Early Sammartini, late Stamitz

Sammartini

World-embracing yet formally autonomous, the peculiarly hybrid genre of the symphony was born from a marriage of the Italian operatic overture and the baroque ripieno concerto. But the detail of the marriage contract was complex, as attested by the nineteen early string symphonies Sammartini composed for the Milanese accademie (private concerts sponsored by nobility) in the 1730s and early 1740s. Sammartini’s ‘concert symphonies’ – a genre singled out in Scheibe’s famous report as being more artful and freely imaginative than either ‘dramatic’ or ‘church’ symphonies⁸ – owe less to the overture than to the concerto and trio sonata. The overture’s influence grew later, with Stamitz at Mannheim. Notwithstanding the conflict of terminology, whereby the rubric ‘symphony’ was used interchangeably with ‘overture’, ‘concertino’ and ‘trio sonata’, it is instructive to consider Sammartini’s overture to his first opera Memet alongside the two symphonies he cannibalised for the introductions to acts II and III, nos. 43 and 76.⁹All three movements of the Memet overture are substantial, whereas the Sinfonie avvanti l’opera by Vinci, Leo and Pergolesi tended to be dominated by their opening movement. The Memet overture owes its cyclic balance and characteristic rhythmic drive to the concerto. At the same time, this drive is counteracted by the binary sonata form of all three movements – a conflict which animates Sammartini’s later symphonies and drove their stylistic evolution. In these respects, as well as in its three-part texture (independent parts for basso and viola, with violins I and II generally playing in unison), the overture is perfectly in line with symphonies nos. 43 and 76. Haydn notoriously called Sammartini ‘un umbroglione’ (to Carpani) and ‘ein Schmierer’ (to Griesinger),¹⁰ yet the cyclicity of his ‘Farewell’ Symphony is implicit within the architecture of these works. In both their first movements, lack of cadential articulation – what Hepokoski and Darcy call a ‘medial caesura’ – means that the music sweeps towards the exposition’s closing theme.¹¹ But this ostensible fault actually serves the interest of the cycle, since Sammartini’s finales are habitually articulated by regular and sharply defined cadences. They thus afford both goal and closure on a global level. And this is why so many of Sammartini’s finales are in a 3/4 or 3/8 dance metre, anticipating the much-misunderstood Tempo di Minuetto finale genre of later symphonies. Historically, cyclic organisation is inherent in the common practice in baroque concertos of ending the first movement on a dominant half-close so as to lead to a transitional slow movement (overture first movements also ended on the dominant). Sammartini consummated this tendency in two cyclic gems of his early period, symphonies nos. 37 and 73.

The first movement of No. 37 in F major implies sonata form but shifts all the signposts, resulting in music of extraordinary continuity. An otherwise clear medial caesura on V at bar 19, including a beat’s rest, is followed by a ritornello of the opening theme in G minor. A secondary transition leads to a closing theme in the dominant minor which spills without a break (no double bars or repeat signs) into an eleven-bar development. After a cadence on VI (a feature much-used by Haydn), the recapitulation compresses the exposition’s thirty-seven bars to just twenty-one. A half-close on V then tips the movement into an Andante in the same key. The Minuetto Allegro Finale begins with repeated descents from , taking up and fulfilling the contour of the first movement’s closing theme and thus affording the work’s first satisfying cadential closure (Examples 6.1a and b). The 3/8 Adagio appendix to the ‘Farewell’’s Finale works in similar fashion to resolve Haydn’s own cycle.¹²The development of No. 73/i in A major contains a 33-bar tonic-minor parenthesis which is a miniature sonata form in itself (Example 6.2). Set off texturally from the frame like a trio section (the violins subdivide and the bass drops out, as in many of Sammartini’s second groups), the section is a cantabile oasis remarkably like the D major ‘trio’ within the ‘Farewell’’s first-movement development. Sammartini’s trio is integrated thematically into the cycle: its lyrical material anticipates both the A minor Largo and the second part of the Finale, so that it is meaningful to speak of a thematic ‘narrative’ cutting across all three movements.

Example 6.1a Sammartini, Symphony No. 37, I, bars 66–9.

Example 6.1b Sammartini, Symphony No. 37, III, bars 1–4.

Example 6.2 Sammartini, Symphony No. 73, I, bars 42–7.

Contrasting a cadentially articulated and periodic finale with a more irregular first movement was Sammartini’s initial mode of unifying his symphonic cycles. Nevertheless, cyclic unity was increasingly traded off against the conventionalisation of sonata form in the first movements. This is the chief reason why such unity is more apparent in Sammartini’s earlier works. As second subjects were rendered more distinct, they also took on many forms: repeated fragmentary ideas (nos. 15, 26, 72, 73, 75), or a melody characterised by a contrast of mood and style and a dynamic shift to piano (nos. 26, 36, 38 and 41). Structurally, the second group may stabilise an irregular first theme through its sequential harmonic rhythm (nos. 43 and 44) or with a pedal point (No. 39). At the same time, cyclic unity is recuperated by making finales more monothematic; in the Allegro assai of No. 44, the first subject returns in the dominant, and thematic contrast happens within groups rather than between them.

As a rule, Sammartini’s recapitulations start with a shortened version of the first group; indeed, the entire recapitulation tends to be abbreviated. Moreover, the material itself is often radically rearranged, a technique Bathia Churgin calls ‘thematic interversion’.¹³For instance, in the first movement of No. 38 in F major, the positions of the T and S themes are swapped and their actual detail transformed.¹⁴ Both versions of S involve harmonic sequences, but the F–B♭–C–F sequence at bars 64–67 is much smoother than the unmediated triadic shifts (D–E–F–G) at bars 28–31 (Examples 6.3a and b).

Example 6.3a Sammartini, Symphony No. 38, I, bars 27–32.

Example 6.3b Sammartini, Symphony No. 38, I, bars 63–7.

Many of Sammartini’s apparent solecisms, pace Rosen’s insensitive critique, are strategic;¹⁵ they are deliberate infelicities to be resolved in the recapitulation. This processive attitude to form was taken up by Haydn, whose recapitulations also ‘knead out’ recalcitrant material in his expositions – what Hepokoski terms ‘refractory-material-to-be-worked-with’.¹⁶ Was Haydn, then, less than truthful in his comments to Griesinger and Carpani? The question is in any case immaterial, since in the years separating the two composers, Sammartini’s influence would have been transmitted through innumerable, indirect, pathways. So too with Mozart. He met Sammartini during the first two of his four visits to Milan (January–March 1770; October 1770–January 1771), but there is no record of Mozart actually having heard Sammartini’s symphonies. The influence – be it direct or indirect – is attested, rather, by Mozart’s Italianate symphonies themselves, such as K 74, 81, 84 and 95.

Stamitz

Insofar as the symphonies of Johann Stamitz (1717–57) sound more ‘symphonic’ than Sammartini’s, they reveal the capabilities of his virtuoso orchestra at the electoral court of Mannheim.¹⁷ They also reflect the increasing impact of the Italian overture; operas by Jommelli and Galuppi were staples at Mannheim, and Stamitz became even more Italianate after his year-long stay in Paris from 1754, where the ‘querelle des bouffons’ was raging. Aspects of this symphonic sound include massive texture, slow harmonic pace married to rhythmic drive, string tremolos and drum basses, dynamic variety and textural and timbral contrast due, in part, to the recruitment of pairs of oboes, flutes and horns both soloistically and within an independent wind section. Also important is the drastic simplification of the harmonic palette to the basic triads, so that root-position tonics and dominants resonate with pristine beauty, and the disposition of this sound-mass in symmetrical blocks of eight- and sixteen-bar phrases. All of this is evident in the opening of Stamitz’s Sinfonia Op. 4, No. 6 in E flat, one of his nine ‘late’, post-Paris, symphonies (Example 6.4).

Example 6.4 Stamitz, Sinfonia Op. 4, No. 6, I, bars 1–18.

Stamitz’s most famous Italian borrowing – ironic, because it became the quintessential trade-mark of the Mannheim sound – was the orchestral crescendo, or ‘roller’ (Walzen), exemplified at bar 9 of the tonic group. The ‘roller’ was not just a dynamic swell but a package of features involving a rising melodic line, tremolo, harmonic acceleration and cumulative addition of instruments. Sonically sensational, it was used in opera for programmatic effect; for example, in the aria ‘Veggio il ciel turbato’ from Act I, Scene 13 of Jommelli’s Merope (1741), the crescendo portrays the surging sea. Stamitz rationalised the crescendos’ formal function. Thus the nine late symphonies adopt a ‘three-crescendo model’.¹⁸ Stamitz places a crescendo in the second phrase of the primary groups, at the start of the development and at the end of the recapitulation. Strikingly, this scheme can even be independent of the original thematic material, suggesting that it was the orchestral sound itself that was ‘thematic’ for Stamitz and his listeners, assuming the clear organisational role of three sonic pillars. This fact is even more impressive when we consider that accelerating phrase rhythm alone – epitomised by the logic of the Schoenbergian sentence – came to supersede the role of the crescendo. Crescendos are common at the start of Mozart’s early symphonies and are phased out on the path to the ‘Jupiter’’s opening sentence (the sheer absence of a Walzen here is the ‘Jupiter’’s most vivid historical marker). The shift from sound to phrase-rhythm – from Walzen to sentence – is not necessarily a qualitative evolution; in some respects, the former is more authentically ‘orchestral’.

In addition to energising the symphony’s sound-world, the overture also promoted greater formal continuity. As in a typical Jommelli or Galuppi overture, a late Stamitz symphony elides the articulating divide between the exposition and development (his early symphonic first movements are binary, with repeats); in any case, the increased length of the movements obviated the need for repetition. Strikingly, full recapitulations are more common in Stamitz’s early- and middle-period symphonies, whereas late recapitulations jettison the primary group. The extreme freedom of Stamitz’s recapitulations is directly inspired by Sammartini’s ‘interversion’ technique, extended by Stamitz to a kaleidoscopic extreme which anticipates the fluid permutations of Mozart’s piano concertos.¹⁹ In Stamitz as in Mozart, the thematic material flows beguilingly in between the bars of the periodic cage, creating a kind of ‘double perspective’. This effect is epitomised by Stamitz’s second groups. From one standpoint, Stamitz’s second groups are consistently more repetitive and periodic than Sammartini’s (from the 1742 Eumene onwards, the second group of every Jommelli overture is organised as 4+4 bars), and they are increasingly differentiated using solo oboe or flute textures. From another standpoint, the caesura between transition and second group (normally so clear in Sammartini) is often abrogated, relegating S to the status of an interruption of T, resumed when T powers on into the development. The eight-bar second subject (carried by oboes I and II) in Op. 4, No. 6 emerges seamlessly out of the transition and quickly sinks back into an orchestral tutti.

Where Stamitz does depart from the overture is in favouring a four-movement cycle. Of the twenty-nine middle symphonies, eighteen have four movements; all the late works insert a minuet and trio in third position. Hugo Riemann believed that it was Stamitz who put in place the foundations of the great German four-movement symphony.²⁰ One such foundation was the concept of a slow movement as an enclave of subjectivity. The Adagio tempo of Op. 4, No. 6’s second movement is characteristically German, differing from Sammartini’s prototypical Andantes. Whereas Sammartini’s slow movements rarely escape the continuity of baroque Fortspinnung technique, Stamitz’s mosaic idiom proceeds as a chain of short-breathed motivic fragments. Individually, the motives encapsulate deep emotions; as a group, they unfold a terse drama. The operatic drama initiated by the ferocious unison gesture in bars 1–2 (Example 6.5a) leads, at the end of the exposition, to the sort of textural magic recognised by all Mozart lovers: a deceptively simple ostinato exchange of motives between violins I and II, underpinned by a pedal, creating a sublime stand-still. Stamitz invented this effect (Example 6.5b).

Example 6.5a Stamitz, Sinfonia Op. 4, No. 6, II, bars 1–5.

Example 6.5b Stamitz, Sinfonia Op. 4, No. 6, II, bars 21–3.

Stamitz also established the ‘Germanic’ version of the symphonic minuet as a concise internal dance movement with regular four-bar groupings, in contrast to the broader ‘Italian’ minuet (or Tempo di Minuetto) finale.²¹ Also typical in Op. 4, No. 6 is the Prestissimo Finale in duple meter. Its peculiar blend of ritornello and ‘reverse recapitulation’ technique keeps the pace moving: P returns initially in B flat (bar 79), followed by a tonic reprise of S (bar 106) and only at the end of the movement by a recapitulation of P in E flat. The Finale is a show-piece of orchestral virtuosity. Pace Riemann, second-generation Mannheim symphonists such as Cannabich reverted to the three-movement overture model. Which model affords a more unified cycle, three movements or four? The debate would continue into the 1780s.

The two streams (Bäche)

Johann Christian Bach

After making his reputation as a composer of Italian opera in Milan as a colleague of Sammartini during 1754–62, Johann Christian Bach (1735–82) settled in London in 1762, visiting Mannheim in 1772. A plausible, if counter-intuitive, argument has been made that the Austro-German classical style was the product of the British Enlightenment.²² Assimilating London’s cosmopolitan classicism, Bach invented many of the symphonic lineaments to which Mozart would cleave, following the eight-year-old composer’s visit to the city in April 1764 and his exposure to the six symphonies Op. 3 (published 1765). What Mozart’s Symphony in D, K 19, emulates from Bach’s Op. 3, No. 1 in the same key is a precisely calibrated procession of structural functions attuned to the rhetorical ‘beginning–middle–end’ model.²³ Bach’s and Mozart’s first movements both open with Mannheim-like triadic flourishes designed to summon attention and circumscribe tonal space. Sequential transitions lead to lyrical second subjects for reduced forces and dynamics on a dominant pedal (Mozart’s theme is an exact parody of Bach’s). The second groups of both movements are completed by a succession of four discrete themes expressing varying degrees of closure, the series unfolding a dramatic arc learned from opera seria. Both expositions then proceed directly into a development with no double bars. Each development begins with an ostensibly new idea which subtly pulls together previous threads (a technique perfected by Sammartini), before slipping into the circle of fifths. Both recapitulations elide the first subject, like late Stamitz. Yet Bach’s form is poised and harmonious whereas Mozart’s bursts with jarring contrasts (such as the horrible forte A♯ which ignites the development at bar 46). Bach is the ‘classical’ artist; growth would confirm Mozart as the ‘sentimental’ one, according to Schiller’s dichotomy. The distinction needs to be stressed, given the propensity to think of Mozart as ‘filling’ Bach’s perfect if ‘empty’ vessels with ‘spirit’.

Bach’s second set of symphonies, the Op. 6 of 1770, develop in polarised directions. On the one hand, the perfection is rendered more concise: opening gambits are encapsulated; the plurality of second groups is extended to similarly heterogeneous first groups; and the long sequential transitions are abbreviated into brutally efficient modulatory gestures. On the other hand, Bach’s poise toys with stasis, compounded as much by the blossoming of his lyrical gift as by an over-articulation of formal junctures. Epitomising the latter is a tendency to cadence at the end of the retransition – a cardinal sin singled out by Rosen for special reproof, since it cuts the development off from the reprise.²⁴ Thus the development of No. 3 in E flat settles gently to a repeated cadence in B flat at bars 72–6, and the recapitulation enters like a da capo or ritornello. But Rosen is quite wrong: what this example demonstrates is the persisting vitality of Sammartini’s tri-ritornello model, indebted to the concerto (Ritornello 1: I–V; Ritornello 2: V–vi or iii; Ritornello 3: I–I), which separates out the three sections of Bach’s sonata form into graceful Doric columns.

Concision and lyricism culminate in the summa of Bach’s art, the three of the six Op. 18 ‘Grand Overtures’ written for double orchestras (1774–7). Bach used the term ‘overture’ interchangeably with ‘sinfonia’; indeed, some of the Op. 18 set were originally operatic overtures, showing that the two three-movement genres had now converged. Bach’s double orchestra, supplying his music with extra resources of sonic richness and concertante dialogue, also allows him to draw in the third genre of concerto. The synergy between tutti and soli in Op. 18 is much suppler than in Haydn’s own experiments with concertante symphonies.²⁵ No. 3 in D major – the finest of the set – was originally the overture to Endimione, and it demonstrates the overpowering sensuality of Bach’s textures. Concision is epitomised in the gravity-defying brevity of the Allegro’s seventeen–bar first group, which supports an expansive exposition of 66 bars. The exposition’s ‘transition space’ has been filled up with stable periodic melodies; the first one (bars 18–25) is remarkable because it sits on the new tonic pedal (A), rather than the more conventionally unstable V of V (E). (The ‘real’ second subject, at bar 51, is quite different.) The premature A major theme works perfectly well in Bach’s sui-generis structure, although it can’t fully be accounted for by modern sonata-form theories.

The melodic genius of the central Andante, in ABA song form, equals Mozart’s, complete with surprising chromatic colourings. Both thematic groups in section A sit in the tonic G major, and Bach keeps things moving with a sure-footed harmonic acceleration from a leisurely opening melody (Example 6.6a) to the much faster contrasting idea at bar 22 (Example 6.6b). The artistry lies in the exquisite care by which this new melody both arrests and follows through the deceptively static flurry of quavers at bars 16–21 (canonically exchanged scales), a passage which works equally well above its alternate tonic and dominant pedals. Only Mozart could emulate this paradoxical blend of motion and standstill.

Example 6.6a J. C. Bach, Symphony Op. 18, No. 3, II, bars 1–4.

Example 6.6b J. C. Bach, Symphony Op. 18, No. 3, II, bars 16–25.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

What Johann Christian learnt from his older brother during his apprenticeship in Berlin in 1750 resurfaces most openly in the dark rhetoric of slow movements such as the Andante of Op. 6, No. 6 in G minor.²⁶ This is a metaphor for the subterranean quality of Emanuel Bach’s own symphonies, whose essentially private, chamber-music-like character was buried by the dominant public style celebrated even by north Germans such as J. A. P. Schulz. Schulz’s 1774 article on the symphony in Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste reports that the genre ‘is excellently suited for the expression of the grand, the festive, and the noble . . .; to summon up all the splendour of instrumental music’.²⁷ This public style is evinced by Johann Gottlieb Graun’s (1702–71) one hundred concert symphonies, which established the genre in Berlin. But on the other hand, some of Schulz’s prescriptions fit Bach’s mannerism like a glove: ‘great and bold ideas, free handling of composition, seeming disorder in the melody and harmony, strongly marked rhythms of different kinds . . .; sudden transitions and digressions from one key to another, which are all the more startling the weaker the connection’. The question, then, is whether a symphony is still a symphony when ‘seeming disorder’ is not played out against a framework of public communication – ‘the grand, the festive, and the noble’.

The question devolves to the idiosyncratic way Emanuel Bach’s eighteen symphonies (eight for Berlin in 1741 and 1755–62; ten for Hamburg after 1767) treat classical form, particularly the ‘beginning–middle–end’ rhetorical model perfected by Johann Christian. Sonata form is present in the first movement of Bach’s Symphony in C major, W 182/3, the third of a set of six four-part string symphonies composed in Hamburg in 1773. Yet it is masked by a quasi-postmodern cross-current of baroque and proto-Romantic styles. The surface form is modelled on Tartini’s concerto-grosso practice: a tutti ritornello recurs in the dominant at the end of the second group, and in the tonic at the close of the movement, but conspicuously not at the structural return of the tonic. The refrains, plus the intervening soloistic passage work, completely detract from the sonata infrastructure. Conversely, the surface is pitted with rhetorical expressive effects associated with the fantasy genre, as in the dramatic A flat interruption at bar 6 of the first movement (Example 6.7a). Fantasy also inspires Bach’s cyclic ambitions: he unites all three movements as sub-sections of a single process. It is at this level that something very sophisticated happens. The run-on slow movement – typically a bridge in a Tartini concerto – is prompted by the interrupted cadence at the sixth bar of the ritornello, the chromatic shock now raised from an A♭ to a B♭ so as to bring back the B–A–C–H motive (Example 6.7b).

Example 6.7a C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in C, W 182 No. 3, I, bars 1–6.

Example 6.7b C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in C, W 182 No. 3, I, bars 124–8; II, bar 1.

Bach confirms the potential for a slow movement to become a prolongation of a cadenza; the Adagio is also a forensic through-composed excursus on ideas from the first movement – a kind of global development section. The chief idea is nothing less than the B–A–C–H (B♭–A–C–B♮) motive – an inconsequential bass pattern in the Allegro’s transition (bars 16–19) now promoted to head position in the Adagio.²⁸ The Adagio builds up to a dramatic face-off between the motive, fortissimo, in the bass, and empfindsam violin appoggiaturas, piano (Example 6.8a), discharging into an Allegretto rounded binary dance Finale, which transmutes the B–A–C–H motive into a charming galant melody (Example 6.8b).

Example 6.8a C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in C, W 182 No. 3, II, bars 17–20.

Example 6.8b C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in C, W 182 No. 3, III, bars 1–3.

In one sense a literal exorcism of Emanuel Bach’s father, the effect also points to his true successor. For as a cyclic ‘story’ of an abstract interval pattern, the symphony is a model for Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge: note the eventual domestication of Beethoven’s subject into a dance tune in the fugue’s Allegro molto Finale. This abstraction – appealing much later to a Beethoven, if not to Bach’s immediate contemporaries – is epitomised by the Finale’s formal concentration, whose density is out of kilter with the galant materials. This is music for Kenner rather than Liebhaber, demanding a sharpness of attention suited to the intimate performance spaces of chamber music rather than to ‘symphonies’ proper. The most exquisite detail comes at bar 47 (Example 6.9). ‘False reprise’ would be a misnomer for the tonic recapitulation which interrupts an E minor cadence at bar 47 (and corrected by the ‘true’ reprise of bar 61): Bach intends an effect not of plausibility but of shock. The frailty and insularity of this two-bar reprise, hedged on either side by darkness, is broadly suggestive of how Bach’s symphonic oeuvre as a whole is overwhelmed by an enormous subjectivity.

Example 6.9 C. P. E. Bach, Symphony in C, W 182 No. 3, III, bars 47–51.

The Swedish Mozart and Haydn’s wife

Joseph Martin Kraus

What a loss is this man’s death! I own a symphony by him, which I keep in memory of one of the greatest geniuses I have ever known . . . Too bad about that man, just like Mozart! They both were so young [when they died]. Joseph Haydn.²⁹

The culture industry and the cult of genius have conspired to keep many first-rate classical composers in obscurity. Listeners who are lucky enough to come across the music of Joseph Martin Kraus (1756–92), perhaps courtesy of Naxos’s pioneering series of The 18th-Century Symphony, may be shocked by just how good he is. Born in Miltenberg-am-Main, and educated at Mannheim, Kraus published a treatise Etwas von und über Musik as a contribution to a Sturm-und-Drang literary circle called the Göttinger Hainbund, joined the court of Gustavus III of Sweden in 1778, eventually becoming Kapellmästare, interrupted his service with a Grand Tour of the European musical capitals (1782–7), during which he met Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, died of tuberculosis in 1792, and left us with twelve surviving symphonies. The symphony singled out by Haydn is the C minor (1783), VB 142, the greatest in that key before Beethoven’s, and deserving of Haydn’s praise. Yet the epitaph ‘the Swedish Mozart’ which clung to Kraus, due to the two composers’ nearly exact contemporaneity, is inaccurate. More akin to an ‘anti-Mozart’, Kraus extrapolated different symphonic tendencies compounded variously from Haydn’s Sturm-und-Drang works of the 1770s, C. P. E. Bach’s fantastical idiom, Stamitz’s formal models and most of all Gluck’s rhetorical directness, whose rawness Kraus disciplined in ways which evoke the sound-world of Beethoven’s heroic style.³⁰

The Symphony in C minor is doubly interesting because it reworks in Vienna elements of the Symphony in C-sharp minor VB 140, written in Sweden a year earlier in 1782, so allowing us to encapsulate matters of ‘stylistic maturity and regional influence’.³¹The slow introduction to VB 140 develops out of the opening phrase of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide; VB 142 spins Gluck’s material far further (Example 6.10a) and conceives dark orchestral sonorities which would never have been heard before (Example 6.10b). VB 142 loses the earlier symphony’s minuet (following other late-Mannheim composers such as Cannabich) and entirely recomposes the outer movements in a deeply satisfying cyclic design. The essence of Kraus’s design is that, in the tradition of Sammartini, Stamitz and Emanuel Bach, the form of the finale functions as a cyclic resolution.

Example 6.10a Kraus, Symphony in C minor, VB 142, I, bars 1–4.

Example 6.10b Kraus, Symphony in C minor, VB 142, I, bars 24–8.

Like early Stamitz, the first movement of the C-sharp minor Symphony is bipartite with repeats, the recapitulation of P being delayed until the end. VB 142, conversely, follows late Stamitz in abrogating the articulation between exposition and development and restoring a tonic recapitulation. Another late Stamitz procedure much in evidence in Kraus even before 1782 is to eclipse S with the transition. In the Symphony in C major VB 138 (1781), a strategically trite secondary theme is thrown aside when a fragment of T (bars 33–4) returns and explodes (bars 63–73). This ‘outbreak’ principle – suggesting a composer bursting through received forms – is taken to another level in VB 142. The most substantial passage in the exposition is the sixty-two-bar-long transition (bars 56–117), book-ended by theatrically emphatic caesuras. Whereas the fifty-five-bar-long primary group is equally weighted, the second group in E flat occupies a mere twenty-nine bars (bars 118–45): as in Stamitz, it is an ‘oasis’ between T and the development.³² The recapitulation recasts the form radically, eliminating T entirely, thereby cutting the exposition’s material from 145 bars to 57. The form is not just foreshortened but rationalised: in terms of modern sonata theory, a ‘tri-modular block’ (an exposition with two structural caesuras) is normalised – the elision of T notwithstanding – into a recapitulation with a single caesura between P and S.³³ This ‘normalisation’ is echoed at a global level by the traditional and concise sonata form of the Finale, including its double bars and repeats. The foreshortening gesture is recursive at three levels – exposition; first movement; cycle – projecting the Sturm-und-Drang telos in a uniquely intricate structure.

Tri-modular blocks were common in other Viennese symphonies by Wagenseil and Dittersdorf,³⁴but were taken up in orchestral music by Haydn and Mozart much later than by Kraus, who learnt the device ‘at source’ from Mannheim.³⁵The C minor Symphony’s extraordinarily expansive transition is reminiscent of that in the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K 491 (1786), which we know, through studies of the autograph, was interpolated into the exposition at a later stage. Perhaps after hearing VB 142? Did the anti-Mozart influence Wolfgang Amadeus?

Luigi Boccherini

Renewed interest in the chamber music of Boccherini (1743–1805) should lead to his re-evaluation as a symphonist of equal stature to middle-period Haydn (1775–92; between the Sturm und Drang and ‘London’ symphonies).³⁶ Despite artistic isolation at Arenas and Madrid, Boccherini corresponded with the Esterhaz-bound Haydn, and the two composers were coupled to the former’s detriment; the nineteenth-century violinist Giuseppe Puppo christened him ‘Haydn’s wife’, due to the perceived effeminacy of his charming style. Yet their affinity was reciprocal in a deeper way. A born architect and musical logician, Haydn only learned to compose melodies in the ‘operatic’ symphonies of the late 1770s;³⁷ a melodic genius from the outset, Boccherini sorted out his formal problems with the Op. 21 symphonies of 1775. The masterworks from the 1780s – particularly the symphonies opp. 35 and 37 – give the lie to the standard epithet, gleaned from the chamber music, that Boccherini was a master of rococo and static ‘detail’ rather than ‘broad effect’.³⁸ It is the broadness of their style, in fact, which suggests comparison with later symphonic masters of repetition and block contrast, such as Schubert and Bruckner, together with a captivating sensuousness and almost luminescent colour. It is extraordinary, then, that this progressive aspect is extrapolated from Sammartini – whom Boccherini met in Milan in 1765.³⁹ It brings this ‘evolutionary’ story full circle.

Boccherini and Sammartini share many characteristics: a sensit-ivity for orchestral string textures, often focussing on first and second violins either in octaves or in double counterpoint; a fidelity to the concerto strand of the symphonic fabric, evinced in Boccherini by an effortless accommodation of concertante dialogue; broad major/minor contrasts (see Sammartini’s symphonies nos. 7, 14 and 65); and perhaps most of all, a liking for cyclic unity. Of all galant or classical symphonists, Boccherini is by far the most preoccupied with patent thematic relationships between movements. A theme or even an entire section or movement may recur (e.g. the opening slow introduction returns before the Finale in Op. 12, No. 4). A particularly sophisticated case is the Andante of Op. 35, No. 2 in E flat, where a new theme, which usurps the expected reprise of the opening C minor first subject (Example 6.11a), returns a few bars later (Example 6.11b) as the first subject of the Finale (many of Beethoven’s finales would also be intimated in the middle movements).

Example 6.11a Boccherini, Symphony in E flat, Op. 35, No. 2, II, bars 39–44.

Example 6.11b Boccherini, Symphony in E flat, Op. 35, No. 2, III, bars 1–5.

Cyclic recurrences throughout Symphony No. 23 in D minor, Op. 37, No. 3 (1787) are particularly extensive and audible, because they correlate with the D minor/major alternation across the work: elements of the four-bar introduction return in the minore sections of the Minuetto, Andante amoroso and Finale.

Op. 37, No. 3, one of the high-points of Boccherini’s maturity, co-opts major/minor opposition in a patchwork of contrasts, encapsulated in the four-bar phrasing for which he is often denigrated. Yet it is precisely the Symphony’s periodicity which makes the non-mediated juxtaposition of textural and tonal blocks so effective, and the overall form so compellingly efficient. The pianissimo four-bar D minor introduction (Example 6.12a) is succeeded with a fortissimo outburst of D major figuration (Example 6.12b). Four bars later, the D minor material returns, succeeded after four more bars by an equally unmediated block of F major. Although the Symphony is topped, tailed and punctuated by episodes in D minor, it is not really ‘in’ D minor; rather, the quality of the mode is rendered thematic in itself. Equally thematic is the delicious textural effect at bar 5 (the violin octaves, which Boccherini made his own, actually originate in mid-century orchestral Viennese idiom).⁴⁰ Paradoxically, this outburst captures our attention while never returning again in the movement (like so many opening gambits by Stamitz and Domenico Scarlatti); the recapitulation pivots on the return not of the D major theme but of the F major block from bar 13, ingeniously reinterpreting the harmonic non sequitur within the primary group (the shift from the chord of A to F) as a Sammartini retransition (Example 6.13). That is, Sammartini’s convention of ending his developments on V of VI is utterly transmuted here, allowing Boccherini to get away with a breathtaking reprise in F, the mediant key. The orchestra is used to project keys as fields of colour; the technique points to the nineteenth century, but its roots are in the Italian galant. Without succumbing to Emanuel Bach’s hermetic intellectualism, Boccherini applies formal experiments more associated with chamber music to the popular symphonic style – something even the Haydn of the Op. 76 string quartets never managed to achieve.

Example 6.12a Boccherini, Symphony in D minor, Op. 37, No. 3, I, bars 1–4.

Example 6.12b Boccherini, Symphony in D minor, Op. 37, No. 3, I, bars 5–6.

Example 6.13 Boccherini, Symphony in D minor, Op. 37, No. 3, I, bars 63–4.

Boccherini’s Op. 7 in C (1769) is a Symphonie concertante spotlighting two violins and a cello as soloists. Op. 10, No. 4 (1771) is essentially a guitar concerto, and the Op. 12 symphonies of 1771 were termed Concerti a grande orchestra. Even a late symphony such as Op. 37, No. 4 in A is designated Sinfonia a più istromenti on the autograph. Where a concerto rubric is not indicated, as in Op. 37, No. 3, concertante obbligato writing is flexibly incorporated within episodes such as the second subject group (as in the two solo violas and solo bassoon of bars 26–31).

In the right hands, a concertante symphony was as viable as a ‘regular’ symphony. Nothing about the evolution of the early symphony was inevitable. Written from the standpoint of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the story of the symphony suggests that the concerto was entirely digested. The view from Madrid, Stockholm, Hamburg, London, Mannheim and Milan is quite different, however, indicating that this evolutionary story could have moved – and indeed did move – in a number of alternative directions.

Mozart’s ‘Paris’ Symphony, K 297 and Haydn’s ‘Paris’ Symphonies, nos. 82–7

The locations for which Haydn and Mozart wrote symphonies were quite different – Haydn’s predominantly for Esterházy and only later for Paris and London, and Mozart’s for Salzburg, Vienna and other cities to which he travelled around Europe.¹³ The Paris symphonies thus offer an ideal viewpoint from which to survey the effect that a particular musical city at a particular time had on symphonies composed by the two men. To be sure, Mozart’s and Haydn’s circumstances were dissimilar when they wrote their symphonies – Mozart, not particularly well known in Paris in 1778 (at least for his adult musical activities), composed his single work for the Concert spirituel while resident in the city, whereas Haydn, already established as a leading figure on the Parisian scene by the mid 1780s, wrote six works for the Concert de la Loge Olympique (1785–6) while still based at home.¹⁴ But both composers, faced with a Parisian audience with whom they were fundamentally unfamiliar, would have had to pay especially close attention to the stylistic and aesthetic resonances of their works in an attempt to guarantee success.

Mozart’s letters to his father about his new symphony describe several ways in which he accommodated the Parisian musical public’s taste for orchestral effects. He claimed to have been ‘careful not to neglect le premier coup d’archet – and that is quite sufficient for the “asses” in the audience’; he repeated towards the end of the first movement a passage from the middle that he ‘felt sure’ would please, hearing it greeted with a ‘tremendous burst of applause’ on the first occasion and with ‘shouts of “Da capo”’ on the second; and he played with audience expectations at the beginning of the Finale by moving from piano to forte eight bars later rather than commencing immediately with the anticipated tutti, such that the audience ‘as I expected, said “hush” at the soft beginning, and when they heard the forte, began at once to clap their hands’.¹⁵Effects aimed at the musical masses, however, represent only half of the equation; for Mozart was apparently just as concerned with the kind of refined orchestral effects that surfaced in Parisian aesthetic discourse in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.¹⁶The diversity of wind effects recommended in treatises – from simple sustained notes and texturally prized combinations of clarinets, bassoons and horns, to carefully placed, not overused thematic-obbligato writing – is reflected in the first movement in particular; each pair of wind instruments (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets) is used independently from and combined with other pairs, reaching a high point in the recapitulation’s secondary theme section (see bars 206–27). Here, all six play sustained notes independent of string lines, featuring a different distribution of instruments each time, in addition to the clarinets–bassoons then horns–oboes offering obbligato two-bar extensions to the theme in thirds. Thus, Mozart immerses himself in French orchestration culture, reflecting and feeding into both the fascination for wind timbre among aestheticians and the desire for immediate sonic gratification among the musical public at large. And, judging by his report of the concert at which the work was premiered, he scored a direct hit.¹⁷

Haydn’s ‘Paris’ Symphonies, nos. 82–7, were praised in the Mercure de France (1788) for being ‘always sure in their effect’; unlike other composers, Haydn did not ‘mechanically pile up effect on effect, without connection and without taste’.¹⁸ Similar to Mozart’s K 297 in relation to his earlier works in the genre, Haydn’s ‘Paris’ Symphonies were the grandest he had conceived thus far. As for Mozart, the large orchestral forces at Haydn’s disposal allowed not only for big tutti effects on a scale not yet witnessed in his symphonies, but also for a greater degree of textural intimacy on account of the variety of instrumental combinations that could be exploited.

Haydn’s extraordinary success in Paris – his symphonies comprised 85 per cent of those performed at the Concert spirituel between 1788 and 1790¹⁹ – can be attributed to a number of musical characteristics in nos. 82–7, including simple and beautiful melodies, humour and general splendour;²⁰ his attitude to orchestration contributed to the happy state of affairs too. For Haydn, like Mozart, accommodates the general listener – replicating Mozart’s piano (light scoring) to forte (tutti) effect from the Finale of K 297 in the Finale of his own D major Symphony, No. 86, for example – as well as the connoisseur of sophisticated aesthetic taste. He covers the gamut of effects for winds in their capacity as agents texturally independent of string parts, from ornate obbligato writing (the slow movements of nos. 83, 85 and 87 and trios of nos. 82, 85 and 87) to colour-orientated sustained notes; his first movements also exploit wind sonorities in as meticulous and measured a fashion as Mozart’s corresponding movement of K 297. In No. 85 in B flat, La Reine, Haydn intensifies his employment of independent wind instruments as the movement progresses. Sustained notes in the slow introduction lead to brief oboe–horn echoes in the first theme and a solo oboe presentation of the secondary theme (which is a repeat of the first theme in line with Haydn’s monothematic practice); in the development section, Haydn ups the ante with eighteen bars of sustained winds (flute, oboes, bassoons) that accompany the strings’ near-quotation of the ‘Farewell’ Symphony, with an eight-bar dialogue between oboes and violins, and with emphatic tutti-wind crotchets towards the end; in the recapitulation, as if responding to wind prominence in the development, Haydn introduces the wind right at the start of the first theme in both long-note (horn) and echo (oboe) capacities, the moment of formal arrival thus coinciding with the coming together of the winds’ two principal roles as independent agents in this movement (held notes and thematic presentation).²¹ No. 86 in D charts a similar course, providing more independent wind writing in the development section (oboe and flute thematic fragments at the beginning; tutti wind in the last sixteen bars) than in the exposition, and new independent roles for the bassoon and oboe and the bassoon and flute in the recapitulation’s primary and secondary themes respectively. Like Mozart in K 297, so Haydn in the secondary themes of his first movements (except No. 87) also makes a point of promoting independent wind participation, even if only in modest fashion. Overall, then, sounds and sonorities constitute important points of communication between Haydn and his audience, just as they feature significantly in French aesthetic discourse. As Ernst Ludwig Gerber remarked about Haydn’s symphonies in 1790, before the ‘London’ symphonies had been written: ‘Everything speaks when he sets his orchestra in motion. Every subsidiary part, an insignificant accompaniment in the works of other composers, often with him becomes a crucial principal part.’²²

Mozart’s and Haydn’s attention to the kind of orchestral effects discussed by French aestheticians demonstrates the synergy of compositional environment and compositional style that is so central to understanding not just their symphonies but all other late eighteenth-century symphonic repertories as well. Mozart’s symphonies may have had only equivocal success at the Concert spirituel between 1777 and 1790,²³ but Haydn’s utter domination of the orchestral scene in the same period shows how receptivity to listener expectation and subsequent shaping of listener expectation – the positive impact on surroundings mentioned by Arnold – went hand in hand. And the grandeur and intimacy of the ‘Paris’ symphonies ensured that they became pivotal works in the musical careers of both men, helping to shape ensuing stylistic practices and expectations in Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies, where listener intelligibility was paramount, and in Mozart’s Viennese piano concertos and symphonies, where the sonorous use of orchestral wind instruments in solo and accompanimental roles reached its peak in his instrumental repertory.²⁴

Mozart’s Viennese symphonies and Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies

Arnold was only one of numerous late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers to draw attention to Mozart’s and Haydn’s harmonic and tonal powers. Critical assessments, including those of the London symphonies, were entirely positive where Haydn was concerned. He was praised for his ‘exquisitly [sic] modulated’ Symphony No. 94 (‘Surprise’), for being ‘wholy unrivaled [sic]’ in harmony and modulation in a review of his Symphony No. 102, for ‘continual strokes of genius, both in air and harmony’ in the Symphony No. 103 (‘Drum Roll’) and, more generally, for handling flexibly even old-fashioned harmonic devices, for introducing ‘new modulations, and new harmonies, without crudity or affectation’ and (alongside Mozart) for introducing new practices, such as pedal points in upper registers for the purposes of intense expression.²⁵ Indeed, the skilled cultivation of novelty and unexpectedness – in harmony and other areas – was central to delineating creative genius according to late eighteenth-century German reviewers of instrumental music, and to Haydn’s status as creative genius par excellence.²⁶ In contrast, the early reception of Mozart’s harmonic and tonal procedures was mixed. He received high praise for ‘bold’ harmonies and ‘overwhelming . . . enchanting harmonies’ in Le nozze di Figaro (1789, 1790), for well-judged modulations inter alia that ‘touch our hearts and our sentiments’ (1789), for ‘heavenly harmonies [that] so often moved and filled our hearts with tender feelings’ (1791) and for ‘very excellent beauties’ in modulation (1792).²⁷ But he also elicited criticism for the ‘Haydn’ quartets that are ‘too highly seasoned’ (1787), for such profound, intimate knowledge of harmony that his works in general become difficult for the ‘unpractised ear’ (ungeübten Ohre) (1790) and for ‘frequent modulations . . . [and] many enharmonic progressions . . . [that] have no effect in the orchestra’ in Die Entführung aus dem Serail ‘partly because the intonation is never pure enough either on the singers’ or the players’ part . . . and partly because the resolutions alternate too quickly with the discords, so that only a practised ear can follow the course of the harmony’ (1788).²⁸ Complex harmonic and tonal procedures are not the only features of Mozart’s music that sometimes rendered it problematic for contemporaries, but are self-evidently contributing factors.

Underscoring differences in Haydn and Mozart reception is the impression that effects – including harmonic effects – are a fundamental locus for listener orientation in Haydn’s music, but on occasion a locus for listener disorientation in Mozart’s music. The effect-laden Allegretto of Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 (‘Military’), for example, provides a firm hermeneutic anchor for the Morning Chronicle (1794):

Indeed, the locus classicus of sublimity in Haydn’s music, the arrival of light (‘Und es ward Licht’) in ‘Chaos’ from The Creation, is as forceful a moment of orientation and stabilisation as imaginable, not only resolving the nebulous C minor to C major – ‘from paradoxical disorder to triumphant order’ – but also reverberating well beyond its immediate confines into the rest of Part I.³⁰ In Mozart’s Entführung, in contrast, minor-key arias ‘because of their numerous chromatic passages, are difficult to perform for the singer, difficult to grasp for the hearer, and are altogether somewhat disquieting. Such strange harmonies betray the great master, but . . . are not suitable for the theatre’ (1788).³¹ Similarly, the perceived lack of coherence that results from Mozart ‘[forgetting] the flow of passion in laboriously hunting after new thoughts’ (1798) and from his ‘explosions of a strong violence’ (1800) also implies disorientation.³²

It is likely that the ever self-aware Mozart suspected that audacious harmonic and tonal twists in his late symphonies would challenge some of his listeners; since he never aspired (understandably) to a lack of popularity and repudiated ‘violent’ modulations that ‘drag you . . . by the scruff of the neck’ as well as ‘passion, whether violent or not . . . expressed to the point of disgust’,³³ we might surmise that any perceived disorientation (whether positively or negatively parsed) represents disorientation intentionally conveyed. At any rate, the potentially disorientating quality of distant-key modulations was recognised as early as 1782 by Johann Samuel Petri: ‘abrupt transitions’ could be carried out in such a way ‘that the listener himself does not know how he happened to be brought so very quickly into a totally foreign key’.³⁴

One of Mozart’s most celebrated passages of harmonic daring is the secondary development of the second movement of the Symphony No. 39 in E flat, K 543 (bars 91–108: see Example 7.1). It begins in the distant key of B minor, which, although achieved through the enharmonic interpretation of the C♭ accompanying the shift to A-flat minor (i), is nonetheless startling, perhaps because it occurs a tritone away from the more ‘civilised’ key of F minor that initiates the corresponding section in the exposition, perhaps because it intensifies certain features of the earlier passage (wind minims from the first not second bar of the passage; registral highpoint of the movement in the flute; double-stopped second violins), or perhaps because it comes across as an abrasive realisation of the intimation of the minor mode a few bars earlier.³⁵ But this is only the beginning. In bars 100 and 101 the and D♭ harmonies (the former a tritone away again from the starting point of B minor) feel completely out of place, but as VI and IV of the tonic A♭ are in the ‘right’ harmonic orbit for this juncture of the movement. If these chords feel strange, and the B minor starting point does too, is it any wonder that we experience disorientation? Surely we are meant to feel this way. Hearing a myriad of harmonic associations and references – B minor as an exploitation of the C♭ contained in the preceding A flat minor; as a reminder of the F minor from the original transition – and hearing the entire passage as a dramatic realisation of the full expressive potential of the original transition material, only tells part of the story. For the passage ultimately inhabits a different expressive world from the rest of the movement – its harmonic disorientation is experienced nowhere else – and thus exists in a kind of self-contained expressive bubble.³⁶ In interpreting it simultaneously as intimately connected to the discourse of the movement and detached from it too, we begin to see how Arnold’s interpretation of the effect of Mozart’s music on the listener (‘[he] lowers us deeper into ourselves and lifts us above ourselves’) might also apply to effects associated with Mozart’s manipulation of harmonic materials in a specific movement.

Example 7.1 Mozart, Symphony No. 39, II, bars 91–108.

The majority of the development section from the Andante of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C (‘Jupiter’), K 551, occupies a similar position to the secondary development of K 543/ii in relation to its movement as a whole (see bars 47–55: Example 7.2). Mozart expands the material from the transition, prefacing and following the passage with the same harmony, V/d, and setting the passage off from surrounding material with four texturally sparse bars beforehand (two at the end of the exposition and two at the start of the development) and two bars of harmonic water-treading afterwards (V/d, bars 56–7). The entire harmonic ‘business’ of the development (V/d–F) is then carried out in just two bars, leading directly into the recapitulation (bars 58–60). Bars 47–55 fulfil an expressive rather than a functional harmonic purpose: whether or not we agree that ‘with each fresh ascent the suspensions seem more sharply pointed, creating ever greater yearning’,³⁷ we hear impassioned intensity first and foremost. The passage stands inside the movement – building on the harmonic purple patch from the exposition – but outside it too, neatly delineated and expressively transcendent.

Example 7.2 Mozart, Symphony No. 41, II, bars 45–56.

The famous openings to the development sections of K 543/iv and K 550/iv, though briefer than the passages discussed in K 543/ii and K 551/ii, again inhabit expressive territory that thrives as much on incongruity as congruity in relation to surrounding material. To be sure, the G⁷ statement of the head motive in K 543/iv points ahead to a harmonically daring development (A-flat major and E major/minor follow straight away), but it stands apart too, wrenching us from the comfort of the dominant, B♭, and fulfilling no clear-cut harmonic function in appearing immediately before a statement in A flat. And the opening of the even more tonally audacious development section in K 550/iv is a bolt from the blue, implied diminished harmonies and uncertain harmonic direction conspiring to confuse. (Even late twentieth-century writers express shock, H. C. Robbins Landon citing it as an example of ‘the desperate near-lunacy with which Mozart’s music sometimes grimly flirts’ and Peter Gülke labelling it ‘nearly atonal’ [‘fast atonal’].)³⁸ Such moments draw attention to themselves, as much (probably more) for how they differ from surrounding material than for how they contribute to harmonic strategies over protracted periods.³⁹

Turning to Haydn’s most powerful and poignant harmonic effects in the ‘London’ symphonies, we can begin to appreciate how the two composers sometimes achieve different effects. In the A¹ reprise section of the Andante from No. 104 in D (‘London’), Haydn interpolates a colourful passage (bars 105–17); reinterpreting the D♯ from the A section (bars 23–4) enharmonically as E♭, Haydn continues chromatically to F (the third in D-flat harmony), retaining D-flat major harmony for five bars culminating in a pause (bars 109–13: see Example 7.3). He lands gently on this harmony – approaching it from the orbit of the tonic, G, namely iv (105–6) and ♭II⁶ (107–8) – just as he lands gently on C major for the pause in bar 25 in the A section. If we are disorientated at D-flat major harmony representing our temporary point of arrival, we are disorientated only gradually. The next four bars (114–17), while highlighting the point of furthest tonal remove from the tonic G (C-sharp minor), also orientate the listener: the preceding chromatic bass ascent (B♮–D♭, bars 103–13) reverses as a chromatic descent (C♯–A♯, bars 114–17), signalling the start of a return to the tonic at the precise moment we are furthest from it; and slow tempo and gesture (più largo and pauses) as well as harmonies (C sharp and F sharp) forge connections respectively with the slow introduction and development sections of the first movement.⁴⁰ Thus Haydn, eschewing Mozart’s abrupt, attention-grabbing harmonic shifts, encourages his listener to experience connections and congruity, rather than a potentially disorientating mix of incongruity and congruity, even at a moment of genuine harmonic audacity.

Example 7.3 Haydn, Symphony No. 104, II, bars 103–19.

Elsewhere in the ‘London’ symphonies, too, Haydn pursues the kind of ‘breadth’ – interpreted here as a forceful harmonic process stretched out over a protracted period and orientating the listening experience – that for Arnold distinguishes his music from Mozart’s. The two most ostensibly surprising and dramatic moments in the first movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 in G (‘Military’) are harmonic effects – the onset of the development section in B flat, after a two-bar general pause, and the forte/fortissimo tutti shunt to ♭VI in the recapitulation. Both moments are integral components of the movement’s narrative, Haydn continually playing with hiatuses and pauses, and exploiting ♭VI harmonies. The portentous end of the slow introduction preceding the main theme (repeated fortissimo quavers in the full orchestra, followed by a tutti fortissimo semibreve pause) leads to written-out hiatuses before two further thematic presentations in the exposition – tutti crotchets and tied flute semibreves in advance of the main theme in the dominant (see bars 72–4); and two bars of accompanimental figuration by itself before the secondary theme (see bars 93–4) – as well as the clearest hiatus of all at the opening of the development. And ♭VI, which first surfaces as augmented-sixth harmony towards the end of the slow introduction (bar 18), appears at the start of the development (B flat, as ♭VI/D) and in augmented-sixth form at climactic, forte/fortissimo junctures later in the section (bars 139, 152 and 162–4). The compressed recapitulation, eradicating the hiatuses of the exposition among other things, explodes in ♭VI, E flat (bar 239), fully exploiting the power that the harmony has accrued during the movement. Neither is its power confined to the first movement: the full orchestra bursts out, fortissimo, in A flat (♭VI) towards the end of the second movement (bar 161), and then again, forte, in the closing stages of the Finale (bars 245ff.).⁴¹

Haydn’s moments of harmonic disorientation and destabilisation inevitably function as important catalysts for coherent harmonic discourse; rather than inviting us to focus on disorientation itself as Mozart sometimes does, Haydn encourages us to understand it first and foremost as part of an on-going process.⁴²His ostentatious slow introduction to No. 99 in E flat is derailed by a C-flat pause (bar 10), and further destabilised by solid preparation for a key (C) that will not materialise; indeed, the V/E flat, final-bar appendage to the introduction in preparation for the tonic at the opening of the exposition feels incongruous and out of place, at least in relation to the music that precedes it. Both unruly elements fuel further discourse: recalcitrant C♭s appear in the exposition’s transition (bar 35, marked sf), shortly before B♮s inflect the music to C minor en route to the dominant; C major initiates the development section, after a stop–start opening in which pauses and harmonic orbit (C) invoke the uncertainties of the slow introduction, but is now part of a smooth, rather than an abrupt and disquieting, modulatory process; and C♭s feature in imitative figures at the end of the development that help re-establish V/E flat, in Neapolitan-sixth harmony (bar 165) that reconfirms the tonic E flat at the end of the secondary theme in the recapitulation, and then as unobtrusive contributors to diminished harmony (bars 174–5), thus illustrating C flat’s assimilation as a harmonically congruous and cooperative element of the discourse.⁴³ In the slow introduction of No. 102 in B flat, too, a harmonically disorientating gesture – an exact repeat of bar 1’s unison B♭ five bars later in bar 6, where it disturbs forward momentum, in effect beginning the Symphony again with a second tonality-defining call-to-attention – resurfaces on various occasions in the first and third movements, the incongruous ‘pillars’ being eventually assimilated as congruous elements of the discourse.⁴⁴

Of course, Mozart’s and Haydn’s most powerful harmonic utterances in the Viennese and ‘London’ symphonies sometimes convey similar effects. In the recapitulation of the Finale of Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 in D, K 504 (‘Prague’), for example, we are likely to admire the force with which the big tutti chords from the development reappear (as iv⁶, ♮III⁷, ♭VI; bars 228–32, 236–40, 244–5), orientating us to the tonic, rather than marvel at how the climactic chords themselves may temporarily disorientate. But differences in Mozart’s and Haydn’s harmonic effects remain tangible on many occasions, and are testimony to the incisively individualistic modus operandi of each composer. In spite of the seriousness with which Mozart essays his harmonic course in his most audacious passages, the self-conscious dimension to his daring manipulations – he intends us surely to reflect upon the ease with which he can disrupt a particular movement only to bring it effortlessly back into line – may strike a chord not only with Haydn’s highly cultivated harmonic disorientations and reorientations but also with Haydn’s self-conscious attention to the compositional mechanisms of his own creation, as exhibited in his much-touted wit and humour.⁴⁵ If in fact a parallel can be drawn here too, the pervasive image of Mozart and Haydn as two sides of the same coin again comes to mind. In our musical and historical imaginations the symphonic achievements of the two men are – and are likely to remain – inextricably intertwined.

Formal articulation

We may distinguish two broad types of formal articulation in Beethoven’s symphonies: one centripetal, based on recurrence; the other centrifugal, based on surprise or contrast. Whereas centripetal articulation tends to facilitate the recognition of formal boundaries, centrifugal articulation is usually disorienting, forcing the listener to reassess prior assumptions about past or future events.

In most of the symphonies, a fairly simple recurring link runs like a narrative thread through the first movement, articulating large sections of the form. All except the Fifth and the Ninth symphonies contain such a link between the exposition’s final cadence and the repeat of the exposition. (The Ninth Symphony is the only one in which the exposition is not repeated, though the opening of the development briefly gives the illusion that a repetition is underway.) In the First, Second and Fourth symphonies, the link also occurs at the end of the slow introduction, creating an additional layer of formal resonance.

In the First Symphony, Beethoven articulates the border between the introduction and the Allegro by means of a slowly arpeggiated V⁷ chord and a rapid, descending scalar pattern from G to C. The arpeggio idea returns – sometimes varied in rhythm, sometimes without the scalar pattern, but always scored for winds – prior to each main section (or the repeat thereof). When it appears for the third time, at the second ending of the exposition, it leads not to C, as on previous occasions, but to C♯, supporting an A-major chord. This harmonic detour is an elementary example of ‘centrifugal articulation’ – a not uncommon procedure at the start of developments in works of the Classical period.⁴

At the end of the development, the arpeggio signal quietly unfolds between two fortissimo tutti passages: a prolongation of E major harmony (functioning as V/vi, or III♯ at the middleground), and the reprise of the main theme (compare the start of the Allegro, marked piano and lightly scored for strings).⁵ The descending G–C scale-fragment at the upbeat to the recapitulation not only echoes the upbeat to bar 13, but also seems to ‘solve’ the problem posed by its inversion, A to E, stated four times in bars 163–70. The familiar arpeggio motive returns for the fifth and final time just before the start of the coda, transposed down a fifth, ushering in the subdominant in bar 263. This echoes the harmonic motion at the start of the movement, albeit in different thematic clothing, and without the former ambiguity, since V⁷/IV now follows tonic harmony, rather than entering out of nowhere, as in bar 1. In any case, the harmonic association between these passages sets the stage for a more obvious echo of the introduction in bars 271–6, where the bass line of bars 8–11 (F–G–G♯–A–F–G) returns.

In a similar yet more varied manner, recurring motives articulate form in the first movements of the Second and Third symphonies. The Second Symphony contains two such motives, both in the shape of a descending scale: a rapid descent through a twelfth leading to the start of both exposition and recapitulation; a more broadly paced scalar descent through a seventh preparing the repeat of the exposition as well as the start of the development and coda. In the Third Symphony, the associations between formal boundaries are subtler. The opening hammerstrokes of bars 1–2, for instance, return at the end of both the exposition (bars 144–7) and recapitulation (bars 547–50), except that new attacks fill the space between the downbeats, and the two-bar idea is extended to four bars. The third A♭–C♭ also recurs at key points: first, as a melodic interval over bass B♭ in bar 150, providing a harmonic link to the repeat of the exposition; then, in the retransition (bars 382ff.) as a very quiet tremolo over the dominant, but now presented as a harmonic third. This framing device is seldom noted in analytical commentaries that, not surprisingly, focus on the most striking aspect of the retransition: the famous horn call four bars before the recapitulation, where tonic and dominant coincide.⁶

In a conventional sonata form, the A♭–C♭ idea of bar 150 would return at the end of the recapitulation, transposed down a fifth, leading to the key of the subdominant at the start of the coda, just as in the previous two symphonies. But rather than follow this convention, Beethoven simply reiterates the principal theme on plain tonic harmony, letting the music soften to pianissimo. He then shatters the calm of bars 555–6 with a forte statement of the principal motive first in D flat, then in C major. The irony here is that D♭ does not assume its conventional guise – the seventh of V⁷/IV – but enters, without preparation, as a foreground tonic (D♭ also relates to the C♯ famously introduced in bar 7). This passage is an unusually early example of ‘tonic assertion’, a chromatic technique more characteristic of late nineteenth-century music.⁷

Whereas centripetal articulation clarifies the formal narrative through motivic recurrence or association, centrifugal articulation disrupts – or at least complicates – the narrative in unexpected ways. The A major chord at the start of the development of the First Symphony, noted above, is a fairly conventional instance of such articulation: it is exactly the kind of harmonic ‘jolt’ listeners had increasingly come to expect at the start of a development section. A more complex example of remote harmonic juxtaposition occurs in the exposition of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony. In bars 134–41, shortly after the first strong cadence in the second key, E major, there is a dramatic shift from E major to C major harmony (I–♭VI). The jarring effect of this passage arises not simply from the remote harmonic relation, but from conflicting thematic and harmonic implications. The grand descending C major arpeggio and the halting effect of rhythmic ‘liquidation’ (as Schoenberg would put it) strongly suggest a post-cadential or closing function. But the unstable, hovering quality of this remote harmony cannot support that function. The conflict is resolved in the ensuing bars by a gradual motion back to the local tonic E supporting a climactic high G♯ in the top line (bar 152), followed by two iterations of an ‘expanded cadential progression’ incorporating the descending arpeggio figure. Genuine post-cadential material is presented in bars 164–71.⁸

Unlike the passages just described, which are fairly easily understood once their larger formal contexts become clear, some instances of centrifugal articulation almost defy analysis. I have in mind such passages as the loud fanfare in E flat during the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony (bars 121–3 and again at 131–3), which Maynard Solomon describes as ‘vainly striving to break a mood of deep contemplation’.⁹ What is centrifugal about the fanfare is not its tonal content – clearly foreshadowed by the earlier tonicisation of E♭ in bars 83ff. and (ultimately) by the marked occurrences of E♭ in the first movement (bar 24 et passim) – but rather its rhetoric. Being a military topic within a ‘contemplative’ movement, the fanfare is a kind of unwelcome guest, appearing out of nowhere and vanishing after its second entrance. It is also, perhaps, a harbinger of the much less pompous – and, indeed, comical – Turkish march that intrudes upon the Finale and is set, ironically, in the same key as the solemn Adagio. Centrifugal articulation of this kind is by no means rare in Beethoven. It is but one of several means by which he creates ambiguity, a central aspect of the music of Beethoven’s middle and late periods.

Ambiguity

According to Carl Dahlhaus, around 1802 – the year in which Beethoven began work on the Eroica Symphony and also announced his intention to enter upon a ‘new path’ – there emerges ‘a musical thinking that is directed towards radical processuality of form’. In several works of this period, the ‘traditional theme’ is replaced by a ‘thematic configuration’ and ‘formal ambiguity’ emerges as a central compositional strategy.¹⁰ In the first movement of the Eroica, for example, bars 3–6 do not simply contain a ‘theme’. Rather, the arpeggio motive has a provisional quality, whose meaning can be determined, according to Dahlhaus, only in relation to subsequent statements of that motive, along with its chromatic continuation. The ‘static’ arpeggio motive is followed in bars 6–7 by a chromatic descent, E♭–D–C♯. In later statements, however, the chromatic continuation ascends: E♭–E♮–F in bars 18–19; then B♭–B♮–C in bars 40–1. The main point is that this ‘thematic configuration’ does not reside in any single presentation of the arpeggio motive and the chromatic continuation, but rather ‘is absorbed into the process for which it provides the substance’.¹¹

The first movements of the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony – notwithstanding their shared ‘heroic’ traits – exhibit remarkably different formal tendencies. The former is expansive, thematically abundant and continuous; the latter, concise, motivically taut and articulated by rhetorical pauses. The Eroica’s unbroken continuity has given rise to much debate concerning the ‘true’ beginning of the second group: most analysts locate it at bar 83, but some have proposed either bar 45 or 57.¹² No such ambiguity arises at this point in the Fifth Symphony; the second group begins without a doubt at bar 60, the entry of the famous horn call.

Although ambiguity can occur at almost any formal stage, it is most evident at or near the beginning of Beethoven’s symphonic movements. A relatively modest example is the famous dominant seventh chord at the start of the First Symphony (which actually predates the ‘new path’ by a couple of years). Much more complex is the unprecedented – and frequently discussed – dramatic effect of the opening of the Ninth Symphony. Admittedly, any ambiguity surrounding the function of bars 1–16 (as introduction or first theme presentation) soon dissolves; but that does not render the ambiguity trivial. It is precisely the challenge of predicting the movement’s formal trajectory on a first hearing that makes this opening so engaging. Similarly, and as Richard Cohn has identified, Beethoven invites the listener at the start of the Scherzo to weigh competing metric interpretations of the first eight bars: do they scan as 2+3+3 or 2+2+2+2?¹³

One of the most frequently cited examples of tonal ambiguity is the opening of the Fifth Symphony (bars 1–5), which could imply either E flat major or C minor. What analysts seldom acknowledge is the importance of this ambiguity at the repeat of the exposition. When the opening idea is heard immediately following the E flat major cadence that concludes the exposition, it seems for a moment as if E♭ is still the tonic, even though C (once again) turns out to be the ‘real’ tonic. The intimate tonal bond between the end of the exposition and the start of the repeat, along with the brevity of the exposition, makes this repeat sound more urgent, perhaps even more formally necessary, than that of most expositions. The sense of urgency has partly to with the fact that the material in the opening five bars is only stated once during the first group. In the Eroica, by contrast, the presence of three tonic statements of the opening arpeggio idea within the first group poses a certain risk of redundancy when the exposition is repeated. It was perhaps for this reason – in addition to the sheer length of the movement – that Beethoven originally chose not to include the repeat (although he ultimately decided to include it after trial performances in 1805).

Chromatic gambits

In several of Beethoven’s symphonic movements, a telling chromatic note or harmony enters at an early stage and recurs in various guises over the course of the movement. The C♯ in bar 7 of the first movement of the Eroica is perhaps the best-known example. The ramifications of that note include its enharmonic potential to function as D♭ – a potential that is realised in the recapitulation’s deft modulation to F major, which Donald Tovey admired for its effect of ‘strange exaltation’ – a rare instance in which II does not function as V/V.¹⁴ Other consequences of the C♯ arise from its ‘subthematic’ function (to borrow Dahlhaus’s term) as part of a chromatic scale-fragment (E♭–D–C♯), as opposed to its recurrence or reinterpretation qua C♯/D♭. In the development, a 5–6 semitonal motion over the bass, deployed sequentially, gives rise to modulations from C minor to C-sharp minor to D minor (bars 178–86). At the start of the coda (as noted earlier), Beethoven does not modulate by semitonal inflection, but simply juxtaposes the ‘keys’ of E flat and D flat. Such placement of the least predictable and most exaggerated manifestation of an opening chromatic idea towards a movement’s end is typically Beethovenian.

The enharmonic D♭/C♯ also plays a conspicuous narrative role in the Finale of the Eighth Symphony, where it occurs three times in the same thematic guise: an abrupt semitone shift, C–C♯, with C♯ accented dynamically and durationally (see bars 17, 178 and 372). In addition to this thematic guise, there is a ‘subthematic’ aspect to consider, specifically the use of ascending semitones at various pitch levels to articulate important formal junctures. The first of these is the G–A♭ shift in bars 47–8, which launches the second group on ♭VI of C major. The recapitulation of this material down a fifth in bars 223–4 strengthens its association with the original C–C♯ jolt. But it is the third occurrence – or set of occurrences – of this jolt, in bars 372–9, that is the most telling. Beethoven reinterprets C♯ as the dominant of F-sharp minor, in which key the opening theme is stated in bars 380–7. The music then seems to become caught in a loop in bars 386–91, where a two-bar pattern occurs in triple succession. Almost imperceptibly, the music slips back to F major in bar 391, by means of the enharmonic reinterpretation of E♯ as F in the bass, and, in the top part, the unaltered common note A, the third of both F major and F-sharp minor. This subtle shift, or slip, down a semitone is the dénouement – both literally and figuratively – of the earlier rising semitone; the main drama of the movement is essentially over. Although some wayward chromatic harmonies briefly ‘shock’ the listener in bars 432–7 (I^♭7 in place of I, reinterpreted as an augmented sixth going to VII, followed by vii and V⁷), they do not belong to the main action, but rather form an ironic commentary upon the earlier conflicts. From bar 438, the movement concludes – purged, as it were, of its chromatic neuroses – with sixty-five bars of pure, trouble-free diatonicism.

The chromatic pitch G♭ runs like a red thread through all four movements of the Fourth Symphony. Though it does not pervade any single movement to the same extent as, for instance, the C♯ in the first movement of the Eroica, G♭ is sufficiently marked for attention to qualify as an important unifying idea for the entire Symphony. In the first movement, G♭ plays a major role in the slow introduction and near the end of the development. Its importance is made clear by its early entrance in bar 2, its return in bar 5 (the longest sustained note yet) and its prolongation in bars 17–24 as F♯, locally V of B minor. It resolves to G in bar 25, part of a rising chromatic line that reaches B♭ in bar 42, the fourth bar of the Allegro vivace. When G♭ returns in the development, it is notated (again) as F♯ (bars 281–301) and, once again, assumes the local function of a dominant. But the notation here is for convenience only, since the ‘dominant seventh’ prolonged in these bars functions on a deeper level as a German sixth, a function that is unveiled by the flat spelling of the harmony in bars 302–4, and its resolution to a B♭ chord in bar 305. This anticipates the tonic of the recapitulation, rather than behaving as a conventional cadential (this irregular usage is ‘corrected’, so to speak, in bars 447–51). By making the putative F♯ discharge its true function as G♭, Beethoven solves a major problem posed by the introduction: the fact that the G♭ of bar 17 does not fall back to F (as in bar 6), but instead resolves (eventually) up to G.¹⁵

In the E flat second movement, G♭ plays a major role, but does not emerge prominently until the central section, starting at bar 50 and leading to the tonicised G-flat major chord of bar 60. The D♭ dominant seventh preparing this goal is the locus of an eloquent dialogue between the violins – a unique passage in this movement. Soon after G♭ is tonicised, it gently falls to F, the fifth of the dominant harmony, in bar 62, and recurs as a passing note in bar 63. The second movement does not explore the enharmonic of G♭. Neither, apparently, does the third movement (whose pervasive use of G♭ need not be catalogued here), unless one includes the rising chromatic line from F to B♭ in bars 175–9, the link between the Trio and the return of the Scherzo (Allegro vivace; the term ‘scherzo’ does not appear in the score). In the Finale, G flat returns again at key moments in the form – the retransition (bars 165–82) and coda (bars 290–5 and, more emphatically, bars 316–17) – but not as a major character. It plays a supporting role in this light comedy where no single feature claims the kind of attention that G flat does in the first movement. The Fourth Symphony conforms to the eighteenth-century symphonic tradition of the lieto fine, insofar as the Finale is shorter and less weighty than the first movement.

Rhythm and temporality

In much of Beethoven’s music in general, and in several symphonic movements in particular, rhythm takes centre stage. This is most evident in movements where short, distinctive patterns are repeated for relatively long stretches of time: in the scherzos; in the first movements of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies (especially in the development section of the Sixth); and in the second movement of the Seventh Symphony. Another aspect of rhythm to consider is the pacing of musical events, manifested in such phenomena as tempo, harmonic rhythm and hypermetre. While listeners usually measure pace (consciously or unconsciously) in relation to an internal ‘clock’, some effects of pacing may seem more ‘absolute’ than others. Thus, the harmonic rhythm of most of the development of the Sixth Symphony sounds ‘slow’ in an almost absolute sense, as opposed to the Presto at the end of the third movement of that Symphony, which sounds ‘fast’ relative to the previous tempo. (The abruptness of this change of tempo is also significant.)

I shall explore the narrative role of surface rhythms in three movements: the first movements of the Fifth and the Sixth symphonies; and the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony. In these movements, a temporal narrative emerges from the dialectic between constancy and change, or between repetition and variation, on both the rhythmic surface and at deeper levels, where hypermetric conflicts sometimes arise. The effect of repetition or constancy with respect to one parameter – striking though it may be – is virtually always complemented or nuanced by simultaneous changes within another parameter, such as dynamics or instrumentation, or by subsequent changes with respect to the initially constant parameter. I shall conclude with an account of metric ambiguity and conflict at deeper levels in the third movement of the Sixth Symphony.

Analyses of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony have rightly drawn attention to metrical ambiguities and conflicts at levels beyond the notated bar.¹⁶ But rhythmic features of the foreground are equally important, especially the varied deployment of the initial four-note motive, with its distinct three-quaver anacrusis. For Heinrich Schenker, the opening two gestures (bars 1–5) and the horn call (bars 59–63) are not only similar in contour and length, but also scan the same way: as a four-bar group preceded by a one-bar anacrusis.¹⁷ Notwithstanding their similarities, the two thematic ‘announcements’ differ rhythmically in one important respect: the horn call does not repeat the anacrusis figure. Thus, instead of two short gestures, as in bars 1–5, the horn presents a single, longer gesture marked by a succession of three long notes unaccompanied by quavers.

Much of the movement’s drama hinges on oppositions between passages pervaded by quavers and passages in which quavers either occur less often, as in the beginning of the second group, or drop out for an extended period, as in the central part of the development. This dramatic process starts in bars 6–21, where overlapping statements of the motive, arranged in groups of three, three and five, produce an effect of acceleration in bars 14–18. The quavers drop out suddenly in bars 19–21, bringing the orchestra to an abrupt halt. The process of acceleration resumes in the transition, and is extended so that the halting effect of the chords spaced two bars apart in bars 56–8 is even more pronounced than those spaced one bar apart in bars 19–21. In the larger context of these changes in surface rhythm, the horn call harks back not only to bars 1–5, but also to bars 18–21.¹⁸ As the second group continues, the four-note motive recurs, but at a palpably slower rate than in the first group: at first, every four bars (bars 65–83), then every two bars (bars 84–93). Meanwhile, the music grows in dynamic intensity to fortissimo on the melodic peak, a sustained high B♭ in bar 94, the initial note of the closing theme.

In the first part of the development, Beethoven sustains rhythmic drive through unrelenting quavers, leading (yet again) to a rhythmic halt, or rather a series of halts, in bars 170–9, followed by the horn call, now played by the violins in G minor. What is new here is not the horn call as such, but the counterpointing of its long fourth note with a syncopated descending arpeggio in the low strings – the first strong foreground syncopation in the movement. Several rhythmic factors contribute to the suspense surrounding bars 196–227: the prolonged absence of quavers (longer than at any other time in the movement); the ‘liquidation’ of the horn call’s three long notes, first to pairs of notes or chords (bars 196–209), then to individual chords (bars 210–26); and the hypermetric shift (or reinterpretation) located, according to Schenker, in bar 209.¹⁹

An echo of bars 168–79 at the start of the coda sets the stage for yet another return of the horn call, in bar 398. That motive now matches, for the first time, the pitches of bars 1–5, thus resolving a fundamental motivic conflict in the movement. But the sense of resolution is complicated by the intrusion of a new countermelody in quaver rhythm, extending to bar 422. What is striking about the quaver patterns is that they begin on downbeats, rather than upbeats (though bar 400 is hypermetrically weak). (Note that such downbeat-orientated patterns of quavers already occur in the closing theme; but there the patterns are comparatively short-lived.) This long string of quavers and the even longer passage in crotchet rhythm that follows in bars 423–69 succeed in keeping the anacrusis figure at bay – but only provisionally. Rhythmically speaking, the movement thus ends in a state of tension that is not fully resolved until the Finale.

The first movement of the Sixth Symphony is largely contemplative in mood, almost devoid of the kind of conflict that pervades the corresponding movement of the Fifth Symphony. In numerous passages, repetition gives rises to a certain quality of stasis that might suggest the timelessness or fixity of the natural order, of nature objectified (natura naturata). Yet, for all its repetitiveness, this movement is more properly heard as an evocation of natura naturans – the nature of vitality and growth.²⁰ To expand a little on Beethoven’s own remark, the Symphony is not so much a painting (Malerey) of nature as an expression of the feelings (Empfindungen) arising from our metaphorical identification with nature. In bars 16–25, for example, the tenfold repetition of the same figure sounds alive and nuanced, not mechanical. The passage has an arc-like dynamic shape, growing in intensity to forte at bar 20 (articulated by the entry of the bassoon) and then gradually subsiding to pianissimo at bar 25. Moreover, the repeated figure introduces the first chromatic note in the movement, a passing B♮, which endows the music with an urge to continue upward, as indeed it does, sequentially, in bars 26–8.

The movement abounds with arc- or wave-like dynamic and/or melodic patterns ranging in length from one to forty bars. The largest of these waves occur in two parallel passages during the first half of the development: the first moves from B-flat major to D major harmony (bars 151–90); the second from G major to E major harmony (bars 197–236). (A linking passage on G follows in bars 191–6.) Each wave gradually builds to its dynamic peak after the durational midpoint (bars 175 and 221, respectively) and is soon followed by a drastic reduction in texture and dynamics. Movement in each passage is projected more through changes in dynamics and texture than by the harmonic shifts, which have a brightening or intensifying effect, but are not strongly goal-directed. Similarly, the loud tutti passage prolonging the dominant at the start of the retransition (bars 263–75) does not ‘lead’ strongly to the tonic, but instead gives way to the subdominant, with a concomitant diminuendo and (again) a reduction in texture.²¹

The overall rhythmic, melodic and dynamic quality of this movement is thus neither static – despite some elements of stasis – nor propulsive, like that of the Fifth Symphony’s opening movement, but rather undulating. Beyond the ebb and flow at local and intermediate levels, one may also observe a global narrative or progression that is not wave-like. The chief point of interest in this narrative is the use of triplets, which make their first modest appearance in the transition (bars 53–64, in every fourth bar). Within the exposition, they occur independently of duple rhythms only once, in bars 111–15, and they continue to play a rather subordinate role in the development. During the opening bars of the recapitulation (bars 289–311), new triplet figuration appears in the first violins (then in the lower strings from bar 304) as a countermelody to the decidedly understated main theme, which migrates from second violins to the winds and back. Here, for the most extended duration thus far, triplets and duplets sound together as equals. In the coda, triplets occur in two places: bars 428–67 (by far the longest passage in which they are unchallenged by duplets); and in the clarinet melody of bars 479–91. Although duplets do have the final say, the narrative played out here in the rhythmic foreground could hardly be called a ‘contest’ between opposing forces. On the contrary, the shift towards a more balanced distribution of duple and triple subdivisions in the recapitulation and coda has a conciliatory effect, and this enhances the sense of closure at the end of the movement.

It is instructive to compare this movement with another famously repetitive movement, the Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony. As many critics have noted, all the movements of this Symphony are dominated by rhythm; but none is as obsessive or insistent in its use of a single pattern (♩♫♩♩). While every movement contains rhythmic patterns that strongly suggest the metres of ancient Greek poetry, the metre of the Allegretto is the least ambiguous, namely, adonic metre.²² The movement has a strongly processional character that suggests the noble and serious ethos of epic poetry, if not a specific ancient ritual.

The variation form of this movement unfolds in an additive manner not unlike that found in the opening movement of the Sixth Symphony: the two-bar ostinato provides the constant background against which changes are perceived. Each variation introduces a new instrument carrying the original viola tune in successively higher registers: the second violin, the first violin and, lastly, the winds. The accompanying rhythms become progressively more animated, attaining a peak of complexity in the two-against-three patterning during the tutti of bars 75–98, which coincides with the completion of a process of instrumental expansion. Triplet rhythms persist during the central A major section (bars 102–49). At the return to A minor in bar 150, Beethoven resumes the process of incremental rhythmic subdivision in each variation, called gradatio by eighteenth-century theorists, through the addition of semiquavers in the accompanying strings. In the fugato that follows – which unavoidably recalls the fugato in Beethoven’s other great processional symphonic movement, the Funeral March of the Eroica – the countersubject consists entirely of semiquavers. But whereas the Eroica’s fugato builds in intensity to an apotheosis or catastrophe, this one complements the earlier variations without transcending them: it intensifies the narrative without reaching the breaking point. Although the Allegretto contains dynamic peaks and valleys suggestive of life’s vicissitudes, it never strays far from the poised ethos of the adonic meter that is its centre of gravity.

The opening eight-bar phrase of the third movement of the Sixth Symphony (a scherzo in all but name) involves conspicuous repetition of a single bar, the implications of which are dramatically played out at subsequent stages of the movement. The motive occupying bar 3 recurs not only in bar 4, where it completes a four-bar group, but also in bar 5, where one would expect a new four-bar group to begin. Two things confirm this expectation: the on-beat grace note and the entrance of the cellos. But there is something irregular about bar 5, and especially its downbeat A. Had bars 5–8 been simply a transposition of bars 1–4 down a fifth, then bar 5 would have started on B♭, rather than A. This hypothesis is borne out in bars 33–40, where the four-bar idea of bars 1–4 is presented sequentially, first on D harmony, then down a fifth. Here, the motivic patterning clarifies rather than conceals the four-bar groups. But at the return of the opening phrase (from bar 53 on, scored tutti and marked fortissimo, as opposed to pianissimo), the irregular repetition returns with a vengeance, since the motive of bar 3 recurs in four, rather than three, consecutive bars. (Moreover, the downbeats are marked sf, and there is no grace note articulating the fifth bar.) The result is a six-bar group (bars 53–8) that can be heard at first as an expansion of bars 1–4 (4+2), but then, in the light of the regular four-bar groups that follow, as 2+4.

Finales

Every finale is marked, aside from any inherently striking qualities, by virtue of its position within a multi-movement cycle. For this reason alone, listeners leaving the concert hall after a performance often take away a stronger impression of the finale than of prior movements. In at least one case – the Ninth Symphony – the power and scale of the Finale is so great that it would be unimaginable to place another work after it on the same programme. (This point does not apply to another palpably ‘end-accented’ work, the Fifth Symphony, which was first performed in the middle of the famous benefit concert of 22 December 1808; for the conclusion of that concert, Beethoven composed the Choral Fantasy, Op. 80.)

In at least four symphonies – the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth – the finale is strongly marked or weighted (a possible fifth candidate, the Sixth Symphony, will be considered presently). Such emphasis arises both from striking events within each finale and, often crucially, from events leading up to it. Thus, the Fifth Symphony’s Finale stands out not just because of its inherent jubilance – proclaiming C major in contrast to the dark, strained C minor mood of the first and third movements – but also because it follows directly what is perhaps the most suspenseful transition in symphonic history. The transition and the haunting reminiscence of the Scherzo in the development are essential to the Finale’s dramatic effect.

Similarly, the Sixth Symphony’s Finale is set up by another gripping transition: the fourth movement (‘Storm’), which, in Charles Rosen’s view, is not a truly independent movement, but an expanded introduction to the Finale.²³ Whereas the tension of the Fifth Symphony’s transition resolves all at once at the start of the Finale, the accumulated tension of the ‘Storm’ resolves gradually, partly within that ‘movement’, but not fully until bar 9 of the fifth movement (‘Shepherd’s Song’), where G (a suspended ninth over F) resolves upwards to A. One could even reverse the relation between the two movements and hear the fifth movement – devoid of strife, but full of rejoicing – as a grand coda to the ‘Storm’. The Sixth Symphony may thus be said to contain a marked or weighted finale only if, following Rosen’s lead, we hear the fourth and fifth movements as a single, undivided entity. (This argument cannot be applied to the Fifth Symphony, since the Scherzo – unlike the ‘Storm’ – can be heard as an independent movement.)

The finales that demand interpretation most strongly are those that break most radically with tradition: those of the Eroica and the Ninth Symphony. Both movements have inspired numerous analytical solutions or hypotheses. Peter Schleuning has argued that the Eroica’s Finale is its focal point, the goal towards which the other movements are directed.²⁴In Burnham’s view, one motivation for this interpretation may be ‘the ease with which such programs are generated for works like the Fifth and Ninth symphonies’.²⁵Elaine Sisman, in her thorough, historically informed analysis, describes the movement as a set of ‘alternating variations’, a formal procedure that Beethoven also ‘adopted for all of his slow symphonic variation movements’.²⁶ Yet neither Sisman nor anyone else, to my knowledge, has adequately interpreted the striking G minor flourish that opens the movement and returns (modified) near the conclusion. Schenker’s reading of the opening eleven bars as a prolongation of V⁷ of E flat is correct as far as the middleground is concerned. But because of his overriding concern with middleground structure, Schenker erroneously concludes that the harmony in the opening three bars ‘has nothing to do with the key of G minor’, thereby disavowing any connection between these bars and the tonicised G minor harmony in bars 420–30, not to mention the return of the opening gesture at bar 431.²⁷ Bars 1–11 pose a tonally open ‘problem’ to which the variations provide only a partial solution. The modified return in bars 431–5, which Sisman situates within the coda and about which Schenker makes no comment, is not a mere epilogue, but rather the dénouement of both the movement and the Symphony.

Unique and fascinating as the Eroica’s Finale is with respect to form, its analytical challenges seem modest compared to those posed by the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. Despite the appeal of the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody and the direct message of the text, analysts have failed to grasp the movement’s formal logic – the most frequently invoked criterion of artistic excellence (one critic even admits that this movement ‘defeat[s] analysis’).²⁸ Notwithstanding its clear allusions to familiar genres (opera, symphony, concerto), formal procedures (variation, rondo, sonata, fugue) and musical topics (recitative, learned style, hymn, march), the Finale is simply without precedent. According to James Webster, this movement demands a ‘multivalent’ analytical approach that is not constrained by rigid formal and generic categories.²⁹ He describes it as ‘through-composed’, continually in search of a goal that is ‘not merely the Ode to Joy as such, not merely the triumph of D major over D minor’, but ‘a new musical state of being’ that ‘does not arrive until the end’.³⁰ A central feature of the movement is repeated deferral of closure – a hallmark of ‘through-composition’. Webster concurs with Maynard Solomon’s idea that the programme for this Finale is ‘the search for Elysium’, a quest that is not completed until the chorus’s final cadence on the word ‘Götterfunken!’ (bar 920).³¹

An important, if seldom noted, aspect of the Finale is the relation between the solo baritone – the first singer to be heard – and the chorus (including both the large group and the smaller ensemble of soloists). The baritone’s first utterance, a recitative-like setting of Beethoven’s own words, expresses an unnamed individual’s desire to hear other, more joyful, tones than those of the preceding three movements. This is not merely a confession (‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne’), but also a call to action (‘sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere’). He himself sings the opening eight lines of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’, to which the chorus responds with the corresponding part of the second stanza (lines 13–20). (Lines 9–12, beginning with ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen!’, are not sung until much later.) This leader–follower relationship between the baritone and the chorus recurs in the Alla marcia section, where the tenor is cast as a hero inviting his brothers to join him on the path to victory. Indeed, the instrumental fugato that immediately follows the tenor’s final words seems to portray the battle that he and his brothers expect to win. The fugato’s harmonic goal is B major, which yields to B minor, then to a cadential in D major preparing the onset of the first choral statement of the opening stanza of the ‘Ode to Joy’. This moment of recapitulation enacts a shift of dramatic emphasis from the soloist to the chorus. In the concluding sections of the Finale, no individual is truly set apart from the group; rather, all the voices represent the ideal, collective ‘voice’ of humanity united in and by joy.

Conclusion

Of the five aspects considered in this chapter, the one that is most basic to our experience of Beethoven’s symphonies is temporality. As with any narrative or journey, we experience a symphony in time before we are able to look back on or ‘objectify’ it. While analysts generally favour a retrospective mode of listening (or understanding) over a prospective or phenomenological one, Beethoven’s symphonies invite, and even compel, listeners to adopt the latter mode. Indeed, few other symphonies have demanded so much imagination, engagement and repeated study from listeners and performers. The narratives embodied in these symphonies all have an ending, but the journey of musical and critical discovery afforded by them – like all genuine learning – is infinite.

Introduction

Several authors in this volume cite the famous (if uncorroborated) conversation between Sibelius and Mahler, in which Sibelius valued the symphony for ‘the profound logic that created an inner connection’ between its component ideas, and Mahler responded that ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’.¹ Appealing as these comments are as indicators of the two composers’ aesthetics, they also have value because they apostrophise neatly the twin aspirations of thematic rigour and monumentality that constituted dominant nineteenth-century symphonic imperatives. Although it would be quite wrong to construe this as a simple dichotomy – even the most expansive symphonies aspire to thematic coherence, and modest works are no more likely to emphasise overarching motivic processes – the challenge of expressing both high communal ideals and comprehensible thematicism, which gained currency as a central inheritance of the Beethovenian symphonic achievement, has at the very least to be regarded as a productive tension.

As the century progressed, the thematic element of this equation came increasingly to be construed cyclically, as a technique that had to encompass the cycle of movements as well as a work’s component forms. In thematic terms, the Beethovenian imperative of originality necessitated a search for ways to imbue whole works with a higher-level material integrity, which depended on strategies ranging from isolated but marked quotations to extensive cross-movement processes of variation and derivation and the wholesale revisiting of passages.² Such processes are also often the lynchpin of a symphony’s extra-musical meaning. The technical features of ‘absolute’ music – those aspects that seem autonomous of meaning and function – are simultaneously the basis of its programmatic aspirations, reflecting the characteristically Romantic conviction that music’s claim to aesthetic superiority lay in its ability to capture essential meanings in the play of tones itself, apart from any dependence on text.³

Widespread though the association of Beethoven with cyclical technique is, however, his status as its progenitor is far from self-evident. In the first place, various commentators have noted integrative techniques in earlier music: James Webster’s extensive study of cyclic integration in Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony is a substantial case in point, and Mary Sue Morrow and Michael Spitzer note similar eighteenth-century strategies in chapters 3 and 6 above.⁴ Moreover, overt thematic relationships extending across, as well as within, movements are comparatively rare in Beethoven’s symphonies (subcutaneous relationships are of course manifold). The two most well-known examples – the Fifth and Ninth symphonies – hardly match the adventurous cyclical techniques employed by Mendelssohn and Schumann, or even the referential use of the idée fixe in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. And the Eroica, as the third claimant in this respect, is even more tenuous: such overt cyclicity as can be detected in the work turns on the plausibility of allowing the famous dissonant C♯ in the first movement’s main theme to act as a ‘pitch-class motive’ resurfacing at later points in the Symphony, for example in the Scherzo’s coda (this and other structural principles in Beethoven’s symphonies are considered by Mark Anson-Cartwright in Chapter 8).

The thematic links commonly detected in the Fifth Symphony are, furthermore, far from unequivocal. Leaving aside the reprise of Scherzo material preceding the Finale’s recapitulation, which functions more as a wholesale sectional transplantation than as an integrated transformation of a thematic idea, claims of thematic ‘unity’ depend above all upon the provenance of the rhythmic cell, which comprises the first movement’s famous ‘fate’ motive, and is understood to recur in the main themes of the Scherzo and Finale. These are hardly definitive connections: the rhythmic shift from upbeat to downbeat between first-movement and Scherzo forms of the motive is especially problematic for any claim of unambiguous derivation. At best (and accepting the indisputable connection between third and fourth movements), the inter-movement links have to be regarded as implications available to the receptive ear, rather than as analytically unassailable facts.

Cross-referencing in the Ninth Symphony is, in contrast, unmistakable, because inter-movement recall is a matter of near-literal quotation: the main themes of the first three movements pass by parenthetically in the Finale’s introduction, intercut with the recitative-like material of the celli and basses, which anticipates the baritone’s entry with the words ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’. Quotation is, however, no guarantee of large-scale coherence. On the contrary, the piecemeal quality of the references here secures the recall of prior movements at the expense of large-scale integration: the quotations are disconnected fragments, which are forced apart by the vocal aspirations of the lower strings. And when the baritone later pointedly rebuffs the return of the Schrekensfanfare in preparation for the vocal version of the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme, the fragmentary character of Beethoven’s prior-movement synopsis gains fresh significance. The Finale’s ambition, it turns out, is not to synthesise the material of the whole work in a summative instrumental conclusion, but to reject that idea in favour of a design that subsumes the instrumental symphony as a whole into a final realisation of the music’s emergent vocality (chapters 2, 8 and 14 all broach this matter).⁵ The point of Beethoven’s cross-referencing is, in other words, fragmentation, not synthesis.

It is in this light that another plausible inter-movement relationship might be understood: the adumbration of the ‘Ode’ theme in the first movement’s second subject, explained in Example 9.1. As commentators have observed, this anticipation has tonal as well as thematic significance, because the secondary key it establishes (B-flat major) prefigures that of the slow movement, and of the Turkish march setting the words ‘Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen durch des Himmels prächt’gen Plan’ in the Finale.⁶ Viewed from the position of the Finale’s first vocal stanza, however, this connection looks less like an instance of integration, and more like a prophecy of the instrumental movements’ provisionality. In the first movement’s lyrical second theme is contained the seeds of the purely instrumental Finale’s demise.

Example 9.1 Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, I, subordinate theme and IV, ‘Freude’ theme.

This chapter explores the post-Beethovenian legacy of cyclical thinking, focussing on its treatment by six composers: Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner and Mahler. I restrict consideration to overt thematic recurrence and transformation; whilst not denying the presence of concealed thematic, harmonic or tonal features reinforcing cyclical coherence, my aim is to scrutinise only unequivocal surface relationships, as the most analytically and historically tractable evidence of the technique. And since purely musical elements in all of these works support programmatic or narrative ambitions, I also pay attention to their extra-musical connotations, which range from the transparently intentional (Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique) to the strongly implied (Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony).

The ‘Romantic generation’: Berlioz, Schumann and Liszt

The techniques of thematic integration exhibited in the first generation of post-Beethovenian symphonies can be understood not as responses to an incipient property of Beethoven’s symphonies themselves, but as realisations of a dual ideal of musical autonomy and metaphysical significance, which sought evidential verification in Beethoven’s examples. The symphonies of Berlioz, Schumann and Liszt are exemplary: all three composers overlaid their movement cycles with overt and variously developmental thematic processes, supporting more-or-less explicit programmatic agendas, to an extent far exceeding anything that Beethoven attempted in the symphonic domain.⁷

The notion of programmatic cyclicity is most blatant in Berlioz’s usage. The Symphonie fantastique instantiates the notion of the idée fixe, which, as Berlioz’s first programme for the work identified, functions as ‘a musical thought, whose character . . . [the artist] finds similar to the one he attributes to his beloved’.⁸ This acts as a kind of narrative anchor, which orientates the movement-by-movement scene changes in relation to the protagonist’s mental projection of the beloved.⁹Example 9.2 compares the variants of the idée fixe as they occur in the five movements.

Example 9.2 Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique, variants of the idée fixe.

Berlioz here marries cyclical and extra-musical elements in a way that has long-lasting influence. Most importantly, the prime form of the idée fixe is also the first theme of the first movement’s sonata form. The heroic subjectivity that is often imputed to Beethoven’s main themes is thereby made explicit, because the theme’s human agency is nominated in the programme. And because the idée fixe does not represent simply the artist himself, but rather the idealised object of his affections, Berlioz pulls off the trick of embodying in a single idea both the artist as narrative protagonist and also a relationship between characters (artist and beloved), which allows him to foster the illusion of an unfolding plot.

As this notion develops across the piece, it exemplifies with exceptional clarity the Romantic perception that it is precisely instrumental music’s autonomy that allows it to capture essential meanings without direct textual assistance. Thus the inter-movement changes of topic that compel variation of the idée fixe (waltz, pastoral, march, gigue) at once facilitate the progression of symphonic movement types (two dances frame an adagio and precede a rondo finale), whilst also providing the circumstances for the changes of scene and character that convey the extra-musical narrative. The difference between the central character and the beloved as an object of perception is underscored from the second movement onwards, because from this point Berlioz detaches the idée fixe from main-theme functionality: in the second movement and Adagio, it appears in the contrasting middle section; in the March as a fleeting expansion of the final structural cadence; and in the Finale as an episode in the multi-part introduction. Altogether, although the treatment of the idée fixe is neither as transformationally extensive as Liszt’s practice, nor as developmentally exhaustive as the cyclical techniques of many later-century practitioners, its capacity to sustain topical variety furnishes a strikingly clear model for the integration of cyclical and programmatic agendas.

In Harold en Italie, Berlioz takes the notion of the symphonic subject as narrative protagonist a stage further, by embodying him in a concertante instrument (the solo viola): as a result, the protagonist is not only a theme, but also a soloist who has physical presence. The critical inter-movement thematic links are appraised in Example 9.3. The first clear cross-reference is the recurrence of the introduction’s ‘Harold’ theme as the soloist’s response to the pilgrims’ ‘canto’ in the slow movement (beginning Fig. 23). Berlioz uses the same device in the Serenade, folding the viola’s ‘Harold’ theme into the movement’s central Allegretto. Both movements exploit a comparable effect: as Berlioz himself put it, the theme is ‘superimposed onto the other orchestral voices . . . without interrupting their development’, reflecting Harold’s character as a ‘melancholy dreamer’ who is ‘present during the action but does not participate in it’.¹⁰In this respect, the ‘Harold’ theme is the direct antithesis of the Symphonie fantastique’s idée fixe: as the protagonist’s projection of the beloved, the latter is changed by its topical and expressive circumstances; the former, however, is the protagonist himself, and (at least before the Finale) remains largely invariant in the midst of topical change.

Example 9.3 Berlioz, Harold en Italie, variants of the ‘Harold’ theme.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Harold en Italie is the direct invocation of Beethoven’s Ninth in the succession of prior-movement quotations beginning the Finale, the ‘Orgy of the Brigands’. Like Beethoven, Berlioz begins his Finale with an intercutting between new and old material: the introduction, first-movement main theme, Pilgrims’ March and Serenade are all rejected in turn; finally, the ‘Harold’ theme appears, now as a genuine variant rather than a straight quotation. This is, however, quickly dissolved through a kind of textural liquidation, and the brigands’ music asserts itself definitively as the start of the sonata action six bars after Fig. 40. The movement yields one final cross-reference: ten bars after Fig. 55, the pilgrims’ canto reappears played by an off-stage string trio, which the soloist turns into a quartet by entering eleven bars later. This material again dissipates, and the brigands assert themselves for the rest of the Symphony.

As Mark Evan Bonds has explained, the effect here is diametrically opposed to that achieved by Beethoven. There is no narrative of transcendence; instead, both Harold himself, and the solo instrument that represents him, disappear.¹¹ At the end, Harold is affiliated with the pilgrims, and so with something approximating the work’s moral compass; but this identification counts for nothing, and the last word is given to the surrounding bacchanale. In a sense, Harold en Italie and the Symphonie fantastique converge in their use of cyclical techniques to invert rather than confirm the Beethovenian struggle–victory symphonic argument. Different though the technique is in each case, their common ground is a shared concept of the narrative goal as a negation of ‘utopian semiosis’, to use Michael Spitzer’s apt term, either in the diabolical afterlife of the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ or the moral vacuum of the ‘Brigands’ Orgy’.¹²

Schumann’s debt to Berlioz is not only musically implicit, but also textually explicit, because, as David Brodbeck has addressed in Chapter 4, Schumann famously reviewed the Symphonie fantastique in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.¹³ In many ways, Schumann’s symphonic project can be understood as an attempt to synthesise three lines of symphonic influence: Beethoven’s goal-orientated dynamic; Berlioz’s conjunction of thematic process and programmatic (literary) narrative; and (as Brodbeck stresses) a lyric monumentality taken from Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, the first performance of which Schumann was in part responsible for in 1839.¹⁴

All of Schumann’s four symphonies and the Overture, Scherzo and Finale (in many respects a symphony manqué) exhibit inter-movement thematic relationships. The technique is most weakly represented in the Symphony No. 1, in which Schumann is primarily concerned to supply conjunctive links between adjacent movements rather than overarching thematic processes. The motto theme with which the first movement’s introduction begins – which, as John Daverio explains, was originally conceived as a setting of the final lines of a poem by Adolph Böttger (‘O wende, wende deinen Lauf / Im Tale blüt der Frühling auf’: ‘Oh desist, desist from your present course / Spring blossoms in the valley’) – adumbrates the first themes of both the first and second movements, as Example 9.4 reveals.¹⁵ The reappearance of the motto’s contour in the slow movement’s theme, however, acts more as a memorial trace than a stage in a cyclical process. Conversely, the prefiguring of the Scherzo’s theme at the end of the Larghetto, which as Example 9.5 shows is at once the slow movement’s coda and the transition into the third movement, functions as an adumbration analogous to the relationship between the first movement’s introduction and its exposition. Schumann’s ruse here is to reconceive this device as an inter-movement rather than intra-movement strategy.

Example 9.4 Schumann, Symphony No. 1, I and II, motto theme.

Example 9.5 Schumann, Symphony No. 1, II, bars 112–17 and III, bars 1–5.

Anticipations of the Scherzo are worked into the slow movement at other points. Example 9.6 for instance reveals that, whereas the end of the Larghetto adumbrates the Scherzo’s head motive, the slow movement’s first episode (beginning bar 25) presages its continuation, thereby giving the impression that the Scherzo pieces together material that the slow movement presents disparately.

Example 9.6 Schumann, Symphony No. 1, II, bars 25–6 and III, bars 5–8.

Such connections, however, dissipate in advance of the Finale, which is thematically self-contained. The highly provisional ending of the Scherzo, which comprises a syncopated, fragmentary liquidation of the material of Trio 1, consequently serves to underscore the dissipation of the tentative cyclical attitude with which the first three movements are associated.

The technique of supplying a motto theme in the first movement’s introduction, which subsequently generates a web of relationships, is taken up and greatly expanded in the Symphony No. 2. The introduction begins with a composite of two significant ideas, identified in Example 9.7: the motto carried by the brass, labelled ‘a’; and the chromatic string counterpoint, labelled ‘b’.¹⁶ These two motives relate to the first movement’s sonata form in different ways. The motto does not generate the first theme, but rather recurs summatively in the coda (bars 339–46); and motive ‘b’ reappears, in inversion, as part of the second-theme group (from bar 276). In other respects, Schumann greatly expands the adumbrative model developed in the Symphony No. 1. The motivic fragments presented in bars 25–33, which cede to the motto in bars 34–6, supply the basis of the first theme and the transition in the exposition. The relationship between motto and first-movement sonata is as a result more complex than the straightforward adumbrative process evident in the Symphony No. 1. In effect, the motto is detached from the sonata action, serving as a structural marker, but the adumbrative function of the introduction is preserved through the inclusion of significant additional material.

Example 9.7 Schumann, Symphony No. 2, I, bars 1–4.

The Scherzo yields two motivic traces of the first movement. Its main subject is a variant of the figure introduced at bar 341 in the first movement’s coda; and the motto theme recurs in the Scherzo’s climactic final cadence, bars 384–90. The Adagio, in contrast, anticipates the Finale, which constitutes the Symphony’s cyclical centre of gravity. The Finale’s form is famously problematic. Table 9.1 attempts clarification, and additionally explains the formal positioning of material from earlier in the Symphony. The first intimation of cyclical thinking emerges with the second theme (bar 63), which comprises a major-key variant of the Adagio’s main theme. This material is revisited in inversion in the central episode of the development (bar 191), joined by its prime form in imitation in the cellos and basses from bar 213, an event marked by the entry of the first movement’s motto over a punctuating authentic cadence (bars 207–10). The subsequent dissolution of this material leads at bar 280 to the movement’s most problematic event: Schumann introduces a new chorale theme, quoting Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, which thereafter engulfs the sense, thus far attained, that the Finale is a sonata rondo. In effect, the rondo design is liquidated by bar 279, and replaced with an expanded chorale prelude.¹⁷

Table 9.1 Schumann, Symphony No. 2, IV, form and distribution of themes

Yet although this seems to open up a rift in the design, the topical shift that accompanies it has the long-range effect of enabling the Symphony’s most spectacular cyclical coup. Following the impressive 35-bar standing on V in bars 359–93, the chorale stabilises in the tonic major from bar 394, initiating a tonally closed presentation phrase sealed by a perfect cadence in bars 445–51. Schumann then grafts the chorale-like material of the first movement’s introduction (beginning bar 15) on as a continuation phrase, shifting to a 3/2 metre in l’istesso tempo to accommodate its distinct metrical character. At bar 475, we see that this is the contrasting middle of a ternary form: An die ferne Geliebte reappears as an A reprise, punctuated throughout with assertions of the motto theme, leading to a decisive perfect cadence in bars 488–92, after which the coda begins. By rejecting the rondo form and replacing it with a chorale prelude, Schumann establishes a topical environment that is conducive to the wholesale restoration of first-movement material, framed as a closed form which, because it draws on a Beethovenian lied, houses a ‘humanised’ (or perhaps secularised) sacred topic.

Superficially, the Symphony No. 3 seems less densely constructed than No. 2. Schumann’s strategy here is to divide the cyclical thematic action into two threads, which unite at the Symphony’s close. The first concerns the harmonic properties of the first movement’s main theme, rather than its developmental potential. As Example 9.8a reveals, in its exposition form, the theme displays a tendency to pull towards the dominant, which the rest of the first-theme group does not satisfactorily redress.

Example 9.8a Schumann, Symphony No. 3, I, bars 1–5.

The critical agent of this attraction is the theme’s figure, which associates with a motion onto that is never properly counteracted. The recapitulation, quoted in Example 9.8b, exacerbates this, because it begins over a rhetorically marked chord (this strategy is taken up again in Chapter 10). Thereafter, the underlying V finds no resolution within the first-theme group, a characteristic that shifts the recapitulation’s harmonic centre of gravity towards the second group’s closing perfect cadence (bars 515–27). In an extraordinary stroke of large-scale planning, Schumann effectively suspends this issue until the progression preparing the Finale’s coda (bars 394–8), where, as Example 9.8c shows, the first-movement main theme is recalled triumphantly and made to function as the elaborative material of the Symphony’s culminating tonic cadence. Again, the figure is crucial here; whereas in the first movement it acts as a destabilising feature, here it collaborates with the cadential voice leading, as part of the decisive soprano line. In this way, a cyclical thread left hanging by the first movement is picked up as a decisive, framing structural event.

Example 9.8b Schumann, Symphony No. 3, I, bars 411–16.

Example 9.8c Schumann, Symphony No. 3, V, bars 394–9.

This gesture is additionally important because it forms the terminus of the work’s second thematic thread, which centres on the principal subject of the fourth movement, itself a quotation of the E-flat Prelude from Book I of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, marked ‘x’ in Example 9.9a. Examples 9.9a–c show that this theme is adumbrated in the second movement as a first-theme continuation (beginning bar 17), finds two variants in the fourth movement (prime form and diminution) and resurfaces in the Finale as the substance of its transitions and development, subsequently combined with the movement’s first theme, in diminution, in the development. This line of thematic action culminates in the standing on V that supplies the transition to the coda in bars 271–398 (Example 9.9d), above which Schumann stacks up ‘x’ in stretto in bars 271–9. The motive’s final appearance coincides with the pre-dominant approach to the crucial cadence in bars 394–8, and comprises two augmented versions of its central segment, as Example 9.9d explains. After this, ‘x’ is superseded seamlessly by the first-movement main-theme variant; the exhaustion of a thematic process spanning three movements clears the ground for the return and resolution of the first movement’s problematic main subject.¹⁸

Example 9.9a Schumann, Symphony No. 3, II, bars 16–18.

Example 9.9b Schumann, Symphony No. 3, IV, bars 1–8.

Example 9.9c Schumann, Symphony No. 3, V, bars 97–9.

Example 9.9d Schumann, Symphony No. 3, V, bars 271–9.

Schumann’s most extensive experiment with cyclic integration appears in the Symphony No. 4 (his second by order of genesis, but last in order of publication, having been revised in 1851). The recurrence and variation of themes between movements in this work is linked to a radical formal strategy, through which movements are made continuous by elision and co-dependent by formal truncation. Thus each movement references a common fund of ideas, which expands across the work. Simultaneously, the four movements are all in some respect formally incomplete: the first movement comprises a compact sonata form with slow introduction, in which the end of the development bypasses the recapitulation and proceeds directly to the coda; the ternary slow movement abbreviates its A¹ section; the Scherzo sets up the expectation of an A–B–A¹–B¹–A² design, which is discontinued towards the end of B¹; and the Finale is conjoined with the Scherzo by means of a slow transition, and then truncated through the omission of the first-theme reprise.

The reduction of each movement’s formal independence is compensated by a network of thematic transformations, which supplies the impression that formal threads left incomplete within movements are fulfilled between them. The important material is summarised in Example 9.10; its disposition across the work is appraised in Table 9.2. The progress of the material is as follows: the principal idea of the slow introduction, marked ‘a’, recurs as a subsidiary idea in the A section of the slow movement. The first movement’s main theme (‘b’), which is also its subordinate theme, forms a counterpoint to the main theme of the Finale. The Finale’s first theme is, moreover, a variant of the new ‘breakthrough’ idea introduced from bar 121 of the first movement (‘c’). This theme also forms the basis of the Scherzo’s principal subject, presented in combination with motive ‘a’ from the introduction, which is inverted and played imitatively between the violins and lower strings. And the Trio is a wholesale recomposition of the slow movement’s B section, itself a variant of ‘a’.

Example 9.10 Schumann, Symphony No. 4, cyclical relationships.

Table 9.2 Schumann, Symphony No. 4, movement scheme, forms and thematic relationships

The density of cross-referencing in Symphony No. 4, coupled with its high degree of strategic formal loosening, reflects a notion of symphonism that is quite different from that embodied in the First, Second and Third symphonies, a distinctiveness underscored by Schumann’s original intention to call the work a symphonic fantasy.¹⁹ Whereas in the other symphonies cyclical methods tighten the multi-movement design, in the Fourth Symphony they compensate for its collapse, a technique that brings Schumann to the edge of ‘two-dimensional form’, the merging of form and cycle that Steven Vande Moortele explores in Chapter 11.

Whether we accept Dahlhaus’s association of Liszt with the so-called mid-century ‘dead time’ of the symphony or not (and David Brodbeck’s chapter in this volume gives us good grounds for being suspicious of Dahlhaus’s model), the modernism of Liszt’s contribution to the field is hard to contest. This is founded on two technical innovations: ‘two-dimensional’ form; and cyclical transformation. These two strategies are intimately related: the coherence of Liszt’s forms in his symphonic poems is secured by the method of integrating the diverse characters of the implicit movement types as transformations of a small repertoire of themes.

The relationship between form and cyclical transformation, however, has to be rethought when we turn to Liszt’s multi-movement works retaining the designation ‘symphony’, not least because they have distinct generic ancestry: the symphonic poems draw on the early-century tradition of the concert overture, notably as practised by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann; Eine Faust-Symphonie and the Dante Symphony are characteristic symphonies in the line of Beethoven’s Pastoral and numerous mid-century examples by Spohr, Raff, Rubinstein, Gade and others. The technique has the same extra-musical function in both cases (a poetic or literary idea is served by a theme’s potential for taking on different identities) but antithetical structural functions (in the symphonic poems, thematic transformation supports the impression of multiple movements in a single-movement form; in Eine Faust-Symphonie, transformation supports the impression of a single overarching design in a multi-movement scheme).

Eine Faust-Symphonie is by far Liszt’s most substantial essay in this technique. As numerous commentators have observed, its various cyclical relationships dramatise four basic extra-musical elements: the personality of Faust himself (in the first movement); Mephistopheles as a ‘negative’ image of this personality (in the Finale); Faust’s relationship with Gretchen (in the slow movement); and Faust’s love for Gretchen as the means of his redemption (in the Finale’s vocal coda, the famous Chorus mysticus).²⁰ The disposition of themes, a conspectus of which is offered in Example 9.11, reflects this. The three main subjects of the first movement’s exposition embody three personality facets – tragic, amorous and heroic – which are viciously parodied in the Finale at analogous formal locations. Around this scheme, Liszt also works the ‘alchemical’ theme with which the Symphony begins, the whole-tone and hexatonic ambiguities of which invoke Faust’s scientific ambitions. This is also given a sardonic twist in the Finale’s introduction: the quest for knowledge is mocked as hubristic and egomaniacal.

Example 9.11 Liszt, Eine Faust-Symphonie, cyclical relationships.

Faust’s dialogue with Gretchen centres on the slow movement’s contrasting middle section, which from four bars after Letter J develops an urgent, recitative-like variant of the first movement’s second theme. This cements the dual perspective engendered in the relationship between first and second movements: Gretchen is viewed from Faust’s perspective; and Faust from Gretchen’s perspective. In the Finale, Liszt finds his crucial arbiter of resolution in an inversion of the idea guiding the Finale of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2. Whereas Schumann fulfils his work’s dramatic aspirations through the transformation of an instrumental image of the ‘distant beloved’ into a kind of wordless secular chorale, Liszt reveals the drama’s redemptive message at the end by setting the crucial words ‘das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan’ (‘the eternal feminine leads us beyond’) to Gretchen’s main theme (at Letter B). Both finales instantiate the problem of following Beethoven’s Ninth, but offer opposed solutions: Schumann summons Beethoven directly (An die ferne Geliebte), but sublimates the overt vocality of the Ninth’s Finale into an instrumental finale that can do comparable extra-musical work in a wordless context; Liszt brings two Beethovenian precedents – the ‘Pastoral’ and the Ninth – into direct contact, by writing a characteristic symphony, which concludes with a redemptive vocal apotheosis.

Austria and Russia: Bruckner and Tchaikovsky

The ideological battles fought over the symphony in the wake of the Lisztian symphonic poem and Wagnerian music drama are keenly reflected in debates about thematic technique. Wagner’s critique of Brahms’s symphonies pivoted on their thematic aspects: when Wagner likened their material to particles of ‘chopped straw’, which had been removed from their proper chamber-musical home and given inappropriate symphonic housing, he reinforced critically the conviction that symphonism reliant on Beethovenian thematicism was moribund.²¹ At the same time, Brahmsian partisans elevated precisely these properties as vital guarantors of coherence. Max Kalbeck’s complaint that Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, a work that became something of a cause célèbre of post-Wagnerian symphonism, evinced the composer’s ‘absolute inability . . . to think and act according to the laws of musical logic’ invoked a benchmark of thematicism, in relation to which Bruckner was perceived to fall some way short.²²The dispute between the ‘Kuchkists’ and the conservatoire-based ‘Germanic’ conservatives in Russia mobilised similar tensions.²³ The ‘Mighty Handful’ marshalled concepts of national authenticity as justification for breaking with teutonic norms, whilst at the same time relying on those norms as inescapable markers of generic identity. In the territory of the symphony, these controversies fostered works by Balakirev and Borodin on the one hand, and by Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky on the other, all of which wrestle with the problem of how to maintain large-scale symphonic integrity whilst finding a constructive alternative to the Brahmsian method of cellular development.²⁴

The symphonies of Bruckner and Tchaikovsky offer an instructive pairing in this regard, not only because they seem, at face value, to exemplify thematic strategies on the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the Austro-German tradition, but also because both have, in their own ways, found themselves on the wrong side of attempts to establish what is normative for post-Beethovenian symphonism. As a result, whilst Tchaikovsky could be construed as a symphonist on the margins of a tradition centred on Austria and Germany, Bruckner has been regarded as an outsider in his own cultural context, an Austrian symphonist who shuns Austro-German classic–romantic orthodoxy.

These perceptions are concisely enunciated in Carl Dahlhaus’s commentary on the two composers, which deploys the comparison as a point of entry into the issues surrounding the ‘second age’ of the symphony:

For Dahlhaus, Tchaikovsky’s theatrical proclivities constrained his symphonic ambitions. In the Symphony No. 4, this is manifest in the relationship between the first movement’s main theme and the ‘fate’ motto with which the introduction begins. Singling out the latter’s appearance at the development’s climax, Dahlhaus argues that the movement is flawed because both motto and main subject are incompatible with their formal roles: the motto is ‘not amenable to development’, but is nevertheless made to serve that function; and the first subject’s lyric character renders it ‘hardly suitable . . . for establishing a symphonic movement spanning hundreds of measures’. In sum, ‘the grand style fundamental to the genre has been split into a monumentality that remains a decorative façade unsupported by the internal form of the movement, and an internal form that is lyrical in character and can be dramatized only by applying a thick layer of pathos’.²⁶ The root of the problem is the mistaken belief that a lyrical melody can underpin a monumental symphonism that is Beethovenian in aspiration.²⁷

Bruckner’s otherness resides not in the vocality of his style, but in the relationship between pitch and rhythm as motivic parameters. As Dahlhaus explains:

In the Sixth Symphony, Dahlhaus locates the foundations of the first movement’s themes in their rhythmic character; the diversity of thematic variants arises not from a systematic manipulation of interval content, but from the free alteration of pitch and interval around an invariant rhythmic pattern. In contrast to the apparent superficiality of Tchaikovsky’s monumental idiom, Bruckner’s technique rested for Dahlhaus on the integration of a ‘block’ formal architecture through ‘a system of approximate correspondences’, which ‘enables monumentality to appear as grand style’.²⁹

Both these readings can be challenged. Leaving aside the covert prejudice which caused Dahlhaus to withold credibility from almost every non-German symphony he investigated (Franck’s Symphony in D minor and Saint-Saëns’s ‘Organ’ Symphony are also deemed to ‘fail’, in the latter case for reasons that are strikingly similar to those discovered in Tchaikovsky), Dahlhaus is remiss in considering the precedents for Tchaikovsky’s style and the details of both composers’ thematic strategies. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 exhibits manifold debts to earlier works in the Austro-German lineage, especially Schumann’s symphonies (and ultimately Schubert, as Chapter 4 identifies): the first movement of the Symphony No. 4 in particular gives the impression of a wholesale misreading of the first movement of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2. And Bruckner’s focus on rhythm as a binding agent in the Symphony No. 6 has plentiful antecedents in the Beethovenian mainstream: in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, for example, the foundations of motivic coherence are as much rhythmic as they are intervallic, as any attempt to analyse the first theme and transition will quickly establish, and as Mark Anson-Cartwright has clarified above.

In general, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies can be grouped together not on chronological grounds (they are separated by some ten years), but because they share a preoccupation with cyclical thematicism, which is more developed than any connections that might be unearthed in symphonies nos. 1–3 or 6. Symphony No. 5 is the more ambitious of the two, pursuing the implications of the first movement’s introductory material across its four movements. Symphony No. 4 applies the same idea in a more restricted sense, working the introductory motto into the fabric of the first movement’s sonata form and reprising it climactically in the Finale. Both symphonies, moreover, make their cyclical materials do similar programmatic work, since in both cases Tchaikovsky associated his introductory motto with the agency of fate.³⁰

Symphony No. 4’s design is indebted to Schumann’s first two symphonies in two key respects. In the first place, Tchaikovsky honours both of these precedents in presenting significant material (the ‘fate’ motive ‘x’ shown in Example 9.12) in advance of the main body of the first movement’s sonata design, which is then extensively worked into it, thanks to the motive’s interjections at the end of the exposition and recapitulation (bars 193 and 355 respectively), its substantial presence in the development and reliance on its second half as the basis of the coda (beginning in augmentation at bar 366).

Example 9.12 Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4, I, bars 1–6.

Moreover, like Schumann’s Symphony No. 2, Tchaikovsky’s No. 4 explores the idea that a thread of developmental activity from the first movement should meld, in its Finale, with one initiated in the inner movements, although the process is rather more involved in Schumann’s case. Specifically, Tchaikovsky’s second, third and fourth movements are related by virtue of a common thematic incipit, which as Example 9.13 makes clear is in all cases a descending tetrachord, marked ‘y’.

Example 9.13 Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4, II, III and IV, thematic connections.

The relationship between ‘x’ and ‘y’ is, however, successive rather than integrative: if ‘y’ links movements as a common Hauptmotiv, then ‘x’ recurs as a ‘breakthrough’ event at bar 199 of the Finale, which impedes progress towards the coda through wholesale recall of the first movement’s introduction. No attempt is made to synthesise these threads: instead, the first-movement reprise functions as a moment of retrospection – a memory of fate’s negative associations – which drains away in advance of the Symphony’s festive conclusion.

In the Symphony No. 5, the authority of the motto theme (labelled ‘x’ in Example 9.14) seems, initially, to be more restricted, since after the slow introduction, its influence is suspended for the entirety of the first movement. Thereafter, however, its incursions are regular, and its involvement in the Finale especially is more substantial and more synthetically minded than in the Symphony No. 4. In the slow movement, ‘x’’s function is disruptive, derailing the progress of the music’s ternary form at two junctures, quoted in Example 9.14: first, in bars 99–107, where it frustrates any smooth retransition to the A¹ section, placing that burden on the pre-thematic material of the reprise (bars 108–110); second, in bars 158–69, where it intervenes between the movement’s final structural dominant and the coda, which sits entirely above a tonic pedal.

Example 9.14a–e Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5, cyclical use of motto theme.

The second intervention is more assertively dissonant than the first: bar 99 brushes aside a four-bar standing on V of C-sharp minor with a diminished third chord, which is then reinterpreted as in the movement’s tonic (D major); bar 158 disturbs A¹’s final perfect cadence with ♯vii^dim.7/V, from which progression to I is salvaged by the assertion of iv⁶ in bar 164.

The slow movement’s success in holding back the influence of the ‘fate’ motto yields expressive dividends thereafter. In the third movement, ‘x’ makes only one appearance, in the coda, where it emerges in a quiet, post-cadential waltz variant (beginning bar 241; see Example 9.14d). And by the time of the Finale, the motto’s function has effectively been reversed: rather than disturbing the form’s progress, it offers a major-mode, introductory antidote to the tempestuous main theme (Example 9.14e quotes its introduction form). As well as supplying the substance of the introduction and the triumphant (but by some accounts shallow) martial coda, ‘x’ makes two critical and formally analogous appearances in the movement’s interior.³¹ In the exposition’s closing section, it is instrumental in the (ultimately problematic) attempt to secure C major as the closing key (bars 172–201). In the recapitulation, this event is offset by an arduous liquidation of ‘x’ over V of E minor beginning at bar 426, which eventually emerges onto the half close prefacing the coda.

For Tchaikovsky, cyclical relationships have fairly specific extra-musical connotations, which are held in common between the two works in which he applies them most extensively; indeed, the use of such devices in these symphonies suggests a close affiliation in Tchaikovsky’s mind between cyclical thematicism and symphonic engagement with the struggle between fate and the heroic subject. For Bruckner, cyclical technique is somewhat more expressively variegated. It is a persisting, but by no means progressively evolving, strategy from the Symphony No. 2 (1872, revised 1877) onwards, being prominent in the Third, Fourth and Seventh symphonies, and most substantially represented in the Fifth and Eighth symphonies (the Ninth, being unfinished at the time of the composer’s death, remains to an extent a moot point in this regard, given that the Finale’s ultimate design remains a matter of speculation).³²

Bruckner’s most comprehensive cyclical exercise is undoubtedly the Symphony No. 5. On the largest scale, Bruckner conceives a symmetrical movement scheme, underscored by tonality, outlined in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, pairing of inner and outer movements by theme and key

In addition to their shared tonality, the outer movements are related by three means. The most explicit devices are the literal recall of the first movement’s introduction as the introduction to the Finale, which generates the impression that both movements proceed as contrasted responses to the same starting point, and the brief, parenthetical allusion to the first movement’s main theme in bars 13–22 , which is part of a chain of prior-movement quotations directly referencing the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In addition, the Finale’s principal subject shares harmonic properties with that of the first movement; specifically, its ♭II inflection mirrors the ♭VI tendency of the first-movement theme (see Example 9.15). Lastly, the first movement’s main theme is reprised in the recapitulation’s expanded third-theme group, initially at bar 462; indeed, this part of the form is enlarged specifically to accommodate further developmental activity centred on the theme’s recovery.

Example 9.15 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, mvts I and IV, first themes.

The harmonic similarity of the outer-movement main themes underpins a more direct connection, which cements their relationship: in bars 522–5, the two themes are combined, prefigured by the combination of their head motives from bar 518, shown in Example 9.16. This event draws the themes into an overarching harmonic process, since their chromatic inflections have a critical impact on both movements’ tonal schemes. It also provides a cyclical rationale for the Finale’s form, which is a complex mixture of sonata and double fugue. The first-theme group is a martial fugue; the development comprises two fugues, the first on the important chorale theme introduced at the end of the exposition (bar 175, fugue commencing bar 223), the second combining this theme with the first subject (from bar 270). Although the chorale is never directly combined with the first movement’s main theme, the fact that the chorale combines with the Finale main theme sets up a threefold thematic relationship that binds the outer movements, through the sharing of harmonic properties.³³

Example 9.16 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, IV, bars 522–5.

Bruckner’s long-range strategies here address a broader metaphysical agenda than Tchaikovsky’s confrontation between fate and human agency. In the Symphony No. 5 more directly than in any other of his symphonies, Bruckner dramatises the struggle between the secular and the sacred, embodied in a system of topical contrasts, which are indivisible from the work’s thematic action. As their martial themes convey, the protagonist of the outer movements is a heroic, secular individual in the Beethovenian sense, a shared agency that the Finale reinforces by contrapuntal combination. The Finale’s double fugue seeks reconciliation of this subject with a sacred topic, embodied in the chorale theme; the exhaustive working out of the contrapuntal possibilities of these two themes in the development signifies an effort to reconcile their opposed topics. The chorale’s magisterial entry as the climax of the coda in bar 583 performs two key functions in this respect. As a generic device, it turns the coda into a chorale prelude, thereby subsuming prior thematic–topical conflicts into a form that gives the sacred material centre stage. As a tonal event, it initiates a final composing out of the chromatic inflections that characterise first- and last-movement main themes: both first and second strains begin on flat-side chromatic regions (C flat and G flat) and work their way towards the tonic and its close relations, eventually emerging into the decisive tonic perfect cadence in bars 610–14. The residues of the first-movement theme persisting in the aftermath of this event and forming the substance of the Symphony’s final gesture are notably diatonic, as if the reconciliation of the work’s thematic, topical and tonal conflicts in its culminating assertion of faith has at last purged the material of its secular uncertainties.

While the outer movements play out their monumental thematic, contrapuntal and tonal drama in the tonic, the Adagio and Scherzo unfold internal relationships grounded in D minor, which interrupt the process that surrounds them. Examples 9.17a and b clarify the relationship.

Example 9.17a Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, II, bars 5–8.

The string accompaniment with which the Adagio begins, marked ‘a’, forms a near-ubiquitous feature of the Scherzo. Example 9.17b shows one of its many subtle uses: the Ländler comprising the subordinate theme, beginning at bar 23, is built on a decelerated variant of ‘a’ transferred into the bass, which persists for the entirety of this material’s presentation. And as Example 9.17a shows, the Scherzo’s main theme, which is counterpointed against ‘a’, is a variant of the oboe theme with which the Adagio begins. The heroic cyclical drama played out by the outer movements is thereby offset by an interior drama grounded in an attempt to transform the Adagio’s mournful processional into a more dynamic alternation of dance styles.

Example 9.17b Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, III, bars 1–8 and 23–30.

Fin-de-siècle: Mahler

In all the works considered thus far, cyclical devices act in the interests of large-scale coherence: that is, they respond to the problem of how to apply thematic techniques as a means of binding disparate movements, whilst invariably conveying an extra-musical message. Yet although Mahler absorbed these precedents thoroughly, he also applied them in ways that sometimes seem to critique the ideal of integration they serve. Whilst all of his nine completed symphonies operate some kind of inter-movement thematicism, it frequently contributes to a kind of collage effect, which questions the notion of inter-movement unification even as it references its guiding method.

Brief comparison of the First and Second symphonies, and a postscript on the Symphony No. 9, serve to introduce Mahler’s complex, eliptical approach to cyclical technique. As is well known, the First and Second symphonies form a pair, insomuch as Mahler imagined the latter as narrating the death and resurrection of the heroic subject embodied in the former.³⁴ The ideal of transcendent integration is most closely emulated in the Symphony No. 1, in which Mahler exploits three crucial inter-movement connections: the primordial music of the Symphony’s introduction (Example 9.18a) is transformed as the work’s triumphant goal; the main theme of the Finale is a wholesale minor-mode recomposition of the first movement’s development material (Example 9.18b); and the ‘breakthrough’ music of the first movement’s climax returns in the Finale, initially in the development and conclusively in the coda (Example 9.18c shows the breakthrough and its return before the Finale’s coda).³⁵

Example 9.18a Mahler, Symphony No. 1, I, bars 7–9 and IV, bars 652–6.

Example 9.18b Mahler, Symphony No. 1, I and IV, thematic relationships.

Example 9.18c Mahler, Symphony No. 1, I, bars 312–58 and IV, bars 588–632.

These three devices are closely related: the second and third are in effect enabling precursors of the first. The introduction’s primal descending-fourth motive recurs in the Finale as a triumphant continuation of the reprised ‘breakthrough’ event, which is additionally changed through the inclusion of a major version of the Finale’s main theme at the breakthrough’s apex. As a result, two ideas, which are separate in the first movement (the introduction theme and the breakthrough) are knitted together. The prematurity of the first version of this event, in the Finale’s development (from bar 370), is signalled by means of an abrupt harmonic shift from C to D, which sunders the breakthrough from its continuation; in the coda (from bar 631), by contrast, all of the material is grounded in the global tonic D major. The transformation of the first movement’s nature music and its conjunction with the Finale’s theme is rich in extra-musical significance. The conversion of an idea initially associated with a nature that is anterior to the first movement’s thematic subject into one that ensues from a major-key variant of the Finale’s pathetic main theme installs nature as the redeeming agent of the Symphony’s heroic subject.

Mahler also employs the wholesale reprise of passages in the Symphony No. 2, but their function here is more elusive. There are two clear instances. The Scherzo’s climactic event (bars 465–81) is retrieved as the opening gesture of the Finale, thereby parenthesising the vocal fourth movement; and aspects of this music also recur in the climax preceding the Finale’s depiction of the last trumpet (bars 402–17). Dovetailed with this is a larger retrieval: the tumultuous martial music leading into the first movement’s retransition gradually emerges out of the Finale’s central episode (first movement, bars 282–94; Finale, bars 301–23). Such recurrences mark their formal locations as dramatically disruptive and therefore expressively significant; but they do not project thematic continuities of the sort explored by Schumann and Bruckner.

Otherwise, thematic connections between the outer movements rely principally on a shared preoccupation with chant-like music, and especially with variants of the Dies irae, which first surfaces in the first movement’s development section at bar 270 (a selection of relationships is given in examples 9.19a, b and c).

Example 9.19a Mahler, Symphony No. 2, I, bars 270–7.

Example 9.19b Mahler, Symphony No. 2, V, bars 62–73.

Example 9.19c Mahler, Symphony No. 2, V, bars 210–11, 216–17, 220–1, 230–3 and 472–4.

The Dies irae is significant, because in the Finale it makes a critical transition from an idea that is incidental to the structural discourse to one that is formally central. The form of the Finale evades simple description. It is probably best regarded as sui generis, comprising four large parts (bars 1–42, 43–193, 194–471 and 472–764), the first constituting the introduction, the last the multi-part Schlußchor. Parts one, two and four also have a sectional, tableaux-like design; part three initially resembles a sonata form, but this impression disintegrates as the music proceeds. From bar 62, Mahler engineers a thematic conjunction that has central programmatic significance. The Dies irae initiates a phrase, which a minor-key adumbration of the Schlußchor’s ‘Aufersteh’n’ theme concludes (from bar 70). In the Schlußchor, the latter takes centre stage, whilst the former is jettisoned. The hermeneutic implication is clear: the progress of the material embodies the Symphony’s expressive trajectory, from death and judgement to resurrection.

Even more hermeneutically suggestive are the relationships between the Finale and the fourth movement, a setting of ‘Urlicht’ (‘Primal Light’) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The crucial material here is the music first introduced to set the words ‘Je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein’ (‘I would rather be in heaven’) in bars 22–30, which supplies the last vocal phrase in the movement’s A section (Example 9.20). Critically, Mahler illustrates that this is an as yet unfulfilled aspiration by leaving the singer’s phrase cadentially unresolved over IV^9–8, it being left to the the oboist to supply perfect-cadential closure. The same material serves simultaneously as the climax of the middle section and as an elided, truncated reprise from bar 58, now given added expressive weight through the addition of a pungent ♭VI chord in bar 60. Here, moreover, Mahler allows the vocalist to carry the phrase through to its cadential conclusion, thus underlining the fact that the material now sets the more assured lines ‘Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben / Wird leuchten mir bis das ewig, selig Leben’ (‘Dear God will give me a little light / Will light my way to eternal, blessed life’).³⁶

Example 9.20 Mahler, Symphony No. 2, IV, bars 22–30.

Mahler retrieves this music at an important juncture (bars 655–72) in the Finale’s Schlußchor on the text of Klopstock’s Auferstehung, to which Mahler added his own additional stanzas. Here, he sets his own words ‘Mit Flügeln die ich mir errugen / In heißem Liebestreben / Werd’ ich entschweben zum Licht / Zu dein kein Aug’ gedrungen’ (‘With wings I have acquired / Shall I soar / In love’s ardent striving / To the light to which no eye has penetrated’),³⁷ in so doing revealing a key strategic motivation behind the extension of Klopstock’s poem. In ‘Urlicht’, both instances of this music set aspirations towards resurrection in eternity, the second more certain in its conviction than the first. In extending Klopstock’s text, Mahler in effect uses it as a platform for recovering and fulfilling ‘Urlicht’’s metaphysical ambition: Klopstock’s assertion that ‘you will rise again’ (‘Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du’) is related by Mahler’s text to ‘Urlicht’’s light that will lead ‘to eternal, blessed life’.

Although strategically related, these three cyclical threads are not integrated. The first is a quasi-cinematic gesture embodying the rhetoric of crisis, which jolts the music out of its local continuity at strategic formal locations. The second has tangible programmatic significance: a chant signifying the day of judgement is conjoined with a theme connoting resurrection. And the third conveys the agency of that resurrection (the light that leads to eternity). There is, however, no grand synthesis in the manner of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. Rather, Mahler embeds strands of cyclical discourse within a symphonic context that values expressive fecundity as much as rigorous thematicism. Mahler’s symphonic ‘world’ is a master-genre that can absorb diverse generic and expressive sources (in this case symphony, lied and cantata), in which context thematic cross-referencing principally guarantees narrative orientation rather than any sense of overarching unity.

In the Symphony No. 9, the Scherzo, Rondo burlesque and Adagio are related by two principal means: first, by variation of the descending melodic line and harmonic progression which appears initially in the Scherzo’s first waltz episode (bar 90, with the characteristic motion towards ♮VI from bar 96), reprised as a complete hexatonic progression from bar 261, and which references Beethoven’s Lebewohl Sonata, Op. 81a (Example 9.21, marked ‘a’);³⁸ and second, through retention in the Adagio of the turn motive first introduced in bar 320 of the Rondo burlesque (Example 9.21, marked ‘b’).

Example 9.21 Mahler, Symphony No. 9, thematic relationships between mvts II, III and IV.

There are several ways of understanding these connections. One solution is to regard the Adagio’s refrain as uniting previously disparate material. By this reading, the movement begins with a synthetic event: the Lebewohl motive, labelled ‘a’, constitutes its head motive; the turn, labelled ‘b’, is a subsidiary idea, which consistently saturates the texture in both prime form and augmentation. This interpretation is reinforced by topical considerations. Motive ‘a’ supports a topical trajectory, in which material portrayed as a waltz in the Scherzo becomes a polka in the Burlesque (second theme, bar 266) and finally a hymn in the Adagio: an idea given a secular identity earlier in the work thereby reveals its spiritual core in the last movement. An alternative reading would see the Adagio’s refrain not as a thematic prime form, towards which the earlier cyclical threads have been working, but rather as a final presentation of ideas that will gradually lose their syntactic cohesion as the movement progresses. In these terms, the two material threads are continuities, initiated earlier in the Symphony, which run through the Adagio’s theme and on to its final bars.

The subsequent processes acting on this music have to be contextualised within the Adagio’s design, which can be construed as a loose five-part rondo with coda, in which the refrain becomes successively more elaborate, and as a result more texturally and harmonically diffuse. Mahler exploits the rondo form not as a means of grounding the main theme through recursion, but as a vehicle for the successive questioning of its structural integrity. In A¹ (beginning bar 49), the refrain is elaborated with increasingly dense chromatic counterpoint which threatens to obscure its syntactic outline, yielding from bar 73 to a cadential phrase and codetta, which draws out the act of local closure to a point of virtual stasis. A², located as the Adagio’s major climax (bar 127), begins with even more densely worked textural elaboration in which the turn figure is counterpointed in diminished form against ‘a’, but this successively thins out as the coda approaches. And the coda itself dwells on ‘b’, elements of the movement’s incipit, and the refrain’s continuation material presented for the first time from bar 13, simultaneously fragmenting and decelerating until, by the end, only the turn remains.

Narratives of farewell are pervasive in the discourse on this music, as on the work as a whole.³⁹As Vera Micznik has shown, such readings are not unproblematic, especially if they are read as autobiographical.⁴⁰ Yet it is hard to ignore the cultural baggage attending this Symphony, and its expressive implications for the material process with which the work concludes. The gradual disappearing from view that Mahler engineers has a fourfold implication. In the context of the Adagio, it supplies a protracted, attenuated liquidation of the movement’s primary material. In the context of the Symphony, this is also a dissolution of the cyclical impulse, because the endlessly drawn-out thematic fragmentation invokes a material thread tracking back to the Scherzo. As Mahler’s last completed symphony, this dissolution also signifies the exhaustion of the impulse motivating his entire symphonic project (although the extensive materials for Symphony No. 10 complicate this perception). And on the largest scale, it constitutes nothing less than an aural symbol of a symphonic tradition, and the idealism it embodied, fading into history: the ardent utopianism of the Beethovenian symphony, galvanised by the realisation that autonomous musical relationships can convey poetic, literary or metaphysical aspirations, finds its point of ultimate repose. The cultural ‘slipping away’ (‘das Gleitende’) that Hugo von Hoffmansthal diagnosed in the years preceding the First World War is nowhere more poignantly expressed.⁴¹

Introduction

In addition to its vital importance for the social and aesthetic development of art music after the Enlightenment, the symphony is also pivotal for the evolution of tonality. As the most prestigious instrumental genre of the nineteenth century, it embodies on the largest scale changes in the way tonal relations underpin instrumental forms. To trace the development of symphonism from the late eighteenth century to the fragmentation of common practice at the start of the twentieth century is in a sense to observe in microcosm the history of tonality in its common-practice phases.

Understanding this history requires engagement with a variety of theoretical, technological and historical issues. To the extent that the exploration of chromatic tonal relationships undertaken by composers in the first half of the nineteenth century shadowed an emerging consciousness of tonality as a musical system, it reflects a striking shift of theoretical attitude. Where eighteenth-century theory mingled notions of mode, key and harmonic schema with concepts of topic and melodic rhetoric, nineteenth-century theorists, from Alexandre Choron’s seminal coinage in 1810 onwards, were increasingly concerned with the system of tonality itself.¹ In parallel, symphonists also responded to major advances in instrumental technology and temperament, which are intimately related to the expansion of tonal means gathering momentum by the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, the rise to dominance of equal temperament and the dissemination of instrumental modifications accommodating this change underlies the increasing confidence with which composers constructed forms around remote tonal relationships.²

For a complex of reasons, however, the symphony absorbs these changes relatively slowly: chromatic tonal schemes discovered abundantly in sonatas and quartets of the 1820s and 30s are not for the most part reproduced in contemporaneous symphonies. This, in part, is a matter of organology. The gamut of chromatic keys is less easily explored in an orchestral context, thanks in particular to the restricted modulatory capacity of the French horn and the trumpet, which only eased with the widespread adoption of valve mechanisms.³ Generic identity is also a contributory factor. Chamber genres were private, domestic media, and therefore offered a relatively safe environment for tonal experimentation. The symphony was by contrast the public genre par excellence, and as such carried a weight of communicative expectation that perhaps constrained tonal innovation.

Caution also needs to be exercised in explaining developments in symphonic tonal planning within commonly disseminated conceptions of influence for the nineteenth-century symphony. In particular, the expansion of tonal means is not congruent with the influence of an all-encompassing Beethoven paradigm; it is not at all clear that Carl Dahlhaus’s notion of ‘circumpolarity’, which suggests that nineteenth-century symphonists maintained a debt to Beethoven regardless of their chronological distance from him, extends to Beethoven’s use of tonal strategy.⁴ In truth, examples of unorthodox strategies are relatively rare in Beethoven’s symphonies. Of his nine first movements, for example, only two contain strikingly post-classical expositional tonal schemes: Symphony No. 8/i presents its second theme initially in VI before correcting to V; Symphony No. 9/i contains a second theme in VI. Citation of Schubert as a precedent is even more problematic: by the mid-century, only the ‘Great’ C major Symphony was widely known, having been belatedly performed in 1839; the ‘Unfinished’ remained obscure until 1865, when it received its first performance under Johann Herbeck; and although all written before 1820, the symphonies nos. 1–6 were not published until 1884–5. Rather, approaches to tonal planning have to accommodate a degree of generic fluidity: expansions of the tonal system travel between genres, in a way that expressive, formal or thematic devices do not. And here the tracking of transmission and influence becomes problematic at best.

The question of influence raises broader historical problems. Although the narrative of a progressive absorption of chromaticism into established symphonic forms is appealing, it is misleading not least because it invokes the spectre of Schoenberg’s notion of tonal collapse. Leaving aside heated debates about the necessity of atonality, it is worth noting that the history of symphonic tonality in the nineteenth century is not necessarily the history of the simple replacement of diatonic relationships with chromaticism. Recognisably classical strategies persist even into the early twentieth century, so that it is perhaps more precise to write on the one hand of an expansion of tonal means that substitutes for classical practices, and on the other hand of the maintenance of diatonic relationships, as possibilities within an enlarged gamut of structural options.

The analyst of these phenomena additionally confronts several ongoing theoretical debates. The structural use of chromatic tonal relationships raises the basic question of whether keys lying beyond the diatonic cycle of relations – or even keys within that cycle, which are not tonic-defining in the manner of the dominant or subdominant – can still perform analogous structural functions. Charles Rosen, evaluating Schumann’s use of a tritone key relationship in the Finale of his Piano Sonata Op. 11, emphatically denies such equivalence:

In Rosen’s terms, one cannot substitute a more distant relation for V in a sonata form and preserve any kind of productive structural tension: we hear a type of tonal ‘distance’, but not a form-defining relationship. Orthodox Schenkerian approaches tend to amplify this view. The grounding of the Ursatz in the model of the perfect authentic cadence necessarily precludes deep-structural participation of chromatic and diatonic tertiary and other relations as anything more than a means of prolonging I or V. In other words, a closing expositional tonicisation of ♭III in a major-key sonata form does not replace the expected V at the background; it simply functions as a chromatic displacement of that dominant, which now occurs at a later point in the structure. Schenkerians unwilling to admit to the possibility of a non-diatonic deep structure are unlikely to concede that chromatic keys can function as dominant substitutes.⁶

Other approaches of fundamentally different theoretical persuasion still either directly or obliquely reinforce this distinction. Robert Bailey’s work, designed initially to account for Wagner’s tonal habits, has been taken up by various commentators.⁷ The idea that nineteenth-century music elaborates a kind of ‘second practice’ is basic to this attitude: Bailey’s concepts of ‘expressive tonality’ (the pairing of keys a semitone apart), ‘directional’ tonality (the practice of beginning in one key and ending in another) and the ‘double-tonic complex’ (continuous motion between two potential tonics) have been brought together under the general observation that nineteenth-century music properly embodies two tonal practices rather than one: a diatonic practice persisting from the eighteenth century, which is monotonal (it is governed by one controlling tonic); and a second practice, which favours the pairing of (sometimes chromatically related) tonalities. In these terms, those aspects of nineteenth-century music retaining classical cadential frameworks comprise its tonal ‘structure’, whilst tertiary and other relations stand outside this as its tonal ‘plot’.⁸

These issues have more recently been taken up by theorists adopting neo-Riemannian attitudes or the theory of transformational networks.⁹Richard Cohn, for instance, has insisted on a basic difference between the asymmetrical properties of diatonic and fifth-based relationships and the kinds of symmetrical tertiary triadic cycles that become widespread in nineteenth-century music. Cohn posits a kind of ‘tonal disunity’, arising from the coexistence within a single practice of the triad’s two ‘natures’: its diatonic tonal nature; and a kind of ‘triadic post-tonality’, formed most commonly from successive major- and minor-third cycles.¹⁰ By this argument, we have to regard symmetrical key relationships as standing outside a tonal system founded on principles of cadence and prolongation. When Schubert modulates to F-sharp minor en route from B flat to F in the exposition of the first movement of his Piano Sonata D 960 (to pick an example to which Cohn has paid close attention), he exploits the triad’s dual nature, enclosing a post-tonal vocabulary of tertiary relationships (the B flat–F sharp motion) within a diatonic practice founded on fifth relationships (the overall I–V motion).¹¹Cohn invokes Dahlhaus’s notion of a late tonal practice that ‘anticipates’ free atonality in order to contextualise such practices historically.¹²

Mindful of these considerations, this chapter offers an account of the evolution of symphonic tonal practice from Beethoven to Mahler, focussing on two central features: intra-movement strategies, that is tonal strategies informing individual movements; and inter-movement strategies, that is strategies unfolding across the cycle of movements. My approach reflects the view that nineteenth-century tonality comprises one expanded system, in which symmetrical and asymmetrical, diatonic and chromatic key relationships can be freely combined or substituted. This has two major ramifications. It implies, first of all, that a diatonic cadence is not the only possible guarantor of tonic identity. We have, in other words, the interplay of classical tonality with what David Kopp calls ‘common-tone tonality’; that is, a tonality in which key can be projected through conventional cadential models, or via chromatic relationships in which triads are related by the retention of one or more pivotal pitches, or even (elaborating on Kopp) by parsimonious voice leading towards a tonic.¹³ Chromatic thirds are the first such relationships to become standardised in nineteenth-century practice; by the later century, a wide range of chromatic relationships is in play.

Second, the interaction of harmony and tonality in such a context needs to be reconsidered. Movements often embellish an unremarkably diatonic key scheme with chromatic foreground digressions; conversely, chromatic key schemes are sometimes elaborated by an entirely conventional diatonic foreground. Such discrepancies impact upon analytical method. A Schenkerian Ursatz remains a workable model for a movement that maintains deep-structural diatonicism, because foreground chromaticism can be understood as prolonging a conventional cadential bass motion. But a movement, the tonal scheme of which comprises successive major-third relationships, turns Schenker’s fundamental structures into regional elaborations, and so undermines their basic premise. In such a context, we can only maintain the diatonic background by insisting that authentic cadences in the tonic take precedence over large spans of music that reinforce chromatic relationships.

In pursuing these practices, I will pay close attention to the interaction of tonal plot, understood as broadly encompassing the distribution of keys within a piece, bass progression, or the motion and character of the plot’s supporting bass, and form. Rethinking of the interaction of these elements constitutes a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century music. It departs most strikingly from classical precedent in situations where tonal plot and bass progression are misaligned: the music may move into the orbit of a given tonality before it is categorically established by bass motion. The relationship between plot, bass and form is throughout represented by bass diagrams, underpinned by Roman-numeral analyses, and overlaid with formal segmentations, which use the following terminology: A is main theme; B is subordinate theme; TR is transition; C is closing theme/section; an integer suffix signifies a new section within a broader function (B1, B2); a superscript integer suffix indicates a reprise or repeat (A, A¹). The way in which plot and bass progression interact within the primary thematic material of a movement I will term a form’s tonal premise; the comparable formulation in subordinate material I will term its counter-premise. In a sonata form, the premise is generally synonymous with the first theme, and the counter-premise with the second theme and closing group. In situations where the second theme and closing groups tonicise distinct keys (the so-called ‘three-key exposition’), we have what I will term a double counter-premise. In sectional or recursive forms (particularly ternary forms or rondos), there is normally an association of primary section and premise, and of subsidiary sections with one or more counter-premises. For the present purposes, we can define the relationship of premises as the specific way in which the plot comes to be formulated.

Intra-movement tonal strategies

Tonal plot

In classical symphonies, tonal plots display an overwhelming degree of diatonic consistency. In the major-key symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, the subordinate theme in a sonata-form exposition, or the first episode in a rondo, overwhelmingly favours V, invariably corrected to I in the recapitulation (for sonata forms) or final episode (for rondos). In comparable minor-key movements, III is predominant, with occasional turns to the dominant minor, corrected to the tonic major or minor under recapitulation. The central episode of a rondo will generally tonicise either IV or vi. Slow movements pursuing ternary designs often deploy the parallel mode (minor or major), the dominant, subdominant or relative minor for the contrasting middle; the minuet da capo will normally frame a trio exploiting the same range of keys.

Many of these habits persist into the nineteenth century. To take sonata-form expositional second-theme keys from across the century as exemplary: expositions modulating directly from I to V can be found in the first movements of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, Dvořák’s No. 2, Balakirev’s No. 1, Mahler’s nos. 1 and 4 and Glazunov’s nos. 1 and 7. They also appear in the slow movements of Brahms’s symphonies nos. 2 and 4, and in the finales of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, Schumann’s No. 2, Brahms’s No. 2, Dvořák’s No. 6 and Saint-Saëns’s No. 1. Expositional modulations from i to III occur in the first movements of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1, Schumann’s No. 4, Tchaikovsky’s nos. 2 and 6 and Brahms’s nos. 1 and 4, and in the finales of Mendelssohn’s No. 1 and Dvořák’s No. 9.

The most straightforward way in which nineteenth-century plots innovate beyond such schemes is by simple substitution of a more remote key relationship. Submediant second themes in minor-key sonata expositions have well-known Beethovenian and Schubertian precedents. The first movement of Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 in C minor (1816), for instance, contains an expositional i–VI plot. Schubert’s recapitulatory response is markedly unorthodox. It begins with a dominant reprise of the first theme at bar 177; maintenance of this fifth transposition leads to a return of the second theme in E flat at bar 214. Schubert does not ‘correct’ the non-tonic reprise until the start of the closing section: the latter stages of the second group modulate, and the closing-section material commences in C major at bar 244. He deployed a similar technique, albeit with a less radical recapitulation, in the first movement of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (1822). The expositional first theme closes with a perfect cadence in B minor, after which the second theme begins, following a four-bar pivot, in G. In the recapitulation, the first group modulates, cadencing in F-sharp minor. The dominant transposition then persists for the second theme, which enters in D major, and only shifts towards B after a modulating sequence and caesura in bars 273–81. The same expositional strategy is also adopted by Beethoven in the first movement of the Symphony No. 9 (1823), although the recapitulation is more direct, switching from D minor to D major for the second theme in the aftermath of the tumultuous first-theme return, before reverting to D minor in the closing section. Schubert sometimes carried his preference for lowered VI relationships into his slow movements: the ‘Great’ C major’s Andante con moto, for example, pits an A minor refrain against an F major episode that is later reprised in the tonic major.

Lowered VI substitutions remained popular throughout the century in major- and minor-key movements. For Dvořák, this strategy evidently held an association with D minor, perhaps in response to Beethoven’s example: the first-movement expositions of symphonies nos. 4 (1874) and 7 (1885) both contain B-flat second groups. Brahms deployed the same manoeuvre more sparingly. A clear example appears in the third movement of Symphony No. 3, which comprises a ternary design in which a C minor A section and its reprise frames an A-flat B section. The submediant is still commonplace at the turn of the century. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 (1904) employs it as the second-group key in the first movement’s exposition and the initial key of the first Trio in the Scherzo (both in F major).

By the later century, the full gamut of tertiary relationships was in regular use. A clear example of simple minor-third substitution can be found in the third movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, in which an A-flat major intermezzo frames a B major trio. In the first movement of his Symphony No. 3 of 1883, the exposition essentially unfurls a I–III scheme, but this is complicated by the fact that both tonalities are modally mixed: the F major first theme has strong connotations of F minor; the A major second theme succumbs to A minor in the closing section. Like Schubert in the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, so Brahms also resolves this modulation back towards the tonic in the recapitulation by inserting an additional fifth relationship: the second theme recurs in D major, before being pulled abruptly towards F in bar 155 via a brief caesura (the location of which is suggestively similar to Schubert’s). Yet F is not sustained, and the recapitulation closes in D minor, so that it is left to the coda to confirm F as tonic.

More complex situations arise when different ways of dividing the octave are combined, most commonly in the so-called ‘three-key scheme’ or double counter-premise. In the earlier nineteenth century, such plots often embed tertiary or semitonal relationships within a fifth-based framework. The first movement of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, for instance, contains a three-key exposition, in which a subsidiary theme in E minor is interposed between a C major main theme and an extended G major closing section, creating a tertiary bass arpeggiation outlining the tonic triad, as Example 10.1 explains.

Example 10.1 Schubert, Symphony No. 9, I, bass diagram.

In the recapitulation, E minor is corrected to C minor and then to A minor, after which the expositional second group is transposed so as to produce C major at the closing section. In one sense, the E minor theme acts as a third divider between I and V within the exposition, which is itself resolved by fifth transposition in the recapitulation as the music moves towards I. Schubert complicates this scheme, however, by according at least middleground significance to A flat, which appears as a chromatic digression within the closing section and is strongly asserted as the framing tonality of the development. As a result, E minor also participates in the symmetrical major-third division of the octave around C, as Example 10.1 shows, and so has a kind of structural double identity. Strikingly, the movement’s slow introduction adumbrates the tertiary plan, its two main departures from C major comprising E major and A flat respectively.

The extent and diversity of such tonal plots in later symphonic forms is attested by comparative analysis of two first movements from near-contemporaneous but geographically disparate works: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 of 1877–8 and Franck’s Symphony in D minor of 1886–8. In each case, the i–III trajectory common to classical minor-key forms is taken either as the starting point or framework for the projection of a network of minor-third relationships. The distribution of these relationships within the movements is, however, quite distinct, indicating the sheer flexibility the sonata idea demonstrates in accommodating the later century’s expansion of tonal means.

In both movements, the minor-third cycle is facilitated by modal mixture. As Example 10.2 explains, Tchaikovsky presents his first group as a wide-ranging but ultimately tonally closed unit, linked to the second group by a transition suggesting a modulation to III. This is undercut by modal mixture when the second theme enters at bar 116 (anacrusis bar 115) in A-flat minor. The expected i–III trajectory is then shifted so that it is orientated around A♭: the second group vacillates between A-flat minor and its enharmonic relative B major, which is secured with the triumphant entry of the closing section at bar 161. The exposition is in this way framed by a tritone, achieved by the pivotal switch from major to minor modes over . The recapitulation begins with a non-tonic reprise of the first theme over a chord in D minor at bar 284 (anacrusis bar 283), which then persists as the initial key of the second group. The bulk of the exposition’s second group and closing-section complex now returns transposed, which means that it will ultimately lead to the tonic major. In short, the progression, which in the exposition moved from A-flat minor to B major, now facilitates motion towards F. Thus the recapitulation does not secure the tonic by banishing all alternatives, but by positing it as the goal rather than the starting point of a progression. After this, the coda consolidates F minor. Overlaid onto all of this is a more weakly projected major-third cycle stemming from the tonic: A minor is inserted into the first-theme group at bar 70; and D-flat major preoccupies the first part of the coda (from bar 365) as a large-scale neighbour note to V.

Example 10.2 Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4, I, bass diagram.

As Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter have briefly noted, and as Example 10.2 explains, the result of all of this is the complete arpeggiation of a cycle of minor thirds, the mid-point of which is reached by the end of the exposition.¹⁴ By these means, Tchaikovsky in effect balances classical and post-classical tendencies. Primary and secondary themes are exposed in different keys and reprised in the same key, as they would be in a classical sonata form. But because the exposition is underpinned by a cycle rather than an opposition of two keys, Tchaikovsky can bring these themes back in the same non-tonic key (D minor) and still conclude the movement logically in the global tonic (F minor).

Franck, in contrast, employs a standard i–III relationship (D minor–F major) between his expositional first and second groups, but engineers the modulation by repeating his entire slow introduction and first group in F minor, producing a double first-theme premise, the latter part of which tonicises the parallel minor of the second theme’s key (F major). One result of this is that the traditional relationship of first group and transition is undermined: the modulation away from the tonic is secured through non-tonic re-presentation of the first theme, leaving only modal parallelism as the agent of contrast with the second group. The recapitulation enacts a series of counter-measures. First, the fortissimo reprise of the introduction with which it begins at bar 331 moves quickly from D minor to B minor, so that the exposition’s i–iii progression is balanced symmetrically by i–♮vi. More remarkably, a non-tonic reprise of the Allegro first theme ensues from bar 349 in E-flat minor, correcting to D major for the second theme via G minor and a series of sequential extensions of first-group material. This has two consequences: first, the introduction loses its framing function and signals the start of the recapitulation; second, and partly as a result, the subsequent first-group material is significantly less tonally stable than its exposition counterpart, and it is left to the second group and coda to re-establish the tonic (the movement is summarised in Example 10.3).

Example 10.3 Franck, Symphony, I, bass diagram.

The preoccupation with third relationships is extended in the second and third movements. The Allegretto’s famous conflation of slow movement and scherzo (whereby the latter appears as a middle-section variation of the former’s main theme, with which it is then combined at the reprise) is also an exploration of chromatic third relationships, since the scherzo begins in G minor, whereas the movement’s key is B-flat minor. The D major Finale elaborates, in turn, on the first-movement recapitulation’s motion to B minor, initiating its second theme at bar 72 in B major, and following this at bar 125 with a reprise of the slow movement’s main theme in B minor, the result being an idiosyncratic three-theme exposition. The downward motion through the minor-third cycle is continued in the development section, the climax of which (bars 175–202) forcefully establishes A-flat major. The cycle is, however, not completed. F♯ plays no role: the first themes of the Finale and second movement are recapitulated in D major and D minor respectively (bars 268 and 300), and the movement closes, after a retrospective glance towards first-movement material, in the tonic major.

Bass progression and formal function

In classical forms, the tonal plot and the material that articulates it are very often coordinated with cadential bass motion. In nineteenth-century music, bass progression, formal function and plot are by contrast frequently misaligned. An emphatic example can be found in the recapitulation of the first movement of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 (1850), beginning at bar 411 and reproduced in Example 10.4.

Example 10.4 Schumann, Symphony No. 3, I, bars 409–15.

Schumann’s first theme is reprised over a chord, resolving the first-inversion German augmented sixth in bars 409–10. This has two immediate consequences. First, the theme’s tonic return is not a point of arrival for the bass, which rather remains active across the formal boundary between development and recapitulation. Second, the stability of the tonic is questioned: the sounds like a suspension over the dominant, which resolves on the first beat of bar 415. In fact, the tonic receives no cadential confirmation in the bass for the entirety of the first-group reprise. V is prolonged until bar 430, where it moves upwards towards vi, initiating a passing modulation to V of that key.

The result is that the often discrete formal functions of development and recapitulation are here elided, because the latter is not distinguished by tonic arrival in the bass progression. Recapitulatory elisions over a chord are widespread in nineteenth-century symphonies. A beautiful example occurs in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, where a retransitional emphasis on vi is chromatically sidestepped in two bars, and the first theme returns as part of a progression in bars 341–4. In the later century, the sense of the as an elaboration of V is replaced by the bolder assertion of the tonic in its second inversion. Examples include the first movements of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 5, which both approach a tonic from a retransitional augmented sixth, and of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, which approaches the tonic from a diminished third. More striking still is the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, the recapitulation of which as we have seen begins with a forceful statement of the first theme over a sustained in the remote key of D minor.

Example 10.5 Mahler, Symphony No. 6, I, bars 291–7.

Example 10.6 Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 2, I, bars 81–106.

More harmonically audacious recapitulatory elisions can be found at the turn of the century. In the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, the recapitulation begins at Fig. 28 in the parallel major, reached via a retransitional chromatic ascent (Example 10.5). A major is, however, quickly destabilised by two jarring harmonic devices: the bass turns towards F, which becomes an upper neighbour to the climactic A minor chord at Fig. 29, which forms the true goal of the progression initiated in the retransition. In a strategy owing something to the example of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, the bass E then persists for another thirteen bars, finally resolving to A at Fig. 30.

The maintenance of an active bass progression across a formal boundary is not restricted to recapitulations; the presentation of a second theme over an unstable chord inversion or oblique progression is also common. Example 10.6 shows a lovely instance of transition/second-theme elision in the exposition of the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (1840). The transition finds its way conventionally to V/V, reinforced by a nine-bar standing on V in bars 78–82. The initial tonal goal of the second theme is, however, ♭VII, confirmed at the end of the theme’s first phrase by an authentic cadence. Instead of resolving the transition’s dominant preparation to its tonic (V), Mendelssohn turns the bass C into the root of an augmented triad neighbouring D♭, which then moves by step through ii/♭VII onto V/♭VII; it is this dominant that is resolved with the cadence in bars 89–90. A flat does not, however, persist as the secondary key; instead, Mendelssohn supplies a cadential extension in bars 90–4, which shifts towards F minor, and the second theme is then restated, via a change of mode, in F major, moving towards an authentic cadence closing in that key in bars 105–6, after which the closing section ensues. Properly speaking, the bass C established in the transition is not resolved until the end of the second theme, remaining active beneath the intervening harmonic digression and retrieved in bar 105.

The double-tonic complex

In the later nineteenth century, the presence of an increasingly chromatic harmonic foreground complicates the idea that an initial theme or section will unambiguously prolong one key. As a result, the association of the parts of a form with a single tonal premise is weakened or else breaks down altogether. Rather, it becomes more accurate to write of the presentation of a harmonic field, defined by a progression that alludes, either by cadence or implication, to multiple, often chromatically related tonics within a single theme group or section, without necessarily confirming any of them. This situation is analogous to the ‘double-tonic complex’ theorised by Bailey as the basis of the ‘Einleitung’ of Wagner’s Tristan, in which the music gives up the prolongation of a discrete tonic and shifts continuously between implied third-related keys.¹⁵

Example 10.7 Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, IV, bars 1–9.

Many subsequent composers grappled with the problem of how to incorporate the idiom of Tristan – which populated an open, dramatic form – into the closed structures of the symphony. In the Finale of his Symphony No. 7 (1883), Bruckner composed a first theme, which begins unambiguously with an arpeggiation of the tonic E major (a reference to the first theme of the first movement), but then veers by ascending semitonal voice-leading or SLIDE transformation towards an authentic cadence in A-flat major at its conclusion (see Example 10.7). The triadic major-third progression A flat–E minor in bars 9 and 10 leads to a consequent phrase beginning in V of E, which again modulates by chromatic voice leading, this time reaching a cadence in B-flat major. The ensuing transition finds its way to V of F minor by bar 34, but this preparation is not taken up by the second theme, which begins in A-flat major. The first-theme group is essentially classical in its design – a sentential period is succeeded by a sequential transition tending towards motivic fragmentation – but its harmonic structure departs fundamentally from the classical paradigm, both in its detail and in its general distance from the idea that a first theme should articulate a single tonic key. Rather, Bruckner composes a theme that establishes I and V as starting points, but confirms ♭IV and ♭V by cadence. The tonal strategy of the movement as a whole is not so much about making non-tonic material (the expositional second theme) prolong the tonic in the recapitulation, but rather involves seeking a variant of the first theme that cadences as well as starts in E, achieved finally in the augmentation of the theme’s cadence in bars 313–15 leading into the coda, as appraised in Example 10.8.¹⁶

Example 10.8 Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, IV, bars 312–15.

In these circumstances, we might write of progression as premise: the theme does not establish a prolonged key, but a progression, in which the eventual tonic is articulated at salient moments.

The main theme in the first movement of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 (1908), reproduced in Example 10.9, is even harder to subsume within a single tonal premise. Arguments about the theme’s tonality – chiefly whether it expresses D minor or A minor – persist. Both readings have merit.¹⁷ On the one hand, the principal motive is poised around V of A minor, a region to which the first phrase returns at its end. On the other hand, the key signature implies D minor, and this is reinforced when the first theme is repeated in transposition from performance Fig. 8. The implication of D is undoubtedly of greater significance for the Symphony as a whole, since it constitutes the Adagio’s tonic and referential key for the first theme in the Finale.

Example 10.9 Elgar, Symphony No. 1, I, bars 50–8.

Yet perhaps the assignment of an unequivocal tonic misses the point, which is the theme’s tonal mobility. At the level of tonal plot, its function is not to project a single tonic, but rather to embed the implication of structurally important keys within a chromatic progression, which allocates gestural salience to other harmonic events, including the implication of G flat three bars before Fig. 7. As Example 10.9 displays, the theme’s presentation phrase in bars 51–8 moves between implications of A and D minor that are fulfilled neither by cadence nor prolongation. This instability is connected to the theme’s non-tonic status even within the first movement, which begins with a markedly diatonic introduction in A-flat major, in which key both the first movement and Finale conclude. The uncomfortable harmonic pivot from the introduction’s final bar takes an A-flat tonic bass, temporarily reinterprets it as of F sharp over an enharmonic bass, and then quickly forces this to function as a neighbouring chord to V/III in A minor at the start of the Allegro. The ambiguity of this sonority is never satisfactorily dispelled. It functions rather as signifier of the tension between the framing stability of A flat and the harmonic turmoil characterising the principal agent of the first movement’s sonata action.

Progressive tonality

The concept of ‘progressive’ or ‘directional’ tonality generally refers to the habit of beginning a movement or work in one key and ending it in another.¹⁸ The critical shift between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice in this respect resides in the application of progressive schemes in the context of closed instrumental forms. The idea that an act of an opera or part of an oratorio might begin and end in different keys is a commonplace for baroque and classical composers; but the use of the same strategy in an instrumental cycle is highly unusual.

Again, the symphony lagged behind other instrumental cycles in this respect. Despite their accommodation in chamber genres as early as the Finale of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op. 12 (1829), and their much-scrutinised application in Chopin’s single-movement forms of the 1830s and 40s, progressive tonal schemes within a symphonic movement remain relatively rare before 1850.¹⁹An early example can be found in the third movement of Louis Spohr’s Symphony No. 4 (1832), which consists of a D major march yielding, in its coda, to a chorale prelude in B flat subtitled ‘Ambrosian Hymn of Praise’. Spohr later employed a descending minor-third plot in the Finale of his Symphony No. 9 in B minor (1849–50), which begins in D major, but shifts to B major at its conclusion. The same scheme is adopted by Liszt in the second movement of his Dante Symphony (1855–6): the entry into purgatory is initiated by a sustained chord of D major; the Magnificat signifying the entry into paradise is grounded in B major.

Four notable examples from the later century occur in the finales of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 5 (1875) and (more famously) Mahler’s symphonies nos. 1 and 4, and in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (1893–6). Dvořák’s Finale traces an overall trajectory from A minor to F, the global key of the Symphony (see Example 10.10: the initial tonality is beamed above the stave, goal tonality below it, a notation also adopted in examples 10.11 and 10.12).

Example 10.10 Dvořák, Symphony No. 5, IV, bass diagram.

F major is not, however, completely evaded in the movement’s initial material; rather, a first-theme group emphasising A minor concludes with a climactic fortissimo passage in F major (bars 55–81¹), which dies away over an F pedal (bars 81–92). Against this, Dvořák sets a tonally mobile second group, which begins in D-flat major, but settles over a chord of G by bar 117. In the recapitulation, the first theme maintains its expositional trajectory with some regional deviations, commencing in A minor at bar 219 and modulating to F major by bar 273. Dvořák then simply stays in F for his second-theme reprise, beginning at bar 292, and stabilises this key through the addition of a substantial second-group codetta in bars 322–61, which forms the starting point for the coda.

Example 10.11 Mahler, Symphony No. 1, IV, bass diagram.

Mahler’s examples are more clearly delineated. The Finale of Symphony No. 1 is summarised in Example 10.11. In effect, Mahler here composes a sonata form in F minor, in which a two-key exposition (first theme in F minor; second in D-flat major) is answered by a reversed recapitulation (second theme in F major; first theme in F minor), yielding to a coda that reasserts the first movement’s D major tonic.²⁰ The result is a two-level strategy, as the Example explains: F minor functions as the tonic at the level of the sonata form; D major obtains at the level of the movement cycle. This means that, at least as far as tonality is concerned, the sonata-form body of the Finale itself has two functions – as a single-movement form and as the finale of a cycle – whereas the coda has only one, furnishing the cycle’s tonal close. At the same time, D major is anticipated by the ‘breakthrough’ moment in the development (Fig. 33) addressed in Chapter 9, which starts off in C and then diverts abruptly to D four bars later. The same material forms the substance of the coda, here, however, presented entirely in D. In this way, Mahler plants a disjunctive tonal event inside the sonata form, which recurs, tonally unified, to complete the Symphony.

The first movement of Symphony No. 3, summarised in Example 10.12, is altogether more complex, reflecting the vast structural expansion that Mahler undertakes (six movements in total, two vocal movements inserted between the Rondo and concluding Adagio and a first movement lasting nearly half an hour). The exposition comprises what James Hepokoski might call a large ‘double rotation’ of the first and second groups, prefaced by a thematic introduction, and rounded off with a long martial closing group.²¹ In the initial rotation, the first group is grounded in D minor and the second shifts between B flat and D before finally asserting D flat at bar 150. In the second rotation, the first group is again a closed unit in D minor, and the second begins as it had in the first rotation, but cedes to the closing section, which sets off in C major at bar 247, consolidates F with the return of the introduction material at bar 273, but turns from Fig. 27 towards D major, in which key the exposition concludes at bar 362, before reverting to D minor for the start of the development.

Example 10.12 Mahler, Symphony No. 3, I, bass diagram.

The recapitulation compresses the exposition’s double design into a single span, whilst retaining core features of its tonal scheme. The first theme is again a tonally closed unit in D minor, and the martial closing section returns categorically in F from bar 762; the second group is, however, excised, excepting the incorporation of thematic elements into the march. At base, Mahler replaces the tonal dialectic of the classical sonata with a problem of bifocal orientation. The movement’s sustaining tension is between an exposition that surrounds F with D, and a recapitulation that construes F as the goal tonic.

Inter-movement tonal strategies and the cycle of movements

Key schemes governing whole symphonies generally respond to the same expansion of tonal means conditioning tonal strategies within movements. Three issues are of paramount importance: the choice of keys for inner movements; their relationship to the outer movements; the overall trajectory thus created. Again, the crucial factor here is the encroachment of chromatic key relations. Tonicisations of V, IV or vi give way to more remote relations, very often organised so as to reveal clear large-scale strategies, which sometimes reflect more localised key schemes.

Whereas an exhaustive summary of intra-movement tonal plots is hardly feasible here, an overview of inter-movement schemes is more practical. Table 10.1 therefore appraises the key schemes of 163 symphonies by 34 composers, written between 1800 (Beethoven’s No. 1) and 1911 (Elgar’s No. 2), arranged by chronology of the composer’s birth. The list is designed to be representative rather than comprehensive; symphonies by Lachner, Kalliwoda, Burgmüller, Volkmann and others are omitted for this reason, rather than out of any critical bias. Whether or not a composer is represented by their total symphonic output has varied with availability: Glazunov, for instance, is represented in full; Stanford only by symphonies nos. 3, 4 and 7. (Clementi’s total symphonic oeuvre remains a matter of speculation; the four symphonies currently published with numerical designations are given here.)²² Keys are assigned letter names rather than Roman numerals, to avoid designating an overall tonic in situations where a symphony begins and ends in different keys. Major keys are shown with capital letters; minor keys with lower-case letters. The order of the inner movements (scherzo/minuet and slow movement) is clarified on a case-by-case basis. In situations where the trio of a dance movement comprises a self-contained section expressing a notable modulation, its key is shown.

Table 10.1 Cyclical tonal schemes of 163 symphonies composed between 1800 and 1911

The Table makes clear the extent to which the development of key schemes tracks the chromaticisation of tonality. Beethoven’s key choices remain largely conservative. Symphonies nos. 1, 4 and 8 have subdominant slow movements, while No. 2 favours the dominant, and submediant slow movements are preferred in both minor-key symphonies. Two major-key symphonies have minor-key slow movements: the Eroica shifts to the relative minor; No. 7 moves to the parallel minor. Only one other instance of modal parallelism occurs, namely the ‘Storm’ movement of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Moreover only one Symphony (No. 7) has a non-tonic scherzo, in the relatively remote key of the lowered submediant, although this remoteness is ameliorated by the preceding A minor slow movement and the tonicisation of D major in the Trio.

Despite his more adventurous intra-movement strategies, Schubert’s cyclical key schemes also remain closely within the orbit of the tonic. Symphonies nos. 1–3, 5 and 6 all have subdominant slow movements, and the ‘Unfinished’ responds to its B minor first movement with a subdominant-major slow movement. Symphonies nos. 2 and 5 contain a practice that occurs in none of Beethoven’s symphonies, which is that they both introduce minor-key minuets into major-key symphonies. Schubert, however, remains within the cycle of related keys in both cases: the Minuet of No. 5 tonicises the relative minor and of No. 2 the supertonic.

Contemporaries of Beethoven and Schubert are sometimes more audacious. Clementi’s Symphony No. 4 goes a step beyond Schubert, in that its Minuet is cast in the tonic minor; the same strategy is developed by Ferdinand Ries, for instance in the modal mixture between outer movements (D major) and Minuet (d minor) in his Symphony No. 1 (1809), or the Minuet and Trio of No. 6 (1822), which tonicises the relative minor (B minor) and then shifts to its parallel major for the Trio, creating a chromatic third relationship with the global tonic D. Ries’s precise contemporary Spohr, who composed ten symphonies between 1811 and 1857, nine of which appear in Table 10.1, is more innovative again, experimenting both with progressive schemes within movements (as we have already seen), modal mixture (for instance between tonic and subdominant major and minor in the Symphony No. 8), and chromatic relations (the D-flat major of the Trio in No. 5, which is a semitone above the key of the Scherzo). Franz Berwald’s four contributions, written between 1842 and 1845, are at least in this respect more conservative. His most notable experiment occurs in the Symphonie sérieuse, the slow movement of which tonicises the lowered leading note.

Mendelssohn and Schumann are only marginally more ambitious than Schubert. The A minor–F major relationship between first movement and Scherzo in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 mimics the same progression in the inner movements of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, but the submediant Scherzo of No. 5 and the mediant-major slow movement of No. 2 have no Beethovenian or Schubertian precedents. Symphony No. 4 contains possibly Mendelssohn’s most unusual scheme. The minor-key Finale departs from Viennese-classical practice: minor-key classical symphonies frequently shift to the tonic major in their finales, but the opposite trajectory has scant precedent (Haydn’s Symphony No. 70 constitutes one precursor). Mendelssohn paves the way for the tonic-minor Finale through the choice of iv as the key of the slow movement. The result is a dovetailed modal mixture on the largest scale, in which first movement and Minuet sustain I, whilst slow movement and Finale emphasise iv and i. Schumann is generally more cautious. His most striking decisions are the employment of VI as the key of Symphony No. 3’s second movement and the choice of the mediant minor for No. 1’s Scherzo. At the same time, No. 2 is the first symphony in the list to remain entirely in the global tonic, albeit shifting from major to minor in the slow movement.

Berlioz and Liszt are both more consistently experimental. The scheme of the Symphonie fantastique explores VI, IV and v; Harold en Italie similarly tonicises VI in its slow movement; and Roméo et Juliette is framed by B, but the love scene tonicises A and the ‘Queen Mab’ Scherzo F, although the sense of an orthodox symphonic design and global tonic is clouded by dramatic elements. The Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) is the first example in the Table of a progressive key scheme across an entire symphony (F–B flat), followed by Liszt’s Dante Symphony (1855–6), in which the ‘Inferno’ movement occupies a modally inflected D minor, which the entry into paradise exchanges for B major. These strategies are obviously mitigated by circumstantial factors in Berlioz’s case (the work’s occasional function) and by Liszt’s programmatic inclination: classical forms are submerged at best, and the movement plans pay only lip service to generic movement types. Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie owes more to the classical model; its key scheme is concomitantly less radical.

Symphonies written between 1850 and 1900 generally evince the burgeoning expansion of tonal means. By the mid-century, a clear preference for third-based schemes was emergent. Gade’s Symphony No. 5 (1852) is organised around the ascending major-third cycle d–F sharp–B flat–D. Joachim Raff’s Symphony No. 5 (1872) adopts a comparable strategy: outer movements in E major and minor frame an A-flat slow movement and a C major march. Raff revisited this idea in his Symphony No. 10, Zur Herbstzeit, the third work in his symphonic tetralogy ‘The Seasons’ (1877–83). Here, the overall trajectory is from F minor to F major, but this is balanced by an A minor Scherzo and a C-sharp minor slow movement. In Symphony No. 8 (Frühlingsklänge) he turned instead to minor-third relations, contrasing the global tonic A with a slow movement in C major. Brahms positioned symmetrical major-third relations either side of the tonic in his Symphony No. 1 (1862–76), and in No. 4 (1885) extended the tendency for minor-key symphonies to tonicise VI in their slow movements to the Scherzo as well, creating a large submediant interior framed by the tonic minor. In Symphony No. 3 (1883), he experimented instead with modal mixture, framing an internal mixture on the dominant (C–c) within an encompassing mixture on the tonic (F–f). Bruckner was at least as ambitious after 1872. The Adagio of Symphony No. 3 (1873, revised 1877 and 1889) tonicises ♭II, the first such relation in Table 10.1 after the Scherzo of Spohr’s Symphony No. 5. Bruckner revived this practice fourteen years later in the Adagio of Symphony No. 8 (1887, revised 1890), a manoeuvre reflecting the harmonic detail of the work’s opening theme. Brahms’s strategy of pairing inner and outer movements in his symphonies nos. 3 and 4 is prefigured in Bruckner’s No. 5, where the tonic outer movements frame interior movements in the mediant minor. Dvořák’s schemes are on the whole less exploratory, with two marked exceptions: Symphony No. 3 (1873) contains a slow movement in ♯vi; No. 9’s slow movement (1893) tonicises ♭VII.

Russian symphonists could be equally adventurous. Borodin, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov all experimented with semitonal pairings: Borodin’s Symphony No. 1 (1867) pits a D major slow movement against an overall E-flat tonality; Balakirev’s Symphony No. 1, begun in 1864 and revised between 1893 and 1897, adopts the same idea in the context of C major; and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Symphony No. 3 (1866–73, revised 1886) pairs a ♭III Scherzo with a slow movement in III. All three composers also employed third relations in interesting configurations. Most remarkable is Balakirev’s Symphony No. 2, completed in 1908, which arranges minor thirds either side of the tonic D minor in the inner movements, such that a tritone obtains between the Scherzo and slow movement (b–F). Balakirev’s strategy is anticipated in part in Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 (1876), which applies the b–F tritone between first movement and Scherzo, although Borodin does not pursue the symmetry of Balakirev’s design, instead supplying a slow movement in D flat. The schemes of Tchaikovsky and Glazunov are, in comparison, relatively tame. Tchaikovsky does not venture beyond the submediant (in the slow movement of No. 1, the ‘Alla tedesca’ of No. 3 and the third movement of No. 6) and the lowered leading note (in the Waltz of No. 5); Glazunov’s most daring scheme appears in his Symphony No. 3 (1890), where an F major Scherzo and C-sharp minor slow movement contrast the prevailing D major tonality.

Balakirev’s use of the tritone signals a point of maximum remove from the fifth-based schemes of the high-classical symphony, which later symphonists also investigated. Prominent in this respect are Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 and Elgar’s No. 1, both of which centre the tritone opposition on the slow movement. Mahler embeds an E-flat major Andante within a global A minor. In the Symphony’s first version, this movement was located third, establishing a direct link between its E-flat ending and the Finale’s opening, which begins in C minor and pivots back to A minor in bar 9. The tritone is more starkly exposed in the final printed edition, which reversed the order of the inner movements, thus isolating E flat between the A major ending of the first movement and the A minor of the Scherzo (the early ordering is given in Table 10.1). In Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, the A♭ tonic of the first movement and Finale is, as we have already seen, contested by an inclination towards D, which is fulfilled by the Adagio’s tonicisation of D major. Elgar’s structure is more complex than Mahler’s: Mahler’s global tonic is grimly maintained in the first movement, Scherzo and Finale; Elgar’s tonic is in question until the very end, and its distance from D major is mediated by the Scherzo, which tonicises F-sharp minor.

At the same time, Mahler also standardises the progressive tonal scheme, a practice that other composers generally restricted to overtly programmatic works (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar, for instance, which begins in f sharp and ends in D flat). Five of Mahler’s nine symphonies begin and end in different keys. Symphony No. 2 has the most conservative scheme, exchanging its severe initial C minor for E-flat major at the work’s conclusion. Later on, he favours two strategies. Symphonies nos. 4 and 7 employ third relationships. Symphony No. 4 begins its Finale in the first movement’s tonic of G major, only consolidating the movement’s concluding E major in the final section. Symphony No. 7, in contrast, never returns to the first movement’s E minor, and C major is boisterously asserted from the outset in the Finale, despite foreground interjections from E major. Mahler’s second strategy is the semitonal scheme, which has two contrasting applications: Symphony No. 5 journeys from C-sharp minor to D; No. 9 travels in the opposite direction, depressing the first movement’s D major to D flat in the closing Adagio. As Christopher Lewis noted, these schemes have much in common with the notion of ‘expressive tonality’ that Robert Bailey describes in Wagner’s Ring cycle: the semitonal pairing of keys, where ascent has positive and descent negative connotations.²³

It is worth stressing that the two dimensions addressed in this chapter are not always correlated: exploration of chromatic inter-movement schemes in a symphony is not necessarily a reflection of intra-movement chromatic strategies. Thus the minor-third cycle in the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 sits within an essentially conventional movement-cycle scheme, which proceeds from i to I via iv. In contrast, the major-third cycle underpinning the movement succession in Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 does not reflect its application within the movements: the exposition in the first movement favours a i–III–iii plot, which remains within the tonic minor or major in the recapitulation; the slow movement contrasts I and vi; as already noted, the third movement contrasts I and ♮II (A flat and B major); and the Finale’s exposition follows the three-key plan I–V–iii, which is modified to I–i in the recapitulation before the coda reasserts the tonic major. On other occasions, a much closer affiliation between intra-movement tonal plot and inter-movement tonal scheme is evident. The B-flat tonality of the Adagio of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 surely reflects the choice of that key for the second group in the first movement’s exposition. Several commentators have noted the influence of the semitonal structures embedded in the opening theme of the first movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 on the overall scheme, especially the ♭II–i relationship between the Adagio and its surrounding movements (I have addressed this issue briefly in Chapter 1).²⁴ And Mahler’s progressive schemes frequently prefigure their conclusive tonalities in earlier contexts. The serene E major ending of Symphony No. 4 is pre-empted by that key’s startling, unprepared intervention before the coda of the slow movement (Fig. 12), where it interrupts the apparently stable G major tonic. More substantially, the framing D major tonality of Symphony No. 5’s second part (movements 3–5) is presaged in the A minor second movement, where it intervenes as a characteristically Mahlerian ‘breakthrough’ between figs. 27 and 30.

Conclusions

The practices explored here connect with many of the broader formal, historical and aesthetic matters addressed elsewhere in the Companion. The use of chromatic relationships both within and between movements often serves expressive ends, which are bound up with manifold literary, poetic and philosophical aspirations, and closely dependent on the importing of idioms between genres. In the later century especially, symphonists had to negotiate not only Beethoven’s legacy, but also Wagner’s; and this meant acknowledging both Wagner’s cultural-political agendas and his tonal practice, especially as developed in Tristan. This inevitably entailed cross-generic fertilisation: tonal practices evolving in music drama were put to work in the symphony.²⁵

Ambiguity is invariably the critical pivot between tonal means and expressive ends. The displacement of the dominant, competition between non-tonic structural keys, the dislocation of bass progression and formal function, and the elaboration of double-tonic and progressive schemes all generate structural ambiguity of a kind that was alien to the classical symphony. This constituted a central technical means for conveying the narrative and philosophical ideals outlined in Chapter 1: the so-called ‘struggle–victory plot’ embodied in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and the utopian aspiration that goes with it is facilitated by the maintenance of structural ambiguity.

Notwithstanding important studies of isolated works or the habits of individual composers, however, research into both nineteenth-century symphonic tonal strategy and its extra-musical connotations remains in many respects in its infancy. In some ways, developments in musical scholarship are propitious for a change in this situation. The ideas propounded by Robert Bailey in the 1970s and 80s have been applied productively in a symphonic context (notably by Christopher Lewis in relation to Mahler); the marriage of this work with the neo-Riemannian and transformational theories evolving since the early 1990s, which have invariably taken nineteenth-century practice as their point of orientation, bodes well for symphonic analysis. Although analyses of whole instrumental movements from this perspective are as yet relatively rare (Cohn’s study of Schubert’s D 960 is an honourable exception), it nevertheless offers the possibility of large-scale assessment of symphonic tonality from a fresh theoretical point of view.²⁶

In other respects, circumstances are not so conducive. The methodological conditions prevailing in the aftermath of the musicological disputes of the 1990s, particularly the critique of ‘formalist’ analysis and concomitant attempts to marry musicology with post-structuralist philosophy and critical theory, have produced a situation that broadly favours the study of texted music and especially opera. As a result, whilst the social and aesthetic contexts of the nineteenth-century symphony have received thorough attention, analytical study has comparably languished. It is hoped that this chapter makes plain the scope of the work that remains to be done in this field, both in terms of the sheer range of the repertoire that awaits investigation and the diversity of practices it exhibits.

Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony

Two-dimensional sonata form can be conceptualised as the loose projection of a single-movement sonata form and a multi-movement sonata cycle onto each other.² The result is a form that unfolds in two dimensions: the dimension of the (multi-movement) sonata cycle and that of the (single-movement) overarching sonata form. Theoretically speaking, it is possible that all sections of the sonata form and all movements of the sonata cycle neatly coincide. This is the model underlying the concept of ‘double-function form’ that William Newman coined in 1969 to describe Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor.³ In compositional reality, this situation never occurs: not all sections of the sonata form necessarily stand in a one-to-one relationship with movements of the sonata cycle. A movement may coincide seamlessly with a section of the sonata form, but it may also overlap with only part of a section, or with parts of several consecutive sections. Often, entire movements stand between two different sections of the sonata form, thus fulfilling a function in only one of the two dimensions. Following Carl Dahlhaus’s coinage, the situation in which formal units of the sonata form and the sonata cycle coincide may be called ‘identification’; that in which a movement of the cycle stands between units of the form, ‘interpolation’.⁴ The opposite of an interpolated movement is an ‘exocyclic’ unit: a unit that belongs exclusively to the overarching sonata form and plays no role in the sonata cycle.

Interior movements and finales can be either interpolated or identified. For first movements, interpolation is not an option: either the overarching sonata form simultaneously functions as the first movement of the sonata cycle (which has, as it were, soaked up the ensuing movements of the cycle), or there are indications of a more-or-less autonomous sonata-form first movement in the opening portions of the overarching sonata form. Only in the latter case is the first movement of the sonata cycle identified with the initial sections of the overarching form.

As shown in Table 11.1, applying this model to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony reveals that the first movement of the sonata cycle is identified with the exposition and the beginning of the development (more specifically, the false exposition repeat) of the overarching sonata form, and that the Finale is identified with both the final portion of the recapitulation and the coda of the overarching sonata form. The Scherzo, by contrast, is interpolated, standing between rather than coinciding with different units of the development. The slow movement begins as an interpolated movement, but evolves into a unit that is identified with part of the development.

Table 11.1 Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony Op. 9

Even from this superficial overview, it becomes clear why Brinkmann claims that the Chamber Symphony – or, by extension, two-dimensional sonata form in general – solves ‘the problem of symphonic form in the nineteenth century’. It is difficult to conceive of a way to integrate the separate movements of a sonata cycle more strongly than by incorporating them in an overarching single-movement form. From this point of view, two-dimensional sonata form really is the endpoint of the tendency towards cyclic integration in symphonic music of the nineteenth century.

But there is more to the issue than this. Two-dimensional sonata form does not merely address the integration of the multi-movement sonata cycle; it can also be understood in the context of that other central issue in the Problemgeschichte of nineteenth-century sonata-style composition, namely the so-called recapitulation problem. As has often been observed, many composers from the generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn onwards experienced the close analogy between exposition and recapitulation that is essential to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sonata form as deeply problematic. Once the onset of the recapitulation had been attained, the rest of the form could, at least in principle, unwind almost mechanically.⁵ If two-dimensional sonata form can be said to occupy a crucial position in the history of large-scale instrumental form in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then this is to a large extent because it engages with both central preoccupations of nineteenth-century form: cyclic integration and the recapitulation problem.

Indeed, what is especially fascinating about two-dimensional sonata form is that it deals with one preoccupation through the other. More specifically, the presence of a finale whose beginning coincides with or follows the onset of the recapitulation radically changes the form’s internal dynamics. If the finale of the sonata cycle appears identified with the recapitulation of the overarching sonata form, then this adds to the latter’s weight as a formal unit. The recapitulation not only acquires a double necessity – in the cycle and in the form – but also an increased independence from the exposition. If, by contrast, the finale is identified mainly with the coda or interpolated between the recapitulation and the coda, then the apex of the form shifts from the recapitulation to the finale or the coda.

In his Chamber Symphony, Schoenberg chooses the latter strategy. Most commentators have opted to let the recapitulation begin with the return of the transition from the exposition in bar 435. Given the absence of both a thematic and a tonal return, however, it is more plausible to hear bars 435–47 not as the beginning of the recapitulation, but as the end of the development; more specifically, as a retransition. This idea is particularly attractive given that the return of a transition as a retransition is not uncommon in sonata forms since the eighteenth century, especially when the order of themes in the recapitulation is inverted. This is exactly what happens in the Chamber Symphony: the recapitulation begins in bar 448 with the subordinate theme group in the tonic, which then leads to the recapitulation of the main theme group (bar 477) in the same way as it led to the closing group in the exposition.

The inversion of the thematic order in the recapitulation has far-reaching consequences. Obviously, it individualises the overall design of the recapitulation from that of the exposition. But it also postpones the most emphatic moment of return, the ‘double’ return of the main theme in the tonic. A crucial element in this strategy is that, as in the exposition, the recapitulation of the main theme is preceded by a motto. Throughout the composition, this motto functions as a formal marker, returning at almost all major junctions in the form. Its return here seems to suggest, therefore, that the reprise of the main theme is not merely the beginning of a new segment of the recapitulation, but also the beginning of something on a larger scale. Bars 474–593 can be interpreted as a full-fledged finale, with an exposition comprising a main theme, a transition and a subordinate theme, a development (mainly based on subordinate-theme material) and a truncated recapitulation. By multiplying the number of recapitulatory gestures (the return of the subordinate theme in the tonic, the double return of main theme and tonic and the recapitulation of the Finale), Schoenberg sustains the momentum much longer than would have been the case had the recapitulation paralleled the exposition. The presence of a finale that is partly independent of the overarching sonata form’s recapitulation not only enables the last of these recapitulatory gestures – which appears, naturally, very late in the piece – but in fact requires it.

All this is not to claim that the integration of a sonata cycle into a single-movement sonata form is not itself deeply problematic. On the contrary, this integration engenders a very strong tension between both dimensions that becomes particularly palpable when a movement of the sonata cycle is identified with units of the overarching sonata form. When they coincide, form and cycle often have very different requirements that are not always easily reconciled. This becomes eminently clear in bars 5–147 of the Chamber Symphony, to the extent that one might debate whether they have a double function at all. Doesn’t the first movement rather coincide with the entire overarching sonata form, which has absorbed the three following movements? There can be little doubt that on the most fundamental level, bars 5–147 constitute the exposition and false exposition repeat of the overarching sonata form. Yet it is tempting to read some of the striking features of this exposition as motivated by the simultaneous presence of the first movement of the cycle. Bars 10–57, for instance, which comprise the first and contrasting middle parts of a ternary main theme, may be heard simultaneously as the main theme, subordinate theme and closing group of a smaller-scale exposition in its own right. And the false exposition repeat in bars 136–47 can surely be understood as the abridged first-movement recapitulation (which must remain incomplete in order to avoid premature closure, thus preventing the continuation of the overarching form). But what about bars 58–135? In the overarching sonata form, they constitute the reprise of the opening part of the main theme (concluded by an emphatic cadence), the transition, the subordinate theme and the closing group. Yet all of these functions are incompatible with the development function that the same music has to fulfil in the first movement. The problem is obvious: one and the same group of formal units cannot possibly have the structure of both an exposition-cum-false-repeat and a complete sonata form; and since bars 5–135 clearly have the structure of a sonata-form exposition (a specific succession of formal functions combined with a specific cadential plan), the articulation of the sonata cycle’s first movement necessarily remains limited to a mere suggestion of some of its surface characteristics.

Difficulties of balance between both dimensions may also arise with interpolated movements. Here, the risk exists that the presence of an interpolation may seem unmotivated from the point of view of the overarching sonata form and that it may be difficult for the overarching form to resume afterwards. The ways in which composers have integrated interpolated movements into the overarching sonata are among the most analytically interesting aspects of two-dimensional sonata forms. In Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, the two interpolated movements are integrated into the overarching sonata form in very different ways.

The Scherzo is integrated by thematic means into the development (of the overarching sonata form) that follows it. In bars 335–54, the second phrase from the Scherzo theme (originally in bars 163–4) is developed alongside material from the exposition of the overarching sonata form and even assimilated to the latter’s main theme. Integration of the slow movement is rather achieved by formal means. When the overarching sonata form resumes in bar 415, the slow movement is left formally open; this incompleteness is compensated for later in the overarching sonata form. Bars 415–34 initially seem to be the middle section of the slow movement. Instead of leading to the expected recapitulation of the first section, however, they are followed by the return of the transition from the exposition, which belongs to the overarching sonata form. Retrospectively, bars 415–34 can be reinterpreted as a double-functional unit that is both the middle of the slow movement and the resumption of the overarching sonata form’s development. Identifying the final unit of an incomplete interpolated movement with the resumption of the overarching sonata form is a very subtle way to shift back from one dimension to the other. Only when no slow-movement recapitulation follows the middle section does it become clear that we have left the dimension of the cycle. The openness of the slow movement is redressed in the coda of the overarching sonata form. Bars 509–15 constitute an almost literal return of bars 382–6 from the slow movement’s exposition; these bars can be understood as a postponed slow-movement recapitulation.

Before

Compositions that combine form and cycle as systematically as Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony are relatively rare; and even within this limited group of works, the idea is treated with considerable flexibility, allowing for very different individual solutions. Nonetheless, the issue of how to incorporate a multi-movement pattern into a single-movement design was addressed with some frequency by composers from the 1850s onwards, often in their most progressive large-scale instrumental music.

Few of these compositions, however, are symphonies. When Liszt experimented with two-dimensional form in the 1850s, he did so in the genres of the piano sonata (his 1853 Sonata in B minor has acquired the status of a textbook example), the piano concerto and the symphonic poem. In his Faust and Dante symphonies, by contrast, he firmly holds to a multi-movement layout. From Liszt, the interest in two-dimensional form spread all over Europe, leaving traces not only in piano sonatas by several of his pupils, but also in such diverse works as Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic poems – both the early Wallensteins Lager (1859) and Šarka (from Má Vlast, 1875) spring to mind – Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto in A minor Op. 33 (1872), several of Strauss’s tone poems and Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande (1903). Yet when composers of the same generations titled a composition ‘symphony’, that predicate seems to have implied an essential separation of movements.

This is especially striking in the light of Brinkmann’s assertion that the problem solved in Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony is a specifically symphonic one. It seems paradoxical that the most inherently symphonic innovation in instrumental music of the second half of the nineteenth century took place outside the genre of the symphony. At the same time, it is not a coincidence that Liszt’s interest in incorporating a multi-movement pattern in a single-movement form arose at the highpoint of what Dahlhaus and others have called the ‘tote Zeit der Symphonie’: the dead era of the symphony (although mindful of David Brodbeck’s challenge to this model in Chapter 4). As Dahlhaus remarks, one of the concomitant phenomena of the mid-century crisis of the symphony was what one could call the ‘symphonisation’ of other genres: while the symphony’s own viability as a genre was questioned, typically symphonic characteristics – such as the monumental scale, the multi-movement plan and the ambition to integrate the movements that constitute this plan – migrated to other genres.⁶Thus one might speak not only of the symphonic poem, but also of the symphonic sonata, the symphonic concerto, and later, in Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, even the symphonic quartet.

Several of Liszt’s symphonic poems attest to this ‘symphonising’ tendency. Whether Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (1847–56) combines its relatively obvious overarching sonata form with the ‘allegro first movement, the slow movement, and the finale’ that Dahlhaus discerned in it remains open to debate.⁷But works such as Tasso (1847–54), Les Préludes (1849–55) and Die Ideale (1856–7) clearly integrate a sonata cycle into an overarching sonata form, thus transcending a simple single-movement design. In Les Préludes, for example, a relatively unadventurous sonata-form plan (slow introduction in bars 1–34, exposition in bars 35–108, development in bars 109–99; see Table 11.2) is interrupted in bar 199 by an interior movement that fuses characteristics of a scherzo and a slow movement. The presence of this movement considerably alters the further course of the form. Not only does it merge seamlessly with the transformed tonic return of the subordinate theme with which the (inverted) recapitulation opens in bar 296, but from bar 344 onwards, what initially appears to be a transformation of the transition from the exposition is expanded in such a way that it alludes to the finale of a sonata cycle. The thematic material from the transition (bars 346–55) has undergone a march-like transformation and is played in a faster tempo than in the exposition. Moreover, it is followed by a new thematic idea that is sequenced and fragmented (bars 356–69) and leads to yet another transformation of subordinate-theme material in bars 370–7. Given that bars 378–404 are a transposed recapitulation of bars 344–69, the entire unit starting in bar 344 can be regarded as a relatively self-contained (but tonally open-ended) miniature finale in ternary form. Only then, in the last bars, does the recapitulation of the main theme enter. It is not difficult to see how the form of Les Préludes addresses concerns similar to those in Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony. The inverted recapitulation and the Finale serve the same purpose in both compositions: minimising the analogy between the exposition and recapitulation and thus sustaining the momentum until the very end of the form.

Table 11.2 Liszt, Les Préludes

One reason why similar experiments do not occur in the genre of the symphony proper might be that the younger genre of the symphonic poem came with a licence for far-reaching formal innovation unavailable in the more venerable symphony. Another probable reason is that the use of two-dimensional sonata form symphonised the essentially single-movement genre of the symphonic poem, whereas imposing an overarching sonata form on a symphony proper would have resulted in a reduction of its symphonic character. It seems unlikely that two-dimensional form would have been practicable at the grandest symphonic scale, especially after 1850. It would appear that in the genre of the symphony proper, the combination of more conservative generic conventions and the aesthetic of monumentality trumped the tendency towards integration, so that the techniques described at the beginning of this chapter might very well have been the maximum attainable cyclic integration.

Not surprisingly, then, two-dimensional form enters the genre of the symphony proper through the back door: in Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica (1902–3), a symphony in name, but fundamentally still a tone poem. The Domestica is not Strauss’s first work to combine single- and multi-movement plans. Both Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben are two-dimensional sonata forms, and Macbeth and Tod und Verklärung also contain obvious references to the interior movements of a sonata cycle, even though neither shows any trace of the outer movements. In calling his new piece a symphony, Strauss may have been drawing conclusions from the inflated proportions of his tone poems from the mid 1890s onwards. In the Domestica, the multi-movement pattern is present in an unusually direct way: a ‘Scherzo’, ‘Adagio’ and ‘Finale’ are all explicitly labelled in the score. In addition, it has often been observed that the sections before the Scherzo and the Finale ‘relate to each other, at least initially, as if they are exposition and recapitulation’.⁸

The form of the Domestica is, however, of considerable ingenuity and few of the labels Strauss gives can be taken at face value (see Table 11.3). In the dimension of the cycle, for instance, it is misleading to assume that one movement necessarily ends only when the next one begins. From bar 392 onwards, long before the label ‘Adagio’ appears in the score, scherzando characteristics give way to a heterogeneous succession of units, none of which seems to allow for an interpretation as part of the Scherzo. Some of them are developmental; others, such as the Wiegenlied in bars 517–46 or the unit in bars 559–88, are suggestive of a slow movement. Being tonally closed in G minor and concluding with their proper coda, both units are even more reminiscent of a self-contained slow movement than the unit labelled ‘Adagio’ (which also has its own coda, but begins in E major and ends in E-flat major).

Table 11.3 Strauss, Sinfonia domestica

The music preceding the Scherzo initially seems to be neither a full-fledged exposition nor an actual (sonata-form) first movement. Not without reason, it has often been described as an introduction that merely presents the composition’s main thematic material (labelled as ‘themes 1, 2 and 3’ in the score). Yet as Walter Werbeck has proposed, the exposition of the overarching sonata form may in fact extend as far as bar 392. In this reading, the Scherzo becomes an interpolated movement that is strongly integrated and, indeed, functionalised within the overarching sonata form’s subordinate-theme group. It transforms the initial, hesitant statement of the third theme in D minor into the grand D major restatement in bars 338–61 and projects its surface characteristics onto what begins as a closing group but soon becomes a transition to the development (bars 362–92).

In the dimension of the overarching sonata form, bars 1–152 (theme 1, theme 2 and the varied return of theme 1, ending with a perfect authentic cadence in the tonic) constitute a ternary form that functions as a main-theme group balancing the lengthy subordinate-theme group. That the middle of the main-theme group bears the label ‘theme 2’ may be explained by its function in the first movement of the sonata cycle. For it may not be too much of a stretch to claim that the juxtaposition of two starkly contrasting themes, the superficially developmental characteristics of the later portions of part B and the stereotypical retransition preceding the return of part A suggest something of a small-scale sonata-form first movement. In the context of the piece as a whole – that is to say, being followed by three further immediately recognisable movements of a sonata cycle – they certainly can be heard as such.

Strauss’s thematic labels in the large ‘Finale’ are equally misleading. It is not difficult to see how this unit can be heard as both a finale and a recapitulation: its formal course and stylistic register differ from the exposition, but at the same time it recapitulates all of its themes (in a more-or-less transformed shape, but in the original key). This recapitulation is, however, less straightforward than it may initially seem. Theme 1 of the double fugue is not a transformation of theme 1 in the exposition, but of theme 3 in the key of theme 1 (or at least its head; the rest is new). Only much later does motivic material from the exposition’s theme 1 start to make itself heard.

After

While Strauss, Liszt and the composers between them use two-dimensional sonata form to symphonise the tone poem (or other genres), Schoenberg does exactly the opposite. In his Chamber Symphony, two-dimensional sonata form is what enables the highly un-symphonic compression of the multi-movement plan, a compression that parallels the piece’s reduced instrumentation. If the Chamber Symphony can be said to solve the problem of symphonic form, its cost is a significant loss in monumentality and, thus, symphonicity. Therefore, its form is not so much (or not only) an endpoint in the sense of a culmination of nineteenth-century symphonic form, but rather (or also) a reaction against the genre’s excesses.

After Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, two-dimensional sonata form ceased to be the vehicle of the musical avant-garde it had been since the 1850s. In the decades following 1906, its use often constitutes a deliberately conservative gesture. In the few pieces in which it is used otherwise, formal organisation becomes increasingly free, moving away from both sonata form and sonata cycle. Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony of 1917, for instance, has less in common with Schoenberg’s eponymous Op. 9 than its title suggests, treating the combination of multi- and single-movement plans in a considerably less rigorous way. It consists of a lengthy introduction and a sonata form, within which the interior movements of a sonata cycle have been interpolated. More specifically, the (relatively brief) development of the overarching sonata form is preceded by a slow movement and followed by a scherzo. Surprisingly, the slow movement reappears in its entirety between the recapitulation and the coda of the overarching form. Traces of a first movement and a finale, moreover, are lacking.

A similar tendency towards looser large-scale formal organisation can be observed in the First Symphony, Op. 7 (1921) by Ernst Krenek (a student of Schreker). In spite of the proliferation of contrasting sections – some clearly reminiscent of movements from a sonata cycle or sections from a sonata form, others less so – Krenek’s Symphony retains a strong sense of overarching formal design, especially through the recapitulation of the opening section right before the coda. The overarching form, however, is not a sonata form, nor can the multi-movement pattern be considered a sonata cycle.⁹

Starkly contrasting with Schreker’s and Krenek’s handling of two-dimensional form is the Fourth Symphony (1932–3) of the Viennese composer Franz Schmidt. Schmidt’s conception of two-dimensional sonata form is significantly more traditional. The first movement of the sonata cycle is identified with the exposition and development of the overarching sonata form (the development simultaneously functions as a recapitulation). The slow movement and the Scherzo are interpolated between the development and the recapitulation, which can be heard as a finale only because of the conspicuous presence of the preceding three movements of a sonata cycle. Schmidt’s Symphony is remarkable for its symmetrical design. The middle section of the central slow movement begins with a melody that modulates from G minor to C-sharp minor and is thereupon repeated, now beginning in C-sharp minor and, consequentially, modulating back to G minor. From this middle section, symmetry expands over the entire Symphony. It comprises the introductory trumpet solo, the exposition, the development and the opening section of the slow movement on one side, and the reprise of the slow movement, the interpolated Scherzo, the recapitulation and the concluding trumpet solo on the other. The tritone relationship at the heart of this symmetrical plan is reflected at several other formal levels, such as the tonal organisation of the exposition (main-theme group in C, subordinate-theme group in F sharp) and the recapitulation (main-theme group in F, subordinate-theme group in B).

An important single-movement symphony that stands somewhat apart from the Germanic tradition is Jean Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony (1924). This work’s most striking characteristic is that its overarching form is slow and that, as a consequence, the different movements do not amount to an orthodox sonata cycle. In addition, neither in the overarching form nor in any of the movements of the sonata cycle does Sibelius make use of standard Formenlehre forms. After a slow introduction (bars 1–22), what follows seems to be an exposition that culminates in the statement of the grand trombone theme in C major in bar 60. This theme, along with its two later appearances, first in C minor (bars 222–41), then back in C major (bars 476–507), structures the overarching form. The three statements of the trombone theme provide a framework within which the other sections and interpolated movements appear in an arch-like design (see Table 11.4). The first statement is followed by a development and a scherzo-like interpolated movement, the second statement by another interpolated movement and a unit that forms a pendant to the first development. After the trombone theme’s climactic last statement, the Symphony concludes with a coda that recalls the introduction. Boundaries between different sections in Sibelius’s Seventh are often remarkably fluid, so that reading a symphonic pattern into it may seem tendentious. It is, however, a reading that the composer himself purposely seemed to invite. After the work had been premiered as ‘Fantasia sinfonica’, Sibelius not only decided to rename it to ‘Symphony No. 7’, but also added the (conspicuously German) subtitle ‘In einem Satze’.

Table 11.4 Sibelius, Symphony No. 7

An echo of Sibelius’s Seventh resounds in Samuel Barber’s First Symphony (1936), which is similarly subtitled ‘In One Movement’. Although there are strong indications that Barber’s Symphony was intended as a response to Sibelius’s, his single-movement design remains significantly closer to Central-European models. As shown in Table 11.5, it begins with a three-theme exposition. The development that follows gives way not to a recapitulation, but to the three further movements of a sonata cycle: a Scherzo, a slow movement and a Finale. Both interior movements are ternary forms, and their main thematic material is derived from the exposition’s main and subordinate themes respectively. At the same time, both movements conspicuously avoid tonal closure, bringing a recapitulation in a key a half step away from their expositions. Each of the interior movements culminates in a grand restatement of the motto-like opening of the main theme. The Finale is a passacaglia on a bass derived from the opening of the main theme that appears thirteen times in total. In the initial variations, thematic material appearing over the bass is either new or else derived from the exposition’s third theme (now transposed to the tonic).

Table 11.5 Samuel Barber, Symphony No. 1

The way in which Barber integrates form and cycle is unique: all movements from the Scherzo onwards are identified with the recapitulation of the overarching sonata form. A thematic recapitulation is thus spread out over the three movements in the sense that thematic material from the exposition reappears in the original order as the main thematic content of each movement. From the Finale onwards, this relatively abstract recapitulatory layer is combined with the increasing prominence of the main theme’s head motive at pitch, first as a bass for the passacaglia, then, especially from variation eight onwards, saturating the entire texture. At the climax of the Finale (variations eleven and twelve), the head of the main theme is contrapuntally combined with theme three from the exposition.

Barber’s First Symphony might very well be the last important two-dimensional sonata form in the orchestral repertoire. In it, this extraordinary principle of formal organization comes full circle. Its function for Barber is the same as for any composer of the Germanic musical avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: it guarantees a maximal degree of cyclic integration between the different movements of his Symphony. More than any other composition discussed in this chapter, however, Barber’s Symphony attests to two-dimensional sonata form’s inherent symphonicity. This may seem surprising, given Barber’s chronological and geographical distance from the heyday of two-dimensional sonata form several decades earlier and on another continent. It is, however, exactly because he was working in so different a context that Barber could, as it were, quote two-dimensional sonata form as a token of the nineteenth-century symphonic style that he was trying to emulate. In doing so, he succeeded in what for composers of the generations of Liszt, Strauss and Schoenberg seemed impossible: to write a symphony in two-dimensional sonata form that is truly symphonic.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 4

Each of the works considered below challenges the temptation to regard the symphony as a conservative or retrospective form. This is especially true of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony (1909–11). Commentators widely agree that the work is the most ‘difficult’ and outwardly modernist of Sibelius’s symphonies. The Fourth is traditionally seen as a stylistic turning point, away from the expansive late-Romantic panorama of the first two symphonies and the crisp Junge Klassizität of the Third, towards a more austere, modernist mode of utterance. But the work also readily reveals Sibelius’s concern with fundamental elements of symphonic thought and design: particularly with notions of monumentality (here expressed in remarkably telegrammatic form); development (energetically foregrounded throughout and often privileged over explicit thematic statement or exposition); and the tension between the idea of the symphony as a large-scale public statement and as an inward personal confession. The first movement (Tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio) is exemplary in its concern with the implications of modal mixture for the articulation of large-scale structure. The formal outline of the movement has prompted considerable scholarly debate. Elliott Antokoletz, for example, identifies a ‘Sonata Allegro’ design, aspects of which correspond with the thematic elements of a rounded binary structure (Fig. 12.1).⁸

Figure 12.1 Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, I, formal reading (after Antokoletz, ‘The Musical Language of the Fourth Symphony’)

As Antolkoletz readily acknowledges, a number of anomalies immediately arise, which challenge this ‘Sonata Allegro’ reading. The proportions of the individual sections in the plan are highly asymmetrical – there is a strong sense of telescoping towards the final paragraph, so that the feeling of balanced symmetry characteristic of normative rounded binary forms is replaced by an urgent sense of goal direction, only to dissipate and atomise in the very final bars. Furthermore, the recapitulation at bar 87 is highly irregular. Even by early twentieth-century standards of formal syntax, the sense of return is extremely attenuated, and the re-entry of previous material is carefully dovetailed so that the precise moment of reprise is almost impossible to determine. Even the identification of first and second subject groups in Antokoletz’s chart becomes problematic – the first part of the exposition, for example, is characterised by a rich tapestry of overlapping motivic fragments, none of which emerge sufficiently prominently to gain the status of a thematic sentence in the Schoenbergian sense. And finally, the tonality remains highly unstable throughout – the only genuine sense of harmonic arrival is achieved in the two coda sections, at bars 41 and 97, which provide the strongest point of formal return in the whole movement. In contrast, the opening of the exposition and development are tonally ambiguous – sustained examples of what Schoenberg termed wandering (or ‘vagrant’) harmony where the music barely suggests any fixed point of tonal orientation. An alternative formal reading of the first movement has therefore been suggested by commentators such as Tim Howell and Veijo Murtomäki,⁹ which breaks the music down into two parallel strophes: the first in bars 1–53, ending with a large-scale cadence on F♯; and the second in bars 54–114, closing with a cadence on A. This simpler binary model hears both strophes as goal-directed, progressing from a state of harmonic and textural instability towards provisional moments of cadential articulation, which in turn become the primary points of structural focus.

Local details support this interpretation of the movement’s design. The opening gesture is a gloomy textural and harmonic birth. Sibelius’s evocative low scoring (cellos, basses, bassoons) creates a dark sonic foundation, resonant with upper harmonic partials, from which the full orchestral timbre slowly emerges and brightens. The first four bars articulate the movement’s principal motivic idea ((), (0 2 4 6) or pitch class set [4–21]), a harmonically ambiguous device that suggests both C Lydian (with emphasis on the sharpened fourth degree of the scale, F♯) and the first four notes of the whole-tone scale (collection I) (see Example 12.1).

Example 12.1 Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, I, bars 1–4.

This process of textural and timbral growth is strengthened by the entry of the solo cello (as bardic orator, perhaps?) in bar 6, harmonically suggesting an unstable A melodic minor/dorian collection – the slow, oscillating bass ostinato is now heard as , effectively underpinning the cello cantilena with a dominant pedal. The gradual entry of the full string group, in a sonorous ‘chorus’ effect, begins to fill out this modal A minor collection, but the viola’s D♭ in bar 17 is a ‘blue’ note, and triggers a local octatonic/E-flat minor inflection that begins to cloud the music’s earlier A orientation. The descending steps in the bass in bars 24–5 finally suggest that the movement is beginning to approach its first point of cadential arrival – on C Lydian, resolving the ambiguity of the opening motto. At the last second, however, the gesture is undermined by the chromatic intrusion of C♯, an enharmonic transformation of the viola’s D♭ from bar 17. This pitch now acts as a decisive harmonic pivot, turning the music’s tonal allegiance away from A (see Example 12.2).

Example 12.2 Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, I, bars 7–21.

The entry of the brass chorale in bars 29–39 reinforces this shift of harmonic allegiance with a new timbral colour, dynamic contour and rhythmic profile. The initial (0 2 4 6) motive returns in transposed form: [A-B-D♯-C♯], bars 31–2, and the cadence on F♯, with its strong plagal colouring, is an obvious tonicisation of this pitch from the opening page. The coda, bars 41–53, is an echo or afterglow of this moment of harmonic arrival. Even here, however, the music’s radiant F-sharp major is clouded by the presence of the sharpened fourth degree (B♯), an enharmonic reference to the C♮ pole of the opening bars.

The insistence of this tritone opposition (C♮-F♯) initiates and underpins the development. The passage begins with complete textural and thematic liquidation, music reduced to spare single lines, motivic fragments and harmonic obscurity in an extreme reinterpretation of classical developmental technique. From this sense of a blank musical void, the movement begins to replay the process of growth from the opening paragraph. The return of the solo cello at bar 57 is a pointed reference to its earlier bardic role in bar 6. The tonal organisation of the passage, soon picked up by the upper strings, is a complex mix of octatonic and whole-tone collections: the music becomes increasingly whole-tone as it approaches its registral ceiling around bar 70. Although this whole-tone bias clouds any sense of tonal centricity, it does succeed in recalling the principal motive in its original form – initially as part of the dusky string figuration in bar 72, and then, in augmentation, in the flute and clarinet. The return of the principal motive marks the start of a gradual process of textural accumulation, reinforced by attempts to assert A as a definitive tonal goal (for example, the timpani entry in bar 77). This sense of imminent tonal arrival is motivated primarily by a rising chromatic bass movement – from the F♯ in bar 76 (a reference, of course, to the end of the exposition space), through G♮ in bar 82 and A♭ in bar 85. The final attainment of A♮ in the bass coincides with the restatement (for the first time) of the principal motive at its original pitch level (C-D-F♯-E; see Example 12.3).

Example 12.3 Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, I, bars 95–6.

The key difference from the opening, however, is that on this occasion the motive has been harmonically contextualised so that it now establishes A unequivocally as the movement’s tonal destination. With this task achieved, the return of the brass chorale in bar 96 serves as a solemn benediction, a hymn-like affirmation of A major’s tonic status. But even here, elements of instability remain. As the music fades into silence, the intrusion of C♮s in bar 110 recalls earlier moments of chromatic interruption (ironically, C♮ was precisely the note withheld at a previous point of disjunction in bar 27). The movement briefly unfolds a whole-tone collection once again (bars 110–11; [C♮-D-E-F♯-B♭]), before pointedly resolving the B♭s down to A♮. Yet closure is once again evaded: the following movement begins by reinterpreting the whole-tone set of the preceding bars as a chromatically altered V⁷/F, and the solo oboe takes up the first movement’s closing a♮², transforming a closing cadential gesture into the start of a new melodic curve (see Example 12.4).

Example 12.4 Sibelius, Symphony No. 4, II, opening.

The first movement of Sibelius’s Fourth adumbrates a number of formal strategies and concerns that preoccupy much of his later music. The first is the thorough reconfiguring of received Formenlehre categories: though the movement suggests elements of a rounded binary form or two-part structure, it is in no sense a normative ‘sonata allegro’. Second, the Tempo molto moderato exemplifies the characteristically Sibelian process of what James Hepokoski calls the ‘interrelationship and fusion of movements’:¹⁰ the elision of the final bars means that the Scherzo becomes a giant pendant to the first movement, amplifying, elaborating and subsequently condensing its tonal drama. Third, the movement’s manipulation of time and space becomes paradigmatic for later symphonic designs. As Edward Laufer has suggested in his Schenkerian reading, the Tempo molto moderato is a symbolic journey, ‘a struggle to victory, from darkness to light, from nothingness to life, or from turmoil to serenity (somehow all the same poetic idea)’;¹¹ yet it is also a mythic transformation, from the ambiguity of the opening page to the crystallisation of the closing bars. The music articulates its own process of coming-into-being, the sounding manifestation of a creative will through a painful process of musical birth that unfolds a bleak new symphonic soundscape.

Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

As James Hepokoski has compellingly demonstrated, similar issues of growth, fusion and teleology motivate the formal design of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony (1914–15; rev. 1916 and 1919). Here, the opening bars of the first movement articulate a ‘misfired’ cadence in E flat, whose chromatic slippage generates the more complex modulatory scheme of the music that follows. Much of the remainder of the Symphony is dedicated to reassembling the intervallic and functional harmonic components of this initial cadential gambit, crystallising, as Hepokoski shows, in the swinging bell-like ‘swan hymn’ in the Finale. The stratified polymetric structure of the swan hymn texture is remarkable: the music unfolds in several different temporal and registral layers through elaboration of the opening gesture’s cadential fourths and fifths (see Example 12.5).

Example 12.5 Sibelius, Symphony No. 5, IV, ‘swan hymn’.

A remarkably similar texture unfolds in the final pages of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1928–30). Stravinsky had already radically recalibrated the idea of symphonic structure (after an early student exercise, the Symphony in E flat), in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1918–20). Aspects of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments superficially resemble the musical language of the opening movement of Sibelius’s Fourth: the tendency to break the ensemble down into craggy instrumental groups; a fondness for bell-like attacks in the woodwind and brass; and the block-like design of the work. Yet the two works are strikingly different in more obvious ways. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments resists any sense of organic growth or evolution in favour of what Alexander Rehding has termed its ‘logic of discontinuity’: the abrupt juxtaposition of contrasting statements of musical material that do not appear to evolve or transform, but simply rotate through rhythmic or pitch cycles mechanically even as they converge on C as tonal centre in the final pages.¹² The Symphony of Psalms obviously builds on the earlier precedent of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its preference for sharp juxtapositions, block form and rapt, ritualistic circularity. In part, these qualities are demanded by the work’s text, taken from Psalms 38 (verses 13 and 14), 39 (verses 2, 3 and 4) and 150 (complete): the Symphony is correspondingly divided into three movements, arranged in an ascending hierarchical order. The first movement is an invocation, a prayer of supplication (‘Exaudi orationem meam, Domine’: ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord’); the second movement is a giant double fugue, an intercession for forgiveness and salvation that results in a ‘new song’ (‘Et immisit in os meum canticum novum’: ‘And he hath put a new song into our mouth’); the third movement is a hymn of praise (‘Laudate Dominum’: ‘Praise the Lord’), whose closing pages intone the ‘new song’ born in the second movement. The Symphony is thus a glowing affirmation of faith, conceived on a monumental, public scale. It embraces aspects of its earlier nineteenth-century inheritance (the symphony as a large-scale vehicle for the celebration of community) and also attempts to ground the genre in an earlier tradition (music as the shared ritualistic expression of public and private religious belief).¹³

These tensions, between different ideas of symphonic time and space, are reflected in aspects of the music’s formal strategy. Much has been written, notably by Pieter van den Toorn, of the first movement’s interaction between different modal collections: predominantly octatonic, but also diatonic (E♭ and C as a binary ‘tonic pair’), Gregorian (E Phrygian), and chromatic.¹⁴ The basic opposition of modal materials is adumbrated in the opening bars. The famous ‘Psalms’ chord, with its characteristic registral scoring (E minor with doubled third (G), and no fifth degree), serves a punctuating role throughout, abruptly closing and initiating phrases as though resetting the clock, yet also prefiguring the movement’s final cadence (on G) and establishing the pattern of third relations which predominates throughout. The first appearance of the chord is followed immediately by two arpeggiated dominant seventh chords (B♭⁷ and G⁷) drawn from octatonic collection 1, whose diatonic chords of resolution (E flat and C respectively) anticipate the tonal frames of the second movement and Finale. For Wilfrid Mellers, these two tonal centres are more important for their associative symbolic character than for their structural function: ‘the key of E♭ – whose humanistic associations extend from the compassion of Bach and Mozart to the heroism and power of Beethoven – emerges as Man’s key, while C, the ‘white note’ key in the major and E♭’s relative in the minor, becomes God’s key’; the first movement’s (Phrygian) E minor, in contrast, becomes the ‘key of prayer and intercession’.¹⁵ Such readings are of course problematic – not least for the ways they threaten to assimilate Stravinsky within an Austro-German humanist tradition to which he was only tangentially related. Yet it is interesting to speculate on the presence of similar key associations in other twentieth-century symphonies: the C major of Sibelius’s Seventh (1924), for example, is no less concerned with notions of the divine (D major often serves a similar purpose for Vaughan Williams, whereas D major means something very different at the end of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony). And the appearance of diatonic writing in twentieth-century symphonic music more widely often assumes a similarly symbolic role: keys evoked more for their expressive affect than any attempt to reinvoke anachronistic notions of diatonic functionality.

The opening bars of the first movement of the Symphony of Psalms are also paradigmatic in their rhythmic and metrical organisation. The vertical, punctuating syntactic character of the ‘Psalms’ chord is spliced with the circular additive tendencies of the following bars: the division of the octatonic arpeggiation into sub-blocks of 1+2, 1+1 in bars 2–3. The effect of such cross-cutting is to create a basic tension between different forms of metrical structure: the strong vertical downbeat of the ‘Psalms’ chord; and the assymetrical, non-periodic grouping of the arpeggiations. Rather than being synthesised into an organic unity (the illusion of a single, linear vector), rhythmic time is broken into its basic dimensions. Similar processes of rhythmic organisation operate elsewhere in the movement. For instance, the augmentation at Fig. 4 (semiquavers becoming quavers) is reversed at Fig. 6. But the complex layering of metrical streams at Fig. 5 (3/2 in the chorus and bassoons versus 8+10+12/4 in the upper woodwind) gives way to a more static improvisatory feel at Fig. 6 (groups of 8+12+24 semiquavers in the oboe). The local climax of this sequence is the neo-Handelian passage at Fig. 9, whose Zadok-like combination of ostinato patterns in simultaneous semiquaver and quaver figuration generates a sense of intense surface activity while remaining metrically static and statuesque. The return of this passage at Fig. 12 (at the words ‘Remitte mihi’, ‘Spare me’), presages the movement’s short coda and the collision between octatonic and phrygian collections which results in the music’s diatonic cadential descent towards G.

The Finale relies upon similar tensions and cross-cuttings, though on a larger and more expansive scale. By comparison with the first movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, the basic formal structure of the Finale is easy to read: a rounded binary main section based on C (labelled simply Tempo minim=80, dominated by its motto-like quaver figure, which Stravinsky associated with the repeated phrase ‘Laudate Dominum’ and later, misleadingly, claimed was one of the earliest ideas for the work),¹⁶ followed by an extended postlude (for which Mellers invoked Henry Vaughan’s ‘chime and symphony of nature’)¹⁷ in E flat, framed by an introduction and coda that grounds the whole movement in C. The third-based structure of Mellers’s tonal pairing is evident throughout: the introduction, for example, superimposes the two centres (the ‘Alleluia’ before Fig. 1), and dwells on the false-relation E♮/E♭ repeatedly, the choir intoning their quiet hymn of praise in E flat while the orchestra insists on a bell-like ostinato in C (see Example 12.6).

Example 12.6 Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms, III, introduction. © Copyright 1931 by Hawkes and Son (London) Ltd. Revised version: © Copyright 1948 by Hawkes and Son (London) Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

The effect does not suggest dynamic polarisation so much as the insistent rocking between two complementary halves of the same compound harmonic unit. The closing word, ‘Dominum’, comes to rest on C, but the presence of B♭ in the chord before Fig. 3 acts both to destabilise the sense of closure, pushing the music forwards into the start of the faster main section, and also serves as a chromatic residue of the earlier E flat-C major mix. Significantly, in the final cadence at the end of the movement, this element of harmonic doubt is removed.

In her study of pages from the sketches for the Finale, Gretchen Horlacher has shown how Stravinsky began the fast main section of the movement by drafting the stratified ostinato texture at Fig. 3 in full, and then cutting and pasting its component rhythmic layers to disrupt its continuity and create a distinctive metrical counterpoint – the bass riff in 3/4 against the movement’s prevailing 4/4 (a pattern prepared, in fact, by the orchestral ostinato at Fig. 2). Much of the tonal drama in the main section is generated not only by modal interaction but also by the play of sharp- versus flat-side harmonic tendencies: the bright, diatonic effect of the C-based music at the start intensified by its shift towards E at Fig. 5, and then clouded by the cadence before Fig. 6 (principally octatonic collection II). E flat reasserts itself, both at the beginning of the middle section (Fig. 13) and at Fig. 22, where the closing hymn of praise begins. This is the passage that resembles the Finale of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony: the swinging fifth steps in the bass and polymetrical layering (the bass riff now in four versus the triple-metre choral parts) create a similar suspension of clock time in favour of an ecstatic sense of stillness and infinitude (see Example 12.7).

Example 12.7 Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms, hymn of praise, opening. © Copyright 1931 by Hawkes and Son (London) Ltd. Revised version: © Copyright 1948 by Hawkes and Son (London) Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

For Taruskin, such textures exemplify Stravinsky’s tendency towards ‘hypostatization’: the coexistence of independent rhythmic strata in a state of perpetual permutation and recycling.¹⁸ The two passages also serve parallel structural functions, as goals of their respective symphonic journeys: they represent the moment at which symphonic time and space seemingly dissolve and collapse inwards, for Stravinsky not so much in synchronicity but rather in a more enigmatic simultaneity.

Berio: Sinfonia

Although they share a similar cyclic view of the Symphony, Sibelius and Stravinsky offer very different metaphors of musical birth, transformation, death and renewal. For Sibelius, the process of musical birth is tense and agonistic – the music seemingly evolves organically but is constantly threatened by its own tendency towards collapse and disintegration; the final bars of both Fourth and Fifth symphonies offer little sustained sense of resolution, only provisional points of rest. The closing bars of Stravinsky’s Symphony are more affirmative, perhaps, though they retain their sense of ritualistic anonymity and disembodiment: in the closing bars of the Symphony of Psalms, the grand nineteenth-century idea of symphonic apotheosis becomes radically hollowed out. The life-cycle of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1967–8) is similarly ambivalent: the work unfolds a gradual growth process that repeatedly ends in death and dissolution. The Sinfonia’s musical and textual material is dominated by recurrent symbolic imagery of water, fire, violence and immersion: the image of a cataclysmic drowning is represented several times throughout the work, both through the process of chromatic saturation that floods the outer movements, and in the explicit reference to the drowning scene from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck that forms the apex of the central movement. Famously a musical deconstruction of the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony, the third movement casts a critical eye on the idea of resurrection (borrowed from the subtitle of Mahler’s work). ‘Rebirth’ here may refer to the Sinfonia’s rich intertextuality – references abound, not only to Mahler, but also to Berlioz, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Boulez and Stockhausen, alongside scat singing and jazz. But it might also refer to the Sinfonia’s satisfyingly tight cyclic structure: the fifth (and final) movement replays (or ‘resurrects’) the first movement’s transformation from vertical chordal sonorities to an energetic linear texture, and the closing bars recapture the first movement’s own ending (a gesture that itself looks back to the work’s opening). In that sense, the Sinfonia is explicitly circular: like James Joyce’s high-modernist novel Finnegans Wake, a work which forms one of the Sinfonia’s central literary reference points, the music’s end becomes its beginning. But this also points to one of the structuralist games that Berio plays throughout the piece: the idea that, in spite of the constant reference to music beyond the Sinfonia’s boundaries in the third movement, the work’s own meaning remains continually deferred, collapsing back on itself in an endless cycle of reflexivity. So the idea of resurrection becomes inherently problematic, robbed of its original transcendental connotations. The Sinfonia’s seemingly infinite process of re-creation is intimately allied to its own cycle of self-destruction.

David Osmond-Smith has compellingly analysed the Sinfonia’s structure in detail, drawing attention to the design of the five individual movements, and carefully charting the work’s progress through the intertextual montage of the third movement and beyond.¹⁹The first movement, for example, is designed around a simple process of symbolic exchange taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist text, Le cru et le cuit (‘The Raw and the Cooked’). Lévi-Strauss’s text concerns two native South American accounts of the origin of fire and water, and the transformation from eau celeste (rain, precipitation) to eau terrestre (lakes, oceans, rivers). This descent (from sky to earth) is mirrored in the movement’s trajectory, which shifts from the gentle pulsating oscillation of two closely overlapping ‘birth’ chords (an eight-note ‘stack’ intervallically constructed from bass fifth and accumulated thirds, and a more resonant four-note set) towards an explosive linear tapestry of sound, the orgiastic celebration of a ‘musique rituelle’ (from Fig. I). The text itself is fragmented and broken apart – the movement begins with open vowel sounds, suggesting a mythic pre-linguistic ululation, from which key symbolic words gradually emerge (‘feu, eau, sang’: ‘fire, water, blood’) as commentary upon the narration of lines from Lévi-Strauss’s account. The alternation of the two opening chords (see Example 12.8) swiftly tends towards saturation – the complete chromatic set is heard as early as Fig. A, though it emerges more forcefully after Fig. I as the ‘musique rituelle’ gains momentum – the movement’s final word is ‘tué’ (‘killed’), a reference to the violent crime that attends the creation of fire/water in Bororo myth, and a link to the following movement, a memorial to the assassinated Martin Luther King.

Example 12.8 Berio, Sinfonia, I, opening.

The second movement is similarly concerned with a process of growth, this time expanding a single melodic line outwards from a basic set (0 2 4 8) through four principal cycles plus an open, incomplete fifth cycle (starting at Fig. E): as Osmond-Smith notes, the melody rapidly begins to suggest two complementary whole-tone collections that generate a more complex harmonic field.²⁰ The sustaining of selected notes of the melody in the orchestra results in a resonant ‘halo’ of sound, so that the melody seemingly weaves its own polyphonic structure as it proceeds. The text similarly weaves itself together, from a series of the five open vowel sounds, until it reconstructs King’s name: the key moment of coordination is the phrase ‘O King’ at the beginning of the final cycle at Fig. E. In the final bar, King’s name is broken into syllables and distributed between the eight individual singers, dissolved once more so that the movement’s growth cycle can begin again.

There is little comparable sense of growth in the third movement: rather, the music whirls around as though in a centrifuge, drawing in and ultimately consuming a range of references to dance movements from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century orchestral repertoire. In this way, Berio collapses time and space into a single fluid whole: the ‘Danse de la terre’ from Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps seemingly coexists alongside the ‘Scène de bal’ from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Mahler’s Scherzo. As Osmond-Smith observes, the Mahler model is already a synthetic intertextual one, containing references both to the trio from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 96 and the closing bars of ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’ from Schumann’s Dichterliebe. But Berio provides an additional layer of analysis and commentary via his literary text, drawn from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable. Beckett’s text provides ample opportunity for parody and self-reflection: the opening lines of the play (‘Where now’; ‘keep going’; ‘nothing more restful than chamber music’) at the movement’s outset are swiftly echoed by more mocking phrases (‘You are nothing but an academic exercise’; ‘it seems there are only repeated sounds’; ‘no time for chamber music’) and negation (‘hardly a resurrection’, punning on Mahler’s work). At times, Beckett’s work stimulates new unexpected turns in the movement’s course: the sudden interjection of the passage from the slow movement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony at Fig. X (appropriately, given Sinfonia’s preoccupation with water imagery, the ‘Scene by the Brook’) is accompanied by the line ‘It’s late now, he shall never hear again the lowing cattle, the rush of the stream’, a sequence that, in Beckett’s drama, refers to an abattoir and which triggers one of the movement’s most violent moments of submersion at Fig. Z.²¹ But the Beckett text also provides an insightful commentary on Mahler’s work: the Scherzo’s generic status as a macabre ‘dance of death’ whose uncanny inability seemingly to reinvent and develop itself, as Lóránt Péteri has eloquently argued,²² ultimately ends in nothingness and collapse. Berio’s gloss, in retrospect, offers not simply playful postmodern irony, but a much darker reading of twentieth-century musical history, a nightmarish memory of musical events haunted by the ghosts of past and contemporary violence and conflict.

Carter: Symphony of Three Orchestras

A similarly energetic and apocalyptic vision of the century is offered by Elliott Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras, a work composed in 1976 to commission from the New York Philharmonic but which is anything but a straightforward celebration or occasional piece. For both Berio and Carter, the idea of the ‘symphony’ is seemingly more ancient (savage and ritualistic) than its nineteenth-century heritage implies. Yet Carter’s work, like Berio’s, is also challengingly modern. One of the most immediate characteristics of the Symphony of Three Orchestras is its formidable complexity and density of musical detail – in that sense, the work represents one possible end-point of the process of maximalisation (understood here in terms of raw data rather than length or volume alone) identified by Taruskin as one of the defining qualities of the twentieth-century symphony. The work also perpetuates a more chamber-musical idiom: one of the Symphony’s more obviously modernist aspects is the way in which it breaks the ensemble down into smaller, more virtuosic assemblages, so that at times the work displays a markedly concertante character. Carter’s Symphony also plays explicitly with notions of time and space. Unlike Berio’s Sinfonia, Carter’s work is performed without a break – the Symphony can be heard as a single, gradually descending musical arc, although its internal structural organisation is characteristically more complex. But the basic division of three separate orchestras implies a spatial broadening of the symphonic domain, as well as an intensification of its multiple temporal possibilities – the three orchestras rarely, if ever, coincide rhythmically, and Carter’s polymetrical counterpoint ensures that the music constantly offers a shifting array of different temporal and spatial perspectives.

Yet despite this complexity, the Symphony of Three Orchestras is also one of Carter’s most poetic and imaginative large-scale works. The work’s initial impetus is a poem, entitled ‘The Bridge’, by the early twentieth-century American modernist Hart Crane. Opening with an aerial portrait of the New York skyline from Brooklyn Bridge, Crane’s poem is a hymn to the city and the diverse sounds and machine noise of the metropolis – and simultaneously an anxious urban portrait of the new world. David Schiff has christened the work Carter’s ‘Great New York Symphony’.²³ Brooklyn Bridge itself offers multiple symbolic images: an architectural landmark, a transport artery, a spatial and temporal span that suggests the journey from one continent to another, a metaphor for the flow of human traffic that drove European emigration in the early twentieth century, a progression from the earthly world towards the divine, and also a nostalgic leave-taking (‘As apparitional as sails that cross / Some page of figures to be filed away; / – Till Elevators drop us from our day’). Crane’s poem suggests a Homeric odyssey, a journey towards an unknown domain or mythic region that is simultaneously an unexpected home-coming, in which the poet appears as both wanderer and vagrant. And, for Carter, this stylised mythic image of the American hobo at the heart of Crane’s work is equally a symbol of the artist as a lone, uncompromising modernist pioneer, whose new musical language (unfolded by the Symphony) can be heard as an imaginative projection of their explorative spirit. The opening bars of the Symphony respond to this imagery in a particularly vivid and direct way: the swooping bird-calls and descending figuration of the introduction (bars 1–10) suggest the soaring bird’s-eye view of the city evoked in Crane’s poem. The gradual textural and harmonic in-filling (beginning with a rare triadic sonority in the upper strings that is swiftly ‘coloured’ by more chromatic elements) suggests the slow emergence of a wide, deep panorama, like a camera panning back in the opening scene of a movie to unveil a broad cinematic landscape.²⁴ The trumpet solo that follows is a musical portrait of the artist as a free, imaginative presence, the work’s most sustained and elaborate melodic statement, expanding outwards intervallically with a liberating sense of rhythmic freedom. The Symphony thus opens with a striking sense of structural and expressive poise – a feeling of balance and apparent weightlessness, similar to the breezy syntax of Crane’s text, which the remainder of the work anxiously begins to destabilise.

The major part of the Symphony, following the introduction, is defined by the interaction of the three orchestral ensembles suggested by the work’s title. Carter plots the Symphony’s course through two statements of a four-movement cycle, but with different ensembles playing different movements at different times in varying orders (see Fig. 12.2), so that the structure can be understood as a twisting, large-scale structural counterpoint that spirals outwards from the introduction towards the forceful unison chords of the coda (from bar 318).

Figure 12.2 Carter, Symphony of Three Orchestras, form

David Schiff has carefully charted the different characters of the individual movements, listing their contrasting expressive, intervallic and metrical properties and tracing their articulation across the course of the work.²⁵ As is apparent from Figure 12.2, the interlacing of different movements spread across the three orchestras creates a rapidly changing montage of sound. At times, particular ensemble groups may take precedence (Orchestra II in bars 100–5 and 142–50; Orchestra III in bars 121–7 and 199–207), and elements of the opening trumpet motto can be heard echoed in certain passages spread across the main body of the work (for example, in the rhythmic fluidity of Orchestra I’s movement 3, bars 105–21 and 157–92). But Carter maintains, in his notes printed at the head of the study score, that ‘the listener, of course, is not meant, on first hearing, to identify the details of this constantly shifting web of sound any more than he is to identify the modulations in Tristan und Isolde, but rather to hear and grasp the character of this kaleidoscope of musical themes as they are presented in varying contexts’.²⁶ For most listeners, even on subsequent hearings, Carter’s music will hardly seem thematic, at least in a normative sense. Much more compelling, especially from a symphonic perspective, is the interaction and exchange of different timbral and gestural characters. Three basic modes of expression are articulated in the opening round of movements: Orchestra I’s sustained, ‘inviolate’ string chords (bars 37–46), the bright, edgy bell-like timbre of Orchestra II (dominated by perfect fifths, bars 50–68) and the more lively, potentially explosive figuration of Orchestra III’s giocoso music (bars 40–61); similarly contrasting modes of gestural behaviour mark each of the subsequent sections. Initially, at least, the pattern of interchange resembles a conversational dialogue. But, as the Symphony progresses, the texture becomes increasingly tense and agitated. The return of the giocoso music in Orchestra III at bar 291, for example, is now restless and uneasy, and the second statement of Orchestra I’s fourth movement (marked ‘angrily’) has expanded from merely fifteen bars to almost 50. Rather than working towards resolution or consonance, the level of dissonance rises incrementally as the work progresses, so that the strident series of tutti chords that dramatically sunder the work from bar 318 appear as the end-result of a process of intensification and conflict. The coda is dominated by hollow, repetitive mechanistic ostinati – the polar opposite of the free-flowing, seemingly improvisatory spirit of the trumpet solo that opens the work – and a final cadenza for piano, tuba and double bass, which, as Schiff suggests, completes the ‘double dramatic trajectories of the work, from high to low, lyrical to mechanical’.²⁷In the context of Crane’s poem, it is hard not to hear this ending as a bleak renunciation of individual liberty, a nightmarish vision of the modern city as a crushing weight of machine noise and expressive violence. Schiff summarises the work as ‘the most extreme statement of tragic disjunction Carter ever attempted for orchestra’.²⁸ But Carter’s music is characteristically ambiguous, and it is equally possible to enjoy the neat symmetry of the work’s closing gesture, the low sounds and resonant timbre in balance with the ethereal luminous sonorities with which the Symphony opened.²⁹ In that way, Carter achieves a compelling sense of structural and expressive poise, and the work completes a circular journey that seemingly brings the listener back to the brink of the opening bars, even as the music plunges into the abyss.

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen: Symphony, Antiphony

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s closely contemporary Symphony, Antiphony, composed in 1977, is similarly ambivalent, though it plays with radically different musical materials. Born in 1932, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen is a senior representative in Danish music of a tendency described by Poul Nielsen as ‘new simplicity’ (‘ny enkelhed’). ‘Simplicity’ here refers not to musical meaning or imagination – as is readily apparent, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music is anything but simple in that sense. Rather, it refers to a vivid clarity of expression and design, promoted partly in response to the perceived over-intellectualism of the Darmstadt school (principally Boulez and Stockhausen). Implicit also, perhaps, is a characteristically Nordic preoccupation with structure and objectivity – aspects of which Gudmundsen-Holmgreen also shared with members of the New York group including John Cage and (especially) Morton Feldman, composers who otherwise seem remote from any traditional sense of the symphonic. Other formative influences on Gudmundsen-Holmgreen include Samuel Beckett – like Berio, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was strongly drawn to Beckett’s antagonistic, deconstructive approach to received convention, and to the idea of a gestural theatre of the absurd, in which language has been reduced to a series of speech acts whose meaning has been continually deferred or withheld. An important early landmark in Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s work is the Beckett setting Je ne me tirai jamais. Jamais (1966), an anti-song cycle whose alternating violence and playfulness responds forcefully to the inherent ambiguity (or multivocality) of Beckett’s text. Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s attitude to the symphonic tradition in Symphony, Antiphony, is similarly double-edged and destabilising. As Ursula Andkjær Olsen has suggested, ‘throughout Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music speaks a certain productive irony. An irony that has nothing to do with the everyday use of the term, which is closer to sarcasm in its meaning, but an irony that is continually on the move, an instability of meaning, both a yes and a no’.³⁰ For Andkjær Olsen, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music is inhabited by a wild array of speaking voices – not simply individual instruments or instrumental groups, but different kinds of music. The resulting ‘sounding together’ in Symphony, Antiphony is violently unpredictable: a ritualistic theatre that occasionally observes the rules of polite conversational dialogue, but more frequently erupts into ‘a kind of mass hysteria or unrestrained anarchy’.³¹

Yet, for all its apparent violence and nihilism, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music is richly allusive and tautly designed. The two-part design of Symphony, Antiphony is highly asymmetrical: the first part, ‘Symphony’, which Gudmundsen-Holmgreen maintains can be performed as an independent work, is barely two and a half minutes long, whereas the following ‘Antiphony’ is almost ten times this length: a massive structural imbalance which the work makes little attempt to redress. ‘Symphony’ begins by systematically unfolding one of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s basic musical structures: a chromatic pitch field that expands outwards symmetrically from a single focal pitch (D), divided at the tritone (A♭) until it covers ten of the twelve available chromatic pitch classes (the missing notes are the tritone pair F♮ and B♮; see Example 12.9).

Example 12.9 Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Symphony, Antiphony, opening.

The music simultaneously begins a process of timbral expansion, from the bell-like vibraphone, piano and marimba at the start, through the addition of woodwind (playing fragments derived in diminution from the opening pitch structure) and strings (largely playing open strings), and eventually with strident brass fanfares. The entry of the unpitched percussion in bar 23, however, critically destabilises this constructivist process of gradual textural and metrical accumulation, and the ‘Symphony’ collapses, revealed as an unsustainable fiction, under the weight of a series of crushing blows on the tam tam. Only dying echoes of the opening pitch (D) remain on the lowest string of the double bass, slowly resonating until they fade, exhausted, into complete silence.

One of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s most striking compositional strategies is the ability to render familiar musical materials suddenly strange and disorientating. The opening of ‘Antiphony’ is an excellent example of this process: a solo violin plays with a simple three-note motive (D-E-F♯) in varying melodic formations – an idea whose diatonicism sounds all the more shocking after the brutal ending of ‘Symphony’. As Andkjær Olsen records, the origin of this device may lie in one of the early technical exercises Gudmundsen-Holmgreen undertook with his first composition teacher, Finn Høffding: the task of finding as many ways as possible of ordering three notes into a melodic sequence.³² The gesture thus has the quality of a new start, a conscious back-to-basics attempt to rebuild a musical language from scratch after the implosion at the end of the preceding movement. But it also assumes the status of a ‘found object’ or objet trouvé; a pre-existent musical element discovered seemingly by chance and recontextualised within a new stylistic domain. Much of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s work is characterised by a similar sense of bricolage, whether referring to actual pieces (such as the Larghetto from Mozart’s ‘Coronation’ Concerto, K 537, in Plateaux pour Piano et Orchestra, 2005), or more broadly to musical types, as is the case here. Hence, ‘Antiphony’ can in one sense be heard as a series of six interlinked variations on material shattered and fractured in the opening ‘Symphony’. But in another sense, the ‘Antiphony’ is generated by the juxtaposition of sharply contrasting blocks of different kinds of music: the violin’s innocent diatonic doodling, raucous animal calls in the brass and woodwind, Stravinskian ragtime on the piano, melancholic late-Romantic yearning in the strings and the nostalgic sound of a solo mandolin, playing fragments of what sounds uncannily like the Song of the Volga River Boatmen. Each of the six movements in ‘Antiphony’ highlights one or other of these musical types: in the first, the violin doodles and brass-woodwind animal calls predominate; in the second, the animal calls and mandolin begin to take precedence; the third movement is the shortest, a ragtime cadenza for piano; the fourth is the work’s orgiastic climax, a multilayered collision of Sacre-like fanfares and ostinati dominated by the heavy brass; the fifth is a complete contrast, a solemn hymnic meditation for piano and flageolet strings; the sixth and final movement is an extended postlude, a Mahlerian paraphrase of swooning cadential string lines and tremolo mandolin that passes into an eerie coda. The final sounds are the wooden saltando rattle of open violin strings and the rasping whirr of unpitched percussion: a dusty musical death.

Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Symphony, Antiphony underlines the contingency of notions of symphonic tradition and inheritance. It collapses familiar conventions of musical time and space, only to reassemble them in a strange and unfamiliar theatre in which collision, superimposition and simultaneity begin to seem consonant even though they never become fully comprehensible in their entirety. Indeed, the work challenges the very idea of such comprehensibility, emphasising the gestural, performative quality of its musical language over and above the question of musical semantics. As Andkjær Olsen suggests, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music is figurative (or, rather, connotive), even if it remains unclear precisely what it is supposed to represent. Even as it vividly deconstructs the genre, however, Symphony, Antiphony ultimately reinforces the idea of the symphonic as a musical category. It successfully promotes (and problematises) the idea of large-scale musical form, and reaffirms the symphony orchestra as a vehicle for sustained musical communication. In that sense, the work becomes emblematic of a broader trend in twentieth-century symphonic composition. It exemplifies the tendency, demonstrated in different ways by the five works discussed in this chapter, towards fragmentation, alienation and reconstruction: the cyclic process of decay and renewal that becomes a red thread throughout much twentieth-century music, from Sibelius and Stravinsky to Berio and beyond. And, while this process often seems painful, inevitably directed towards its own imminent generic self-destruction, it ensures that the symphony remains an effective mirror of the modern condition. Perhaps, in that way, the twentieth-century symphony remains faithful to its eighteenth-century origins: the subtle merging of public and private space in conversational dialogue, the ritualised ‘sounding together’ of multiple musical languages, dialects and identities. Never has the need for such dialogue seemed more urgent.