still cling to the edges of repertoire status (Roussel’s Third and Prokofiev’s Fourth), two that have since faded but would have outclassed anything in the Columbia competition (Honegger’s First and Howard Hanson’s Second) and one that stands as a major landmark: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Other American orchestras soon followed Koussevitzky’s lead in commissioning new symphonic work, with broadcasting stations and eventually even universities not far behind.

At one level, Stravinsky’s readoption of the generic title of symphony is no more than a response to the Koussevitzky commission. A recent returnee to the Russian Orthodox communion, he wanted to compose three psalm settings, and it happened that their trajectory from supplication to thanks to praise and epilogue, together with their contrasts of tempo and mood, mimicked the external features of a symphony. In the context of Stravinsky’s drastic re-imagining of the genre ten years earlier in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Symphony of Psalms pointed back towards the symphonic tradition. Ten years further on, he would produce a still closer simulacrum of the classical symphony, though still keeping his distance from its ethical dimensions. His Symphony in C (1938–40) betrays nothing of his fraught personal circumstances at the time, nor of the looming global conflict. It plays at being ‘in C’, just as it plays at adopting the good manners of symphonic motion. Again the piece was composed for America, where Stravinsky had recently settled. By contrast, his Symphony in Three Movements (1942–5) took a step in the direction of the ethical concerns of traditional symphonism, at least if Stravinsky’s own remarks concerning the Finale’s images of goose-stepping soldiers and Hiroshima are to be trusted (his comments on his own music are almost compulsively misleading). In structural terms, however, the generic relationship is if anything looser than before, since the three pieces only came together as a symphony thanks to a commission from the New York Philharmonic for such a work, as the title partially acknowledges.

Stravinsky’s flirtations with symphonism are prophetic in a number of ways. Taken as a whole, they anticipate a phenomenon of the 1960s and 70s, when composers such as Penderecki, Berio, Schnittke and Maxwell Davies who had previously shunned the genre hit the headlines by returning to the symphony, on their own modernist or postmodernist terms. The Symphony of Psalms stands as godfather to the new wave of spiritual symphonism and of the fusion of ancient and modern styles that characterised another phase of genre renewal in the second half of the century. And the Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements are joint role-models for the opportunistic brand of minimalism represented by John Adams (who referenced them blatantly in his quasi-symphony, Harmonielehre, of 1985) and by numerous other Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century. There is no need to look that far ahead to detect the influence of the Symphony of Psalms. Messiaen may not have needed its example in order to compose his Turangalîla Symphony in 1945 – whose techniques arise rather from The Rite of Spring and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. But already in 1940 Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem, in 1943 Hanson’s Fourth Symphony, ‘Requiem’, and in 1945 Honegger’s Symphonie liturgique were mapping movements from the mass onto those of the traditional symphony, as Schnittke would do in his Second Symphony of 1979–80.

In the end it was neither competitions nor commissions, nor even apostasy from anti-symphonic modernism, that produced the definitive renewal of the 1930s, though all of those were part of the enabling ethos. The renewal happened not in the Nordic regions, where Sibelius and Nielsen had been such vital forces during the previous three decades, nor in France, for all that Nadia Boulanger’s harmony class at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau from 1921 was nurturing it. The decisive breakthroughs, scarcely foreseeable before 1930, came rather in the United States, England and above all in the Soviet Union.

Not resting on his laurels after his serendipitous commissioning in 1930, Koussevitzky kept up his exhortations to American symphonists to produce ‘a great symphony from the West’. Roy Harris’s First in 1933 was an early near-miss. But the breakthrough piece was his Third (1937), which managed to fuse the open-spaces frontier mentality of the American dream with single-movement symphonic momentum inherited from Sibelius.²⁷Harris’s Third certainly captured the American imagination far more immediately than did Rachmaninoff’s (1936), though the latter has stood the test of time rather better, making a powerful case for the viability of the nostalgic symphony in the modern world (as do the Fourth and Fifth symphonies of Arnold Bax, 1931 and 1931–2). Rachmaninoff’s return to the symphony after nearly thirty years has a remarkable near-parallel in the Third Symphony that Elgar left incomplete on his death in 1934 – an emblematic year for the English symphony.

To what extent individual artistic maturity or national/global contexts fostered the symphony’s renewal in the mid-1930s remains an open question. Certainly an element of weariness with the brittle cynicism of the Roaring Twenties must have played its part, along with the gathering clouds of new dictatorships and potential conflict. But the violent streak unexpectedly revealed by Vaughan Williams in his Fourth Symphony (1931–4) – something like César Franck imagined through the prism of Hindemith – can be traced independently of the zeitgeist back to the Satanic music for his ‘masque for dancing’ Job (1928), which supplied almost as many impulses for his equally fine Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (1938–43 and 1944–7). Walton’s First (1931–5) is evidently an attempt to marry the symphonic idiom of Sibelius with the Elgarian ceremonial tradition (which makes for a creaky finale after three strikingly brilliant movements). Edmund Rubbra’s First (1935–7) stands not so very far behind them as a creative achievement, and it is animated by an attempt to reconcile symphonic momentum with centuries-old polyphony,²⁸just as Tippett’s First (1944–5) is a fusion of Beethovenian fugue, Purcellian ground bass and Hindemithian harmony. Even the arch-Romantic Arnold Bax, after his highly Sibelian Fifth (1932), produced a remarkably tough and spare Sixth (1934), regarded by his champions with some justification as his symphonic pinnacle. The cluster of tough-minded English symphonies around 1934 seems to bear out Constant Lambert’s contention – in his polemical book Music Ho! published that year – to the effect that Sibelius was a far more productive influence than Schoenberg.²⁹And while Britten’s Simple Symphony, also assembled in 1934, is a playful anti-symphonic romp in the manner of Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’, it shares the same quality as most of its fellow-countrymen of facing away both from the folksong tradition (which had been memorably reconciled with symphonism in Vaughan Williams’s Third, ‘Pastoral’, of 1921) and from the prospects of a new cataclysm in central Europe.

In fact, none of these attempted or actual renewals were as fraught in their background circumstances, yet as profoundly consequential, as their contemporaries in the Soviet Union: above all Shostakovich’s Fourth and Fifth Symphonies (1934–6, 1937). Here there is no question that the socio-political context is germane, and both works square up to it. Indeed the ferment from which Shostakovich’s twin symphonic peaks arose is unique in the extent to which it determined the environment in which composers worked; unique, too, in the degree of documentation and the heat of argument generated. The three-day ‘Discussion on Soviet Symphonism’ hosted at the Soviet Composers’ Union in February 1935 came at the far end of a decade of Soviet debate about the genre. Among the strands of those arguments were: how and whether the legacies of Beethoven, Mahler and the pre-Revolutionary Russian symphony might be co-opted to the cause of the new society, as Pauline Fairclough elaborates in Chapter 16; whether a new topicality based on approved socialist themes could be reconciled with those legacies; and whether new hybrid genres might more productively embrace the disparate interests of the proletariat and the intelligentsia. Those debates were all given a new impulse from 1932 thanks to the new-born concept of Socialist Realism, first applied in the field of literature. Its undeclared purpose was to unite the power-driven agendas of the Party with the ethical traditions of Russian culture. But its mendaciously prescribed ‘truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development’, hard enough for writers to adopt, was impossibly nebulous for composers.

Shostakovich, who had plenty to say at the 1935 ‘Discussion’ about the successes and failures of the Soviet symphony, had already announced his work on a ‘symphonic credo’, namely his Fourth. Debates continue as to how this white-hot masterpiece lives up to or subverts Socialist-Realist expectations. Less debatably, its own undeclared articles of faith may be read from its virtuosic welding together of the everyday and the transcendent, pushing the Mahlerian understanding of the ‘world’ to regions where utopia and dystopia are hard to separate and where credo and anathema are pronounced with equal vehemence. The fine line Shostakovich treads between utopia and dystopia, euphoria and terror, is one reason why his Fourth Symphony feels like the most exciting and authentic symphonic document of its decade. Composition of the Finale was interrupted in January and February 1936 by the notorious dual denunciations in Pravda of his recent operatic and balletic output. There he was informed in no uncertain terms that his recent creative path could not serve as a model either for him or for any of his composer colleagues. Whether or not he considered that the Fourth Symphony might actually help the cause of his rehabilitation could be argued either way. He was certainly not to know that the purges of the Party carried out in 1936 would escalate into full-scale civic Terror in the following year. Although he completed the Fourth Symphony and put it into rehearsal, he had to bow to force majeure and withdraw it just before the scheduled premiere, which had to wait another twenty-five years. In an astonishing act of self-reinvention, Shostakovich came up with his Fifth Symphony in 1937. Here the narrowed field of stylistic vision, compared to the Fourth, was richly compensated for by a more disciplined language and structure, trading a degree of vivid representation for gains in reflective philosophical wisdom. In its expressive depths and humanity, the Fifth Symphony offered a safety valve for a population at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, when the more explicit languages of words and images had become too dangerous for candid communication. The symphony was not unintelligently glossed – by author Aleksey Tolstoy, using a standard cliché of Socialist-Realist literary criticism – as ‘the Growth of a Personality’, a formulation that strikes much the same balance between official acceptability and humanist values as the music itself. As a feat of artistic manoeuvring – both within the panoply of Soviet symphonic styles represented by Shostakovich’s most talented Soviet contemporaries (Gavriil Popov, Nikolay Myaskovsky, Vladimir Shcherbachov, Vissarion Shebalin and hosts of others) and within the vacillating agendas of Socialist Realism – the Fifth was an achievement no less staggering than the Fourth. Even in countries that had little or no knowledge of such manoeuvrings, it registered as epoch-making, though approval was far from universal. Stravinsky and Bartók were almost as scornful of Shostakovich’s apparent stylistic backsliding as Pravda had been of his previous apparent progressivism. Controversies apart, Shostakovich’s Fifth soon established itself as the first example of a truly ‘community-forming’ symphony since Mahler.

In its aspirational per ardua ad astra trajectory, unabashedly exploiting the new democratic idiom of film music alongside that of traditional symphonism, Shostakovich’s Fifth had managed to hit on a musical formula for Socialist Realism that none of the doctrine’s proponents could clearly define or envisage. At a stroke he also brought about what many at the February 1935 ‘Discussion’ had wishfully and prematurely declared: the passing of the symphonic torch from a decadent West to the bolshevised Soviet Union. He would consolidate that achievement four years after the fifth, when his Seventh Symphony, the ‘Leningrad’, produced another archetypal example of the symphony’s community-forming power, enshrining the cruelty of war, resistance and hope in a hugely morale-boosting work, three quarters of it composed in the besieged city itself. The ‘Leningrad’ became the object of an unprecedented media frenzy – above all in the USA³⁰ – and together with the Fifth it became a touchstone for critical–aesthetic debates in the West. Hardly a single symphonist anywhere in the world after 1942 could continue to compose symphonies without having Shostakovich’s Fifth and Seventh at some level in their consciousness, whether or not they shared similar aspirations. Meanwhile his Sixth Symphony (1939) showed that he could deploy similar theatrical and cinematographic elements to other, more personal and more elusive ends.

The number of symphonists who also wrote film scores, and indeed the number of film composers who wrote symphonies, is legion. Not only Shostakovich but also Honegger, Britten, Walton, Copland, Vaughan Williams and Prokofiev head the former category, with Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold making worthy contributions in the latter. Along with the imagery of film, the ambivalent tone of voice in Shostakovich’s Fifth gave a new lease of life to musical pathos, which might have been thought forever superseded by the sobriety of neo-classicism. Within the symphonic tradition, Shostakovich had learned that tone from Mahler, but his instincts had also been sharpened by the examples of Stravinsky and Hindemith. Even Prokofiev, whose early aversion to symphonic pathos ran deep, proved to be not immune to the power of ambivalence. This is plain from the final pages of his two greatest symphonies – the wartime Fifth (1944) and the post-war Sixth (1945–7). Even his outwardly modest Seventh (1952) ends – at least in its original version – in a wistful retrospection that questions rather than asserts. Having edged his way back to the traditional symphony via a Third Symphony (1928) derived from his lurid opera The Fiery Angel and a Fourth (1929–30) based on his far more sober ballet, The Prodigal Son, the fact that Prokofiev eventually accomplished so complete a return to the ‘long’ symphony is remarkable enough in itself. But without the example of Shostakovich, that return would surely not have happened, or at least not with a fraction of the artistic potency it did – though this is a point Prokofiev would have hated to acknowledge. The quality of Shostakovichian ambivalence emerges all the more strikingly when ‘victory’ symphonies such as Shostakovich’s Ninth of 1945 and Prokofiev’s Sixth are compared with others where it is absent. Within the Soviet tradition, Aram Khachaturian’s gloriously kitschy Third of 1947, also titled Symphony-Poem, is a good example, with its coruscating organ obbligato and fifteen extra trumpets. Elsewhere Copland’s extremely blatant Third of 1944–6 can be entered into evidence, with its grafting of his 1942 Fanfare for the Common Man into the Finale (even allowing for the fact that the fanfare itself was written more with the oppressed working classes in mind than anything to do with the American Dream or the War effort). Among other symphonies of the mid-1940s, only Vaughan Williams’s vehement and desolate Sixth (1944–7) has the stature of Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s finest, and only Messiaen’s Turangalîla (1946–8), with its very different agenda, holds a comparably firm place in the repertoire.

Conflictlessness and cold war

Neither Beethoven nor Mahler had to contemplate barbarism on the scale of the two world wars, the atrocities of the Nazi death camps and the Gulag, or the cataclysm of the atom bomb. In the post-war era these enormities were visually accessible as never before, with the exception of the Gulag, where memoir-based literature was the prime source, and a time-delayed one at that, thanks to the survival of Stalin’s dictatorship until his death in March 1953. Symphonists in these years who clung to Mahlerian ideals, or who might have been otherwise inclined towards creative acts of commemoration, had only a shaky legacy to build on, especially in the Soviet Union. There Shostakovich’s Eighth (1943), written in the midst of war but looking beyond it, and Prokofiev’s Sixth, written after the war but looking back on its horrors, might have pointed the way. But both works were banned in the aftermath of the ‘anti-formalism’ campaign that hit Soviet composers in 1948. That campaign, spearheaded by Stalin’s henchman Andrey Zhdanov and hence known as Zhdanovshchina (the Zhdanov business), urged composers to re-engage with music for the ‘people’, not least by returning to ethnic sources, rather than add to the mountain of supposedly elitist symphonies, quartets and sonatas.³¹ The ban itself was short-lived, but the works affected (also including Khachaturian’s Third Symphony) remained too hot for Soviet promoters and practitioners to handle, which in turn delayed their potential export to the West. Shostakovich read the omens accurately and held off from symphonic composition until the death of Stalin in 1953, when he produced his Tenth. Even this masterpiece had to undergo a three-day peer review in the Union of Composers before being approved for continued public consumption. Since then, however, Shostakovich’s Tenth has become widely regarded as his symphonic masterpiece, thanks to its integration of immanence and transcendence at a higher level than the Fourth Symphony, to its harnessing of Beethovenian economy to Bachian counterpoint, to its sheer force of musical personality and not least to its unimpeachable orchestral technique.

Shostakovich’s Tenth is in many ways a summary of the achievements of mid-twentieth-century ethical symphonism, and not only in the USSR. Yet it was also to prove an end-point. Though numerous Soviet symphonists responded to its challenge, as they would again in the 1960s following the delayed premiere of Shostakovich’s Fourth in December 1961, he himself turned to other branches of the genre – principally to the programmatic-epic (in symphonies nos. 11 and 12) and to the cantata/song-cycle hybrid (in symphonies nos. 13 and 14). Vaughan Williams in England did similarly after his central symphonic triptych, with his film-score-based Sinfonia Antartica (No. 7), his elliptical Eighth and his stoical Ninth. Even after the post-Stalin Thaw had given way to a prolonged ‘Stagnation’ from the mid 1960s, the channels of information exchange that had been tentatively established with the West remained more or less open, ensuring that the Soviet symphony would be less insulated from the rest of the world than before, which also meant more susceptible to Western hang-ups. Gradually the heroic-epic symphony in its pure form became even less viable than it otherwise would have been, though there were still numerous attempts to fashion hybrids with concepts permeating from the West.

Even in the late-Stalin era, from 1948–53, there are some parallels to be drawn between East and West. Soviet symphonists, cowed in the aftermath of the Zhdanovshchina, had to put high ambitions on hold, and the resulting more or less compulsory mildness of tone became known – and increasingly deprecated – by the term coined for that kind of literature: ‘conflictlessness’. In the West, too, in the aftermath of the Second World War and genocide, and with the perceived nuclear threat in the headlines, the reaction was to look inwards or backwards, disavowing music’s potential community-forming power altogether and proceeding as though only a retreat from humanism into material objectivity or mysticism was artistically responsible. The projects of the 1950s Western avant-garde were seemingly diametrically opposed to Soviet Socialist Realism in stylistic terms, since they were for the most part recklessly adventurist, experimental and hostile to all such received genres as symphony, rather than, as in the USSR, guardedly pusillanimous, conservative and wedded to the past. But the two traditions were at one in their disengagement from social issues. An unwitting pawn in the Cold War, the Western avant-garde was sustained by a network of pundits and politicians who saw its revivified modernism as a potential bulwark against the no-less doctrinaire world view of a newly militant Eastern bloc. And when the CIA’s covert financial sustenance collapsed in the 1970s, thanks to economic strictures consequent on the Middle Eastern oil crisis, so too did much of the avant-garde’s delusional mythology, along with its hostility to the symphony.

Western symphonists were also in the mood for detoxification. Hence the phenomenon of the ‘Cheltenham Symphony’ in England, named after the Festival supported by a well-intentioned Arts Council. From the late-1940s through to the 1960s, the Cheltenham Festival commissioned dozens of well-constructed, workmanlike but musically dilute neo-classical symphonies, almost all with worthy aims but narrow horizons, from the likes of Lennox Berkeley, Peter Racine Fricker, Alun Hoddinott, Alan Rawsthorne, William Wordsworth and William Alwyn. Meanwhile in America, institutions such as the Juilliard School and the better-endowed of the universities and orchestras provided havens not only for the experimentalist avant-garde but also for redoubtable symphonists such as Peter Mennin, Paul Creston and William Schuman. Their works were generally speaking as hermetically sealed against the contamination of the outside world as those of the avant-garde, and therefore proved equally ephemeral. Symphonies far superior to theirs were composed in the 1950s by mavericks and independents such as the Dane Vagn Holmboe (No. 8 Sinfonia boreale, 1951) and the Englishmen Robert Simpson (No. 2, 1955–6) and Malcolm Arnold (nos. 2 and 3, 1953 and 1957), all of whom found ways to make the Nordic priority of elemental animation feel like part of an ethos of reconstruction. Even a symphony as fine as Tippett’s Second (1956–7) – possibly the only one from the 1950s worthy of mention in the same breath as Shostakovich’s Tenth (as Mieczysław Weinberg’s Fifth of 1962 definitely is) – operates at a highly abstract level of post-Vivaldian-cum-Stravinskyian energeticism. That a composer already as deeply engaged as Tippett with existential and contemporary political issues should only feel able to incorporate them into symphonies after the seismic shifts of the 1960s, is indicative. It would take those shifts, and the painful confrontations they entailed, to re-establish symphonic composition on something like its former level of prestige.

Anti-anti-symphonies, apostates and apostles

The defining event in the symphonic/anti-symphonic battlegrounds of the 1960s was the Sinfonia of 1968–9 by Luciano Berio (another focal work of Chapter 12). This deliberately pluralistic rag-bag of a piece is admittedly as much a prisoner of its fashion-conscious decade as the fashions it seeks to comment on. It stands as a culmination of years of symphonic confrontation with phenomena supposedly antithetical to the genre: twelve-note constructivism; stylistic mixtures; chamber and other idiosyncratic forces and layouts; concerto elements; incorporation of vocal/choral forces; aleatoricism (chance elements) and sonorism (extended instrumental techniques and noise effects); religious contemplation and political engagement. (One of the few elements of this kind that did not spark many symphonists was the newish field of electronics, though it did produce at least one superb example in Roberto Gerhard’s Symphony No. 3, Collages, of 1960.) The results were often appealingly weird and wacky, occasionally wonderful, and in many cases explicable as anti-authoritarian responses to a decade that witnessed the brink of global nuclear conflict (the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962), race riots, the Vietnam War and military conflict in the Middle East.

Among the more headline-grabbing symphonies in the 1960s and early 1970s, the weakest (such as Arvo Pärt’s First and Second, or Hans Werner Henze’s Sixth) wore one or more of those anti-symphonic elements as embarrassing fashion statements, rather as middle-aged hippies adopted alternative lifestyles. The finest, by contrast, built them in to their symphonies as new negative poles, to be wrestled with in the service of existential conflict on a new plane. Examples of such accentuation of the negative are Shostakovich’s Fourteenth (1969), whose contrasting tonal and twelve-note ideas support a dualism of physicality and death, and his Fifteenth (1971), where quotation and self-quotation participate in a drama of memory and creativity. Similarly, in Tippett’s Third (1970–2), blues and quotation from Beethoven’s Ninth combine to symbolise a questioning of the brotherhood of man. Aesthetic success or failure apart, such renewed receptivity to the notion – and indeed the problems - of community-forming symphonism was furthered by the rediscovery of Mahler following his centenary in 1960 and around the same time of Ives as the godfather to avant-garde experimentalism of a non-doctrinaire, inclusive kind, not to mention the global phenomenon of The Beatles. In their very different ways each of these offered models of transcendental messages conveyed through a fusion of musical vernacular and rarefied experiment.

Socio-economic parallels between the transition from the Roaring 1920s to the 1930s and that from the Swinging 1960s to the 1970s offer a useful means of orientation. In each case, an economic crisis issued a wake-up call to Western societies (felt intensely after 1973 when the OPEC nations suddenly increased the price of oil) and permissive hedonism gave way to more sober outlooks. In terms of the symphony, practice had already been evolving less by expansion and growth than through encounters with new negatives. As the examples of Shostakovich and Tippett suggest, these encounters found a place in a replay of traditional symphonic dramas but now at a higher level – involving contrasts not just between themes and movements but between styles and aesthetics or belief systems. Even Robert Simpson, having published his desiderata for ‘true’ symphonism in 1967, just at the time when symphonists were deriving new energy from most of the qualities he was excluding, was himself in the middle of a symphonic sabbatical. From this he would return with a vengeance in the 1970s with a succession of imposing works, each of which showed, from the perspective of one who had never dabbled in modernism, how such ‘unsymphonic’ elements as twelve-note aggregations and atonal stasis could be incorporated as new negative poles. Such negativity, Simpson the composer realised, can create friction and demand to be dealt with, rather than merely presented as neutral material. Simpson’s mature symphonies were therefore, in effect, anti-anti-symphonies, and their extensive paraphrases of Beethoven (in No. 4, 1972) or quotations of Bruckner (in No. 9, 1986) appear virtually as manifestos for the enduring eloquence of the symphony in the late twentieth century. But not only that; for Simpson’s concentration on substance and inner drive unmasks whole swathes of audience-friendly symphonism – especially in the USA – as feeble-minded by comparison. Conspicuous exceptions to that generalisation are the three symphonies of Christopher Rouse (1986, 1994 and 2011), Elliott Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras (1976) and, even more so, his Symphonia, completed in 1996. At the same time, however, Simpson’s avoidance of cultural-political topicality, and his resolutely unflashy scoring, have militated against his symphonies’ finding a permanent place in a market-driven orchestral repertoire. His power-packed Fifth (1972), was the nearest to a breakthrough piece.

Appearing a year after Simpson had published his desiderata for ‘true symphonism’, Berio’s Sinfonia could hardly have been more subversive of them. It was to be far from the last such act of subversion in the symphonic tradition, even though for Berio it remained a one-off. There was to be no bolder statement of a new negative pole than in Schnittke’s First Symphony (1969–72), which he at one stage considered actually dubbing ‘anti-symphony’. This was bold by virtue of the fact that the taboos it broke were far more real in the USSR than any operating in the West (which also means, paradoxically, that transgression per se was far easier to achieve). Schnittke’s First took the confrontation of symphony with its opposites to unheard-of levels, not so much constructing dramas from new positive–negative polarities in a spirit of renewal, as systematically snuffing out all positives until just the faintest hint of redemption dawns in the Finale, with a conglomeration of diatonic chants in resistance to the marauding Dies irae. That such willingness to question the essence of the symphony was not a local phenomenon is further confirmed by Tippett’s Third Symphony, in which the anxieties of the twentieth century and of the symphony itself are symbolised by the brushing aside of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from the Choral Symphony in favour of a queasy blues. This is the other side of the coin from Simpson’s Fourth Symphony (1970–2), which fashions its Scherzo as a paraphrase of the Scherzo from the same Beethoven symphony, but here as an unequivocal statement of faith in the continuing viability of Beethovenian energy.

In principle, Tippett’s symphonic trajectory was a continuation of the Stravinskyan project to re-engage with the genre at the same time as redefining its potential – a paradoxical affirmation out of scepticism. By contrast, Schnittke’s First, like Berio’s Sinfonia (which Schnittke knew and analysed) is as much a manifesto as a work of art – from the opposite party platform to Simpson’s. Whereas Berio adheres to minimal standards of taste and craft, Schnittke deliberately (or perhaps inadvertently) serves up a mess instead of music, daring commentators to fling up their hands in outrage (which they duly did). In fact there is rather more craft in Schnittke’s work than meets the ear. And because of the strength of their scepticism, neither Schnittke’s nor Tippett’s work is quite the act of apostasy it might seem to be (in the sense of going against the avant-garde’s determination to stigmatise the symphony as a dead form). But they certainly prepared the ground for that phenomenon later in the 1970s, when composers such as Penderecki and Maxwell Davies, who had been avant-garde iconoclasts through the 1950s and 1960s, startled the musical world by rediscovering points of contact with symphonic tradition, via Mahler and Sibelius, respectively. Admittedly neither composer is likely to be remembered for his symphonies, which lack the focus and dramatic edge of their most distinctive work. Penderecki’s symphonies have been increasingly vitiated by neo-Romantic posturing and Maxwell Davies’ by obsessive-compulsive note-spinning. In neither case is the negative pole dramatised anywhere near as effectively as by Schnittke or Tippett.

The crucible of communicative post-war musical modernism was Poland, where the surface attractions of the avant-garde combusted with the audience-friendly rhetoric of the East. Here, after the first flurries of excitement had died down, most composers willingly ditched the modernist baggage for the sake of re-engagement with the symphony. What they retained from that flirtation, at least for a while, were the elements of chance and sonorism (indebted to Cage and Bartók, respectively), which were later to be replaced by spiritual subject matter and moody contemplation. Witold Lutosławski forged an uneasy compromise with his Second Symphony (1968), styling his two movements as ‘Hesitant’ and ‘Direct’ in a way that recalls Sibelius and Nielsen in principle though not in practice (the same ploy features far more potently in the first movement of Tippett’s Third, as ‘Arrest’ and ‘Movement’).³²But Lutosławski hit something much closer to the bull’s-eye in 1983 with his Third Symphony. Meanwhile Henryk Górecki took a more drastic path from the violence of his Second Symphony (‘Copernican’, 1972) to the consoling beauty of his Third (‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’, 1976). The latter made little impact on its initial appearance but gained a cult following in 1992, following astute marketing of a CD markedly inferior to the Polish recording that had long been in circulation without attracting much media attention. In one of the most fascinating case-studies of musical appropriation, Górecki’s Third then became a soundtrack for documentaries about the Holocaust, which had been no part of the composer’s intentions.³³

The New Spirituality, generally expressed in pacific neo-tonal or neo-modal idioms, was the one ingredient implied in the expansions of 1960s symphonism that Berio had not enshrined in his Sinfonia and that Schnittke had barely hinted at in his First Symphony. It would flourish through the 1970s and beyond. Of course, symphonies with more-or-less overt spiritual programmes had been composed periodically through the twentieth century and before, sometimes even with the label ‘sacra’ attached (beginning with Holmboe’s Fourth in 1941, and with Andrzej Panufnik’s Third of 1963 as the salient example). The strikingly new project was to marry that impulse with a fresh consideration of folk sources (itself a long-established escape route from modernist-materialist impasses) and increasingly with aspects of ecumenicism and new-age contemplation as well. These dimensions were the flip side to the militant Islamic fundamentalism that fulminated after the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1967 and that came to the surface with the deposing of the Shah of Iran and the establishment of theocratic rule there in 1979. The rising materialism of the 1980s in the West, with powerful right-of-centre governments in the UK and USA setting the agenda for revived capitalism and a precipitous collapse of the socialist alternative, seem to have prompted an urge among symphonists to redress the balance, with a renewed emphasis on spiritual values. It is important to recognise that the concomitant rehabilitation of tonality had nothing necessarily to do with affirmatory aesthetics or right-wing politics but could equally betoken apostasy from a discredited and dysfunctional avant-garde.

All these trends can be traced quite clearly in the work of four composers who worked in the satellite republics of the Soviet Union and were thus to some extent immune from the worst effects of centralised control. The weakest representatives are the three early symphonies of the Estonian Arvo Pärt, which are a parade of attempts to drag the Soviet symphony into the world of modern -isms – from serialism and sonorism, through polystylism and symbolic quotation, to archaism, stopping at the threshold of the full-blown spiritualism that coincided with his abandonment of the symphony from the 1970s (his Fourth Symphony had its premiere in Los Angeles in January 2009 and proved a very damp squib). Far more potent are the seven symphonies of the Georgian Giya Kancheli, whose starting-point was the encounter with Shostakovich’s rehabilitated Fourth, but which soon moved into polarised regions of contemplation and explosion, indebted to Stravinsky, Shostakovich and the spirit of Georgian folk music. Kancheli’s symphonies nos. 3 to 6 (1973–81) are single-movement structures of twenty-five to thirty-five minutes at least (when taken at the uncompromisingly slow tempi on which Kancheli insists). All offer fine examples of controlled accumulation and release of tension. In his eight symphonies (1969–89) the Armenian Avet Terteryan retained more of the trappings of Polish-style sonorism than did Kancheli, and at the same time placed folk elements closer to the surface of his music in the shape of actual folk instruments, making for a remarkable fusion of militancy and meditation. Finally the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, also with eight numbered symphonies so far to his name, plus several symphonic upgrades from concertante works, began with flirtations with a poeticised Webernian pointillism. At the apex of his output is his masterly Fifth Symphony (1980–2), the finest symphonic embodiment of his self-declared act of ‘disarmament’, wherein hypnotic memories of Mahler and earlier Romantics evoke a beauty that is craved but no longer graspable. All these works in their various ways show symphonists disengaging from the world, at a time when the West was facing up to the consequences of new economic realities and when Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK had sat down heavily on the anti-socialist end of the political see-saw. Those realities eventually forced the Soviet Union into its reformist period of glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985, leading ineluctably to the collapse of communism and of the Union itself in 1991.

By comparison with the best work of these four composers, the blend of modernism and spirituality in the 1980s symphonies of the bigger names in post-Shostakovich Russia – principally Edison Denisov, Schnittke and Sofiya Gubaidulina – seems speculative and schematic, largely because of their heavy reliance on symbolism, evidently seeking to compensate for under-developed compositional strategies and insufficient aural filtering. The one symphony of Schnittke’s that fully lives up to his reputation is in fact his first to eschew spiritual symbolism altogether, namely the Concerto grosso No. 4/Symphony No. 5 of 1988, a virtuoso genre-fusion that moves from post-Stravinskian concerto grosso to post-Mahlerian symphony, displaying a magnificent gift for dystopian frenzy throughout. The only other symphonies from the last decade or so of the Soviet era that can be ranged alongside Kancheli, Terteryan, Silvestrov and Schnittke’s Fifth for communicative intensity are those of the maverick Galina Ustvolskaya, beginning with her Second of 1979 (‘True, Eternal Bliss’) and ending with the Fifth of 1991 (‘Amen’), whose agonised spirituality is conveyed with extreme intransigence and hard-hitting intensity, indebted to Bartók and Stravinsky.

Politics and popular music

Outside the Soviet Union there have been any number of symphonies written with overtly spiritual content, but few that can match Kancheli, Terteryan, Silvestrov and Ustvolskaya for a sense of inner necessity or control over large time-spans. The Scot James MacMillan, directly influenced by Ustvolskaya’s work, arguably did so in his First and Third Symphonies (‘Vigil’, 1997; ‘Silence’, 2002). MacMillan, a composer with a high profile for his political as well as religious views, has tended to channel the former in the direction of opera and the latter in the direction of symphony. Others have sought a fusion, producing symphonies with comparably grand ambitions but far less creative potency. From China, Tan Dun’s ‘Symphony 1997: Heaven, Earth, Mankind’ and his 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium are cases in point, their compendious programmes being in inverse proportion to their musical interest. These and other symphonies from the East, such as those by the Japanese Takashi Yoshimatsu, have in their favour a sensibility unencumbered by Western assumptions of taste and technical competence. But their immediately gratifying surfaces and politically correct programmes offer little substance to chew on. Meanwhile symphonies have been written about conflicts in Vietnam, the Balkans and Iraq, about the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and about the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. But none of these has generated more than local or ephemeral interest. Meanwhile, those who have dared to broach such topics as power politics, fundamentalist religion, terrorism and climate change – the preoccupations that drove disease, post-communism and civil rights off the front pages in the first decade of the twenty-first century – have generally done so in genres other than symphony, such as opera and oratorio. Yet given the pluralism of postmodern attitudes to style, there would seem to be no reason in principle why fine symphonies should not emerge with such agendas, if only the music and the message can be made to serve one another.

The only other major new trend to have emerged in the symphony since 1990 is a reconsideration of possible interfaces with popular music. Coming from the direction of the high-art composer, John Adams’s Chamber Symphony of 1992 achieved an unlikely but effective fusion between Schoenbergian atonality – which occasionally surfaces very usefully as a negative pole in his otherwise relentlessly affirmatory style – and popular cartoons, notably Roadrunner (Adams’s ‘Son of Chamber Symphony’, premiered in 2009, is similarly urbane and hyper-active). Far less interesting is Michael Daugherty’s attempt to upgrade the Superman story to symphonic status (‘Metropolis’ Symphony, 1988–93). Among his eight numbered symphonies to date, Philip Glass’s First (‘Low’, 1992) and Fourth (‘Heroes’, 1996), paraphrasing albums by David Bowie and Brian Eno, are by no means the most turgid. But from the pop/rock end, perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is New York-based guitarist Glenn Branca, who has produced a series of ambitiously titled symphonies (the latest to the time of writing being No. 13, ‘Hallucination City’ for 100 guitars, premiered in 2006, No. 14, ‘The Harmonic Series’, premiered in 2008 and No. 15 ‘Running through the World like an Open Razor’, premiered in 2010). These have won some recognition and if nothing else have a feel of needing their large-scale dimensions in order to convey matters of depth and urgency, avoiding the instant gratification of most of their art-symphony compatriots.

Instead of prognostication

Writing as the centenary of Mahler’s death approaches, it is as hard, and as pointless, to make predictions as it would have been for Paul Bekker in 1911. Symphonies are still commissioned, or written in response to non-specific commissions, by such bastions as the London Proms, among the most prominent from that source in the past quarter-century being the Dane Poul Ruders’s Himmelhochjauchzend, zum Tode betrübt (1989) and three from England: Robin Holloway’s First (1998–9), which seeks to chart the musical course of the twentieth century; John Casken’s First (‘Broken Consort’, 2004), in which a concertante gypsy ensemble defines the topic of cultural difference; and David Matthews’s finely argued Sixth (2007). But symphonies have long since ceased to be solicited by competitions, which nowadays tend to specify the medium (usually small) but not the genre. And they are unlikely to feature as topics for composers’ symposia any time soon. The demand for large orchestral works has become more focussed on symphonic poems (in effect if not name) and concertos, which a number of star soloists are happy to support, while the popularity of concertos for orchestra fuels suspicions that for better or worse composers remain daunted by the notion of the symphony (no bad thing, it might be thought). Meanwhile the infrastructure that supported more than 250 years of symphonic composition has shown unmistakable signs of fragility. Pundits both Eastern and Western have been observing – if not lamenting – the shift of the symphony concert to the status of lifestyle accessory driven by the imperatives of marketing, rather than of quasi-religious observance.

As for composers with established reputations as symphonists, of the generation of the 1920s and 1930s still creatively active in the twenty-first century, Henze completed his Tenth in 2000, and only ill health seems to have prevented a continuation of the cycle; Kancheli put a full stop to his symphonic output with No. 7 (‘Epilogue’, 1986), though he has continued to compose long orchestral pieces that could carry the generic title without embarrassment. Like him, Per Nørgård seemed to have closed the book with his millennial Sixth (‘At the End of the Day’) only to reopen it with an impressive Seventh in 2006. Fans of the mystical aura of the ‘Ninth Symphony’ may note the significant number of composers seemingly stalled at its threshold. Maxwell Davies put a comma to his symphonic output with his Eighth (‘Antarctic’) in 2000, returning only in 2012 with his Ninth, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II in her diamond jubilee year; Einojuhani Rautavaara reached his Eighth (‘The Journey’) in 1999, Penderecki his (‘Songs of the Past’) in 2005 and Silvestrov his in 2007. Schnittke was working on his Ninth up to his death in 1998; but if its reconstruction by Alexander Raskatov is anything like an accurate deciphering of its almost illegible manuscript, it has to be reckoned no more coherent than Schnittke’s previous three symphonies.

Finland continues to produce a plethora of high-grade symphonies, thanks to public and political assent to the value of subsidy for the arts (the same applies to opera), and thanks to the creative vigour of individualists such as, above all, Kalevi Aho, whose Fifteenth Symphony was first heard in Manchester in March 2011. Certainly, anyone who can take on and make such a magnificent job of a commission for a symphony to be performed on the slopes of a hillside in Lapland, with musicians up to 300 metres away from the conductor (No. 12, Luosto, 2002–3), cannot be accused of lack of symphonic ambition. Aho’s Ninth (1994) has a fair claim to being the finest of his numerous post-Mahlerian concertante symphonies (the solo instrument here being trombone, doubling on sackbut). In the year that symphony was composed, Richard Taruskin, introducing an appreciative essay on Vagn Holmboe, produced one of his most apposite sound-bites: ‘In the twentieth century the symphony moved to the suburbs.’³⁴ That remains true today, when Finland, Britain and the USA continue to provide the breeding-ground for fine symphonies. However, in a less well-judged postscript from 2008 Taruskin opined that with Holmboe’s death in 1996 the world had lost its ‘greatest living traditional symphonist’ and that ‘there is no one living now to whom such an epithet could be meaningfully applied’.³⁵ By virtue of openness of outlook and virtuosity of technique, Aho’s ongoing symphonic output makes a clear riposte to that claim.

Jeremiads concerning the death of the symphony, or of classical music altogether, have been sprinkled around ever since the 1830s, and they generally look stupid almost as soon as they are made. It would be comforting to respond – as Mahler reportedly did in conversation with Brahms about the death of music – that the urge to compose symphonies and to listen to them is as unstoppable as the flow of water to the sea. If the flow appears to stagnate from time to time, then climate change will inevitably intervene and cut new channels. From the perspective of 1918 it would have been next to impossible for Paul Bekker to foresee the flowering of the symphony in Russia, Britain and the United States in the following decades. Nearly a century on, the seeds of the next symphonic renewal may be just as hard to discern. But so long as the ambition to enshrine the human condition in sound remains intact, they will surely continue to germinate.