The orchestral consensus

What we know about eighteenth-century orchestras comes courtesy of a long paper trail: payrolls, concert reviews, travellers’ accounts, performance treatises, sheet music and more. They reveal what John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw dub an ‘orchestral consensus’ in their definitive The Birth of the Orchestra. Encompassing ‘what an orchestra was, what instruments it comprised and in what proportions, and how those instruments were organized’, it lasted from the 1740s through the early nineteenth century – or, put in terms of the symphony, from about a decade after the genre emerged through to the middle works of Beethoven.² Differences between countries, cities and individual orchestras remained significant during this time, inspiring (or being inspired by) distinctive styles of orchestral scoring. Still, enough remained constant that music and musicians could circulate internationally and encounter similar conditions of performance.

At a minimum, every eighteenth-century orchestra could field four-part strings: two violins, viola and a bass line or basso covered by cellos and double bass. That force alone, joined by keyboard continuo according to local preference, sufficed for many symphony performances through at least the early 1770s. During those years, numerous works were composed for strings alone in four or even three parts, and the wind parts of many other symphonies were advertised as optional. At the same time, by 1740 most orchestras had winds, initially one or more bassoons, which at first doubled the basso; two or more flutes or oboes, sometimes played by the same, ‘double-handed’ musicians; two or more horns or trumpets, or both; and timpani. Clarinets joined some ensembles as early as the 1750s, but they did not become a standard in symphonies until very late in the century. Much more significant was the eventual creation of independent parts for all the winds. Around the middle of the century, most symphonies employed what were known in sheet music and music catalogues as six-, eight-, or eleven-part scorings. The strings counted as four parts regardless of how many different instruments played the basso, and the wind complement could amount to a single pair of oboes, flutes, horns or trumpets (six parts), one pair each of woodwinds and brass (eight parts), or two woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets and timpani (eleven parts). By the 1790s, the standard had grown to fourteen parts or more, the ensemble most typically associated with the modern term ‘classical orchestra’: four-part strings plus one or two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets (sometimes), one or two bassoons (now playing their own parts rather than doubling the basso), two horns, two trumpets and timpani. While expanded and unusual scorings do occur, most symphonies abided by these instrumentations, which in turn matched the most common disposition of orchestras.

Consensus did not extend to the number of players.³ Depending on finances and needs, performance spaces and taste, orchestras could have as few as ten members and as many as a hundred or more – though few standing orchestras had more than seventy (those assembled for special occasions were often larger). Large or small, most ensembles grew over the course of the century, at least until the 1780s when Spitzer and Zaslaw note a levelling off. On the other hand, during any given period they could differ radically from one another in size. The orchestra of the Concert spirituel in Paris, a leading venue for symphonies from the 1740s to 1790, went from around forty to around sixty members in that time. By contrast, that of Prince Eszterházy had only about fourteen members when Haydn became director in 1761, and about twenty-four when he departed in 1790. Both ensembles got larger, but a Haydn symphony played for Eszterházy by twenty musicians might have been performed in Paris, in the same year, by two or three times that many.

Balance varied as well, though less dramatically. In 1776 Haydn had seven violins, two violas, one cello, one double bass, eight winds and timpani. The high proportion of winds, nearly 50 per cent of the total, was typical for smaller orchestras, while larger ensembles had more strings: at the Concert spirituel in 1774, there were twenty-six violins, four violas, ten cellos and four double basses versus fifteen winds and timpani. Despite that difference, the examples share a strong opposition between treble and bass. The violin sections are large, 35 to 45 per cent of the ensemble, and while the fourteen low strings of the Concert spirituel reflect a French preference for especially strong bass, if one counts bassoons (still largely doubling the basso in the 1770s), then the bass constitutes 20 to 30 per cent of both totals. That proportion decreased over time, presumably diminishing somewhat the power of the bass; at the same time, regional variations such as the French enthusiasm for bass also diminished, such that by the early nineteenth century the proportions of balance were largely standardised across Europe.

By that time the instruments themselves had also begun to change, becoming more like their modern counterparts thanks to venting and key systems for the winds and the concave Tourte bow for the strings. For most of the eighteenth century, however, orchestra players stuck with older technologies.⁴ Apart from the double bass, which was found in three-, four- and five-string varieties of differing size and resonance, the strings retained a design established in the late seventeenth century and characterised by a flatter profile and lower bridge than the modern instrument. They were strung with gut and played mainly with convex bows. The woodwinds had fingerholes and generally only two or three keys, and the brass remained ‘natural’ instruments, capable of playing only those notes that belong to the overtone series of the key in which they were pitched.⁵ The last point is worth emphasising since it had a formative influence on orchestration. Brass players could change the key of their instrument by inserting extensions into its sounding tube – the longer the extension, the lower the pitch – and a system developed in the 1750s allowed horn players to do so between and eventually within symphony movements. Still, neither horns nor trumpets played much beyond the tonic triad and first five degrees of the scale in symphonies, whose composers mostly avoided the instruments’ highest registers, where the overtone series offers more notes. Hence the abilities of the brass shaped the whole symphonic sound, determining when they could be brought to bear and with what kinds of musical material.⁶

Venues and quality

Orchestras played in theatres, churches, a variety of concert rooms and outdoors. The acoustical results would have varied considerably depending on the nature of each space and the size of the ensemble. Spitzer and Zaslaw suggest that the orchestral style of the period was optimised for a dry sound characteristic of theatres and the outdoors, which allowed common effects like abrupt dynamic changes and repeated notes in the strings to be heard clearly. As they point out, however, a new generation of small, hard-surfaced concert rooms increasingly put those same effects into very live spaces that must have made listeners feel like the orchestra was all around them. This more visceral experience gained ground over the course of the century, as orchestras playing in large spaces took on ever more players to achieve comparable immediacy.⁷

Audience behaviour would further have affected orchestral sound, or at least its perception. Used in theatre pieces and church services as well as concerts, symphonies encountered differing degrees of attentiveness. In concerts they served mainly to open or close programmes of instrumental and vocal solos, and descriptions abound of audiences arriving, departing, chatting or playing cards during symphony performances.⁸ This does not necessarily mean that the orchestra was ignored; only that its sonorities probably drifted in and out of consciousness, perhaps according to some commonly encountered patterns of orchestration discussed below. Other descriptions, meanwhile, tell of audiences listening closely to symphonies, reacting to specific moments and calling for movements to be encored. Such circumstances presumably favoured the orchestra’s capacity for nuance.

A favourite topic of eighteenth-century observers, the quality of orchestral performance turned on many variables, among them money, stability and leadership. The best orchestras resided in the urban capitals and the courts of the German and Austrian nobility, which could muster the considerable resources necessary to underwrite even a small ensemble.⁹ In the cities, financing came from ticket sales and, in many cases, core groups of aristocratic sponsors, while in the courts it came from single patrons like Prince Eszterházy. Cities and courts also had the institutions that could keep ensembles together for a season of concerts or longer – sometimes much longer. In the cities, theatres employed musicians for comparatively long seasons and in turn provided most of the players for concert series such as the Concert spirituel (which had much shorter seasons) and for the many individual concerts organised by composers and soloists. The chances were, then, that any given performance in Paris, London, or another major city involved some proportion of musicians who played together regularly. Court orchestras enjoyed still greater stability. The most widely praised ensemble of the century, that of the Elector Palatine in Mannheim, enjoyed such continuity that by the time most of the encomiums appeared in the 1770s, many of its members had decades in service as well as sons and nephews who trained and performed beside them. Together with the skill and longevity of Christian Cannabich, director since 1757, the players’ long experience with one another helped to produce a legendarily unified manner of execution.¹⁰

Leadership had several dimensions.¹¹ Directors guided the ensemble in performance, typically with the violin from the concertmaster position and sometimes in tandem with a keyboard player. They ran such rehearsals as there were; concerts often had only one, which made the stability of the ensemble and its performance style all the more critical. Directors hired the musicians and they usually composed at least some of the music, another point of particular significance for the symphony. All of the century’s most influential composers of symphonies spent time directing orchestras: Giovanni Battista Sammartini in Milan; Cannabich and his predecessor Johann Stamitz in Mannheim; Johann Gottlieb Graun in Berlin; Haydn, Carl Ditters, Antonio Rosetti and others at smaller German and Austrian courts; Johann Christian Bach in London; and François-Joseph Gossec in Paris. Their experience allowed them to capitalise on the existing strengths of specific ensembles and even individual musicians, as well as to develop effective new sounds. More broadly, their insider’s knowledge formed the basis for the reciprocity of composition and performance noted above, without which symphony and orchestra alike might have remained colourful accompaniments to other things – their role throughout much of the century. Instead they moved from the background to the foreground of concert life, thanks in no small part to the interaction of musical style and ensemble capability.

Scoring and style

Although symphonies could display an orchestra’s abilities through striking effects like the premier coup d’archet (‘first stroke of the bow’, that is, a unison attack in all the strings), the relationship between style and ensemble ran much deeper. From its earliest years, the symphony stood for a modern and essentially comic idiom in which composers changed musical ideas and moods quickly rather than elaborating them at length as in some genres of the first half of the century.¹² The orchestra’s capacity for contrast made the changes vivid, an advantage that composers began to exploit already in symphonies for strings alone. Although lacking the colour and volume of winds, these works compensate with an astonishing array of textures, some of them inherited from antecedents of the symphony such as the concerto, trio sonata and dance suite. In four-part writing, the default is often what might be called ‘2+2’: that is, the two violins play in unison, octaves, or close harmony with one another, and the violas and basso do the same. Accommodating two-, three- and four-part harmony but only two layers of rhythm, the pattern affords flexibility and clarity and may dominate slow movements and finales, where lyricism and dance set the tone. First movements employ many textures in addition to 2+2, above all 1+1+2 (violin 1 and 2 in imitation or dialogue, viola and basso together); 2+1+1 (violins together, viola and basso independent); 1+3 (melody in violin 1, remaining parts together); and 1+2+1 (melody in violin 1, inner parts together, independent basso). In addition, the viola, basso, or both instruments regularly drop out, leaving reduced textures of two or three upper strings. The options can succeed one another with dizzying speed: the first movement of Sammartini’s Symphony in C (Jenkins-Churgin 7, c. 1730) registers twelve shifts of texture in only 112 bars.¹³ Demarcating the arrival of new musical ideas and harmonies, the shifts also create a drama of their own, a comedy of instrumental role switching for which the ideas and harmonies are themselves a vehicle.

Ensemble and style connect further in the so-called Trommelbass (‘drum bass’), the repeated crotchets or quavers in the basso that pervade many symphonies through the 1770s, including those with winds. Accommodating a new emphasis on homophonic, melody-and-accompaniment textures and an associated slowing in the rate of harmonic change, repeated bass notes invested long-held chords with a sense of rhythmic motion. They also highlighted one of the characteristic strengths of the early orchestra, namely its powerful bass: even in a small ensemble, the combination of cellos and basses, frequently doubled by bassoons, continuo and viola, would have given repeated notes a forceful resonance magnified further by the stringed instruments’ use of open strings in common keys such as C, G and D. In soft dynamics, the scoring is equally effective, producing an urgently pulsing hum. Frequently criticised as monotonous, the Trommelbass was all the same not simply a harmonic crutch but rather another means of conveying orchestral splendour.

Early symphonies with winds show the influence of another symphonic antecedent, the three-movement Italian opera overture or ‘sinfonia’. Neapolitan opera in particular cast a long shadow over orchestral technique, beginning in the 1730s with composers such as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Leonardo Leo, and continuing through the 1750s with Niccolò Jommelli and Baldassare Galuppi. Pushing contrast and homophonic clarity to new heights, they injected fresh colour through the addition of woodwinds and brass and streamlined the string textures into predominantly 2+2, Trommelbass-heavy homophony. They also pioneered widely imitated effects such as fanfare openings taking advantage of the ‘natural’ range of the brass, quiet passages featuring woodwind solos or the strings alone, and crescendos. The first two actually enjoyed longer lives in the symphony, but the last, generally attributed to Jommelli, came to rival the premier coup d’archet as the quintessential symbol of orchestral virtuosity. More than simply an increase in volume, the mid-century crescendo involved a coordinated intensification of melody (which rises), instrumentation (which grows) and rhythm (which subdivides; e.g. crotchets become quavers become semiquavers). All of this happened within four to twelve bars, leaving listeners if not breathless, as one writer claimed, then at least with a vivid impression of the orchestra’s entire sonic gamut.¹⁴

To the extent that sinfonias and concert symphonies can be distinguished (they were frequently marketed together), the latter tend to adapt Neapolitan conventions to a more mercurial and texturally diverse environment.¹⁵In the 1740s and 50s, both Sammartini and the leading symphonist in Vienna, Georg Christoph Wagenseil, used one or two pairs of winds to double the strings, play brief solos, or support the harmony, either in short punctuating chords or in long tones that sustain behind the strings. They also silenced the winds periodically to expose the contrasting colour of the strings alone. Thus far their works recall Leo or Jommelli, as does the use of slow movements, and the second key areas of fast movements, to feature wind solos or the strings by themselves. Yet the concert symphonies often have more changes of colour than the sinfonias, switching many times between the full ensemble or ‘tutti’ and various smaller groupings. Despite a predominance of homophony, moreover, the textures frequently grow quite complicated, whether due to counterpoint between the violins (as in many works of Sammartini), or the mixing of strings and winds in different roles. In an elaborate example from the first movement of Wagenseil’s Symphony in G (Kucaba G3), the first violin dialogues with the oboes on the principal melody of the second key area, while the second violin holds a pedal tone with the horn, and violas and basso play two distinct accompanimental figures.

Still more elaborate are Johann Stamitz’s symphonies, especially the late works of c. 1754–7, by which time he was leading an already excellent ensemble at Mannheim and had experienced the orchestras of Paris as well.¹⁶ He was indebted to Jommelli on several counts, including the crescendo, which he used frequently.¹⁷ He also explored new role divisions among the strings, activated the viola and basso with scales and melodic figures, and featured the winds – two woodwinds and two horns – with an enthusiasm matched in the 1750s only by other Mannheim composers such as Franz Xaver Richter and Anton Fils. The woodwinds (oboes, flutes or clarinets) always have at least one, and more often two featured episodes in the fast movements, and both woodwinds and horns regularly double the principal melody in the strings, which incorporates plenty of triad- and scale-based material suitable for the brass. In addition, though they frequently sit out the slow movements, the winds dominate the minuet-trio movements found between the slow movement and the finale in all the late works. Indeed, while Stamitz’s addition of a fourth movement has been much celebrated as a formal innovation, it was no less consequential for orchestration. Symphonic minuets returned again and again to the brassy, top-heavy sound Stamitz achieved with horn-ready melodies and heavy wind doubling, and likewise innumerable trios served, like his, as oases of pastoral lyricism scored for winds alone or with subdued string accompaniment.

By 1760 the eight-part scoring of strings and two pair of winds, sometimes augmented by trumpets and timpani, had become standard. It would remain so for two decades and even longer among some composers, although performance practice accommodated variations such as the playing of woodwind parts by different instruments in different orchestras and the omission of trumpets and timpani (or their addition to works that lacked them). The parts themselves settled into consistent roles, with the violins presenting most of the melodic ideas, the lower strings playing a lot of Trommelbass and other harmonic support, and the winds doubling, sustaining, punctuating and soloing. Equally consistent were contrasts in scoring that lent many symphonies a similar orchestral shape. First and last movements used the full ensemble, slow movements omitted the winds or featured them in solos, and minuets (in four-movement symphonies) performed the same switch in miniature, from tutti scoring in the minuet to strings alone or wind solos in the trio.

Contrast remained a basic principle within movements as well, where the order of colours and textures varied greatly but within common parameters that may have affected audience reception. Most importantly, the opening sections of many first movements incorporated some or all of four common ingredients: ‘melodic’ tuttis, which were homophonic and used for principal musical ideas; ‘concerted’ tuttis with counterpoint, motivic action in the basso and sustained chords, used for harmonic transitions and cadences; reduced textures for the strings alone or strings with a wind solo, used again for principal ideas; and either a crescendo or quick alternations between tutti and reduced scoring, used for all purposes. Sometimes arranged so consistently as to suggest a kind of orchestrational ‘form’ (for instance in the Op. 3 symphonies of J. C. Bach), and elsewhere presented in many diverse orders (as in works by Haydn, Gossec, Ditters and other leading figures of the 1760s), these ingredients furnished a precis of orchestral effects likely to be heard later in the symphony. Their appearance near the beginning may further have suited those occasions, mentioned above, in which the finer nuances of style were lost to conversation and other distractions. The opening sequence of scorings primed audiences to perceive the swelling and diminishing of volume, the addition and subtraction of voices and other broad strokes of a performance that now mirrored, now contrasted with the hubbub of social interaction.

Orchestration as variation

Like Stamitz before him, during the 1760s and 1770s Haydn capitalised on his association with a virtuoso court orchestra to create some exceptionally rich orchestrations. The abilities of Eszterházy’s players are most evident in the showy pieces Haydn wrote within a few years of becoming their director in 1761, symphonies nos. 6–8, 31 and 72.¹⁸ They include difficult solos for winds and strings along with sounds he would not use again for some years: a wind choir accompanied by pizzicato strings (No. 6); duets in the tenor range for bassoon and cello (nos. 7 and 8); and four soloing horns (nos. 31 and 72). In less extravagant works, the orchestra must still negotiate unusually dense counterpoint – only Mozart and C. P. E. Bach ask for anything comparable – and its wind players must perform solos well beyond the conventional contexts of slow movements, trios and second key areas of fast movements.

The reliability of the musicians undoubtedly encouraged Haydn’s signature orchestral technique as well, the use of colour and texture for variation. Theme-and-variation movements offer the most obvious examples, often emphasising orchestral as much as thematic or harmonic development. Two of the early showpieces (nos. 31 and 72) end with finales that review the soloists and orchestral sections in successive variations. Later examples, particularly slow movements from the later 1770s and early 1780s, instead offer systematic, almost textbook-like illustrations of orchestral technique. While alternating between minor- and major-key versions of its theme, for example, the Allegretto of Symphony No. 63 offers the wind section both alone and accompanied; the tutti in dialogue with three-part strings; a grand concluding tutti; and no fewer than four different homophonic string textures, including one in which the flute doubles the melody in the first violins (a favourite sound of Haydn’s). Haydn is not always so didactic, but orchestration figures large right through his last, alternating variation set in the second movement of Symphony No. 103, where the strings and winds trade and redecorate both themes.¹⁹

An aspect of Haydn’s broader tendency to develop musical ideas continuously, his use of colour and texture as means of variation also occurs outside actual variation movements. Any thematic repetition is a candidate, whether immediate, as in the parallel phrases of antecedent-consequent pairings, or delayed, as in the reprises and recapitulations of sonata, rondo and minuet forms. The second possibility takes dramatic form in several first movements from the 1760s, where the openings of the recapitulations depart significantly from the movements’ opening bars: strings take over what were originally themes for winds, or vice versa (nos. 8, 24, 31 and 72), or the winds interject previously unheard solos and elaborations (nos. 6, 13, 30 and 35). Often encompassing domains beyond orchestration (e.g. nos. 24 and 31 both shift from major to minor), the changes help figure the recapitulation as a new event in a still-unfolding drama.

In the 1770s and 1780s, orchestral variation becomes less dramatic but more pervasive, especially following Haydn’s oft-remarked turn towards a more popular style around 1774. During this time his orchestration grows more transparent and consistent, with less counterpoint, more Trommelbass and textures of longer duration to match more expansive tunes and forms. The new expansiveness means that melodies are often played twice in succession or divided into antecedent and consequent phrases, in which case the first or antecedent hearing is frequently given to the strings, and the second or consequent to the winds (e.g. nos. 68, 74 or 84). Something similar happens in sonata- and rondo-form reprises, where themes played initially by the strings return doubled by one or more wind instruments – or, if already doubled the first time around, with a different doubling (e.g. nos. 56, 66 and 82). Still another possibility involves themes distributed among multiple instruments, like a swaying minuet tune in the first movement of Symphony No. 76, whose first two bars are played by the horns and flute, the next two by the oboes, and the remaining four by all the winds. Itself an increasingly common way to create contrast within themes, dialogue of this kind practically begs to be varied, and the subtlety of the recombinations belies the apparent simplicity of Haydn’s ‘popular’ manner. By the end of the first movement of No. 76, the wind section has shared the tune in four different ways, each time to a different string accompaniment. Much as in Sammartini’s textural changes of several decades before, the switching of instrumental roles becomes a drama all its own.

In the 1770s and 1780s Mozart used colour and texture in comparable ways, though with fewer effects on his recapitulations and reprises. More often he altered immediate thematic repetitions, especially by reconfiguring ever more elaborate dialogues between strings and winds (e.g. K 183 in G minor, K 200 in C, the ‘Paris’ Symphony K 297 in D, or K 550 in G minor). Variations like these, or like Haydn’s of the same period, are common coin among prominent symphonists of the following decades such as Adalbert Gyrowetz, Paul Wranitzky, Anton Eberl, Ignaz Josef Pleyel and Beethoven: witness Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C (1800), where all the principal themes of the first movement are rescored in the recapitulation. The new generation did not, however, follow the example of Haydn’s own symphonies of the 1790s, in which variation achieves an unparalleled complexity amidst increasingly developmental forms.²⁰ Whether in variation, rondo, or sonata movements, scarcely a melody returns in the ‘London’ symphonies without the texture being changed or new instruments adding doubling and countermelodies. In first movements, moreover, where recapitulations routinely depart from the expositions, orchestration takes on quasi-narrative qualities, for example when opening themes are heard twice or more in the course of an exposition, and different scorings raise the question of which version will return later on. The answer typically provides a kind of colouristic ‘resolution’, as multiple possibilities are combined (nos. 96, 98 and 104), a missing option filled in (No. 100, where a tutti replaces competing string and wind scorings), or other expectations set up and fulfilled. In Symphony No. 102, back-to-back renderings of the opening theme juxtapose a vigorous tutti with a reduced texture featuring solo flute. The second version returns as a ‘false recapitulation’ midway through the development section, then disappears at the beginning of the real recapitulation. Yet rather than let the flute represent a mistaken alternative or formal disorder, Haydn has it play the theme again just before the final cadence. A colouristic reprise thus settles the last unfinished business of the movement.²¹

New contrasts

The nuance of Haydn’s variations, and of colouring generally in the last two decades of the century, was facilitated by modifications to wind scoring. In the 1770s wind instruments began to appear in all slow movements, not just those in which they played solos. In addition, by 1780 many composers had introduced one or two independent bassoon parts as well as multiple upper woodwinds, most commonly one or two flutes with two oboes. With more voices and a more flexible bass than the horns could provide, the wind section became more self-sufficient and appeared more frequently by itself, unsupported by strings. Since the woodwinds alone could now muster harmonies in five or six parts, the section was also more frequently split in two, most commonly in passages where the winds sustained and the brass and timpani punctuated. The separation of the bassoons from the basso, finally, together with a rise in independent cello parts and more ambitious writing for the viola, brought an activity to the tenor range that eventually transformed the whole orchestral sound. The tenor instruments became the most versatile in the ensemble, playing solos, furnishing harmonies, doubling melodies at the octave and providing light basses in various reduced textures. While they also united with the double basses to reconstitute the old basso, their primary effect was to mitigate the familiar opposition between bass and treble. Already in the 1770s and early 1780s, symphonies by C. P. E. Bach (Wq 183), Gossec (Brook 83–5), Ditters (now von Dittersdorf; see Grave Am1, and the symphonies on Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Cannabich (nos. 46, 57, 59 and 63) and others showed the effects, their sound growing fuller and more diffuse, and their gradations of colour ever finer.²²

Mozart was populating his middle ranges even in the early 1770s, writing extensive sustaining parts for the winds and using the inner strings as much to fill in the harmonies – often with double stops, tremolo and arpeggios – as to reinforce the outer parts. He placed particular confidence in the violas, making them equal partners in contrapuntal passages and frequently splitting them into two lines (‘divisi’) that double violin or woodwind pairings an octave below (e.g. K 84, 114, 162 and 200). The last remained a popular device among many composers through the end of the century, and Mozart himself found additional ways to expand the viola’s role: the opening of the Symphony in G minor (K 550), with its divisi violas murmuring an accompaniment to the violins, is an emblematic example. In the later symphonies as in the piano concertos and operas, Mozart also greatly expanded the responsibilities of the winds. In addition to playing without the strings, they reverse roles with them and accompany melodies that are no longer harmonised within the string section itself – for example, an exchange between bass and treble in the second movement of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (K 551 in C), where strings in bare octaves play against pulsing chords in the bassoons and horns. The winds also acquired enhanced solo roles, especially in melodic dialogues between multiple winds or between winds and strings.²³

The last innovation is especially significant inasmuch as many other symphonies of the 1780s – Dittersdorf’s and Cannabich’s, for example, and even Haydn’s to an extent – continued to ‘feature’ the winds, assigning them self-contained and often extended melodies in favourite places (expanded from slow movements, trios and second themes to include variations, rondo episodes and closing themes in sonata forms). Where shorter solos and dialogues occurred, the context tended to be developmental, as when fragments of a theme are sequenced in different keys. Mozart was more likely to build such exchanges into the themes themselves. The Allegro of the ‘Prague’ Symphony (K 504 in D) opens with a back-and-forth between string antecedent and wind consequent, followed by a repetition of the antecedent with oboe countermelody. At closer range, strings and winds divide the antecedent of the second key area of K 550, with the order of entries reversed on repetition. Closer still, violins, horns and bassoons alternate nearly bar-by-bar in the opening theme of the Symphony in E flat (K 543), constructing a virtual ‘tone-colour melody’ that later shifts to bass strings, clarinets and flute. No longer only a means for distinguishing parts of a form, or even phrases in a melody, orchestral contrast could now define the very identity of the musical idea.

The force of Mozart’s later symphonies opened another dimension of contrast, a familiar but vastly magnified distinction between tutti and reduced scoring. It was inherited, at least in part, from symphonies and orchestras he heard in Mannheim and Paris during 1777–8, which influenced the formal and expressive designs of several of his works.²⁴Most striking, passages like the opening of the ‘Paris’ Symphony reveal a new insistence on the sheer grandeur of the tutti. Three bars of a D major chord, scored for full orchestra and articulated only by minim rhythms, sound all the more massive by comparison to an answering figure for violins alone, and they also postpone any real musical action; the movement gets underway only after the chord and violin figure have been repeated and a contrapuntal development begun. The power of what precedes is due only in part to Mozart’s expanded instrumentation (seventeen parts: strings, timpani and six pairs of winds). Appropriately likened to slow introductions, such openings occur also in eight- and eleven-part works written for Mannheim and Paris in the 1770s, whose orchestras must have sounded impressive even without the extra winds (e.g. in Gossec’s symphonies in F and C, Brook 83 and 85, or Cannabich’s nos. 55 and 57).

After 1780, ever grander tuttis reinforced a long-standing association between symphonies and the sublime. The interwoven textures, chorus-like agglomerations of instruments, and indeed the dynamic and colouristic contrasts of symphonies had already been deemed exalted and awe-inspiring.²⁵ Now the last of these became epochal in scope. Openings like that of the ‘Paris’ Symphony became a regular feature of actual slow introductions, sometimes expanded as in Wranitzky’s Symphony in D (Op. 36), where a rolling tutti stretches several bars before giving way to an elegant string melody; and sometimes reduced as in many of Haydn’s late works, where short bursts of sound alternate with various quiet responses. Other examples engender some of the most memorable fractures in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century symphonies. In the first movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’, a tutti blast of C minor answers the trailing off of the strings in the second key area; in the second movement of Haydn’s ‘Military’ Symphony (No. 100), an even bigger blast of A flat (seventeen parts plus triangle, cymbal and bass drum) counters the dwindling to pianissimo of the main theme – ‘a climax of horrid sublimity’, according to one observer.²⁶And in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (No. 3 in E flat), which adds only a third horn to the standard seventeen-part ensemble, the infamous dissonant tutti of the development section collapses into a familiar if updated reduced texture, woodwind melody accompanied by strings. The narrative weight these moments bear should not obscure their role as orchestral effects, successors to a long line of dramatic contrasts. Once again they broadcast the discipline, breadth and visceral impact that made orchestras famous, and that symphonies absorbed into the very heart of their style.

Beethoven’s shadow

Responses to Beethoven

The shadow of the Ninth

Because of its unusual vocal Finale, with its integration of so many different forms and styles, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became an object of protracted attention for critics and composers alike. The critical reception of the Ninth was mixed in the early decades. Even Mendelssohn, the one post-Beethovenian composer who seems to have grasped Beethoven’s late style better than any of his contemporaries, harboured ambivalent feelings about the Ninth’s Finale. ‘The instrumental movements belong to the greatest of all that I know in the world of art’, he wrote to his friend the historian Gustav Droysen in 1837. But ‘from the point at which the voices enter’, Mendelssohn confessed, ‘I, too, do not understand the work; that is, I find only isolated elements to be perfect, and when this is the case with such a Master, the fault probably lies with us. Or in the performance.’ Schumann felt similarly divided, confiding to his diary in February 1841 that although the first two movements had brought him ‘great pleasure’, he had ‘not yet entirely understood the last two movements, in which I can not yet find the thread’. The noted conductor Hans von Bülow condemned the Finale for having ‘trespassed over music’s boundaries’ and even omitted it from performances, conducting only the first three movements. And most famously of all, Wagner pointed to the Ninth’s Finale as evidence that instrumental music had reached its limits and that even Beethoven, the greatest of all instrumental composers, had been compelled to ‘redeem’ music from its ‘intrinsic element’ by introducing a sung text.²⁴

Mendelssohn nevertheless openly used the Ninth as a model for his Lobgesang (1840), with three instrumental movements followed by a lengthy Finale for orchestra, vocal soloists and chorus. Although warmly greeted at its premiere for Leipzig’s festival honouring the four-hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg’s printing press, the Lobgesang eventually became a whipping boy of sorts, a work that imitated Beethovenian forms all too closely. Without citing it by name, Wagner wrote scornfully of it:

Wagner would express no such scorn for two works written a few years later by his close friend and future father-in-law, Franz Liszt, whose Faust and Dante symphonies both end in brief choruses.

In the end, only a relatively small number of nineteenth-century symphonies would culminate in a vocal finale, as Table 14.1 explains. Far more numerous were those works that end in what might be called an implicitly vocal finale, that is, a movement that evokes the sound of a chorus through purely instrumental means alone (see Table 14.2). The Finale of Brahms’s First Symphony (1876) is the best-known instance of such a finale, with multiple ‘vocal’ themes: the lyrical main melody openly reminiscent of the ‘Ode to Joy’ (bar 62); an alphorn-like theme that evokes the ranz des vaches of alpine shepherds (bar 30); and a chorale-like apotheosis presented by the brass (bar 47). But this is merely one in a long line of symphonic finales that in one way or another suggest the sound of a chorus through instruments alone. Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Gade, Spohr, Raff, Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns and Bruckner had all employed a similar device in at least one earlier symphony, and Mahler would bring the tradition to a spectacular close in the nineteenth century with his First and Third Symphonies.

Table 14.1 Nineteenth-century symphonies with choral finales

Table 14.2 Nineteenth-century symphonies with implicitly choral finales

With the passage of time, Beethoven’s shadow began to recede: composers like Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms had demonstrated beyond question that the symphony remained a viable genre, an attitude that was by no means a given half a century before. These later composers, moreover, had created shadows of their own, so that from the 1840s onwards, layers of influence become all the more difficult to distinguish. The symphonies of Niels Gade (1817–90), for example, bear unmistakable traces of Mendelssohn’s approach to the genre in their thematic material, orchestration and formal design. The Symphony in D minor (1888) by César Franck (1822–90), in turn, owes much to Beethoven’s Fifth, with its cyclic form and minor-to-major trajectory, yet it could also be argued that Franck’s chromaticism, orchestration and intricate web of thematic transformations were shaped even more profoundly by the later music dramas of Wagner.

By the end of the century, the symphonic landscape had changed profoundly. The profusion of individual styles, the growing importance of nationalistic tendencies, the ever-expanding range of harmonic possibilities and the expansion of the orchestra itself all combined to create a broader range of options for symphonists. Composers could also count on more venues in which to present their symphonies, for by 1900 every municipality with aspirations to cultural status either had or wanted to have its own standing orchestra. Even in the New World, an orchestral backwater for most of the nineteenth century, civic orchestras had become a point of special cultural pride. Ensembles that still exist today were established in New York (1842), St Louis (1880), Boston (1881), Chicago (1891), Cincinnati (1894) and Philadelphia (1900).

‘A symphony’, Mahler is alleged to have declared to Jean Sibelius in 1907, ‘must be like the world: it must be all-embracing.’²⁶ And what was to be embraced, in Mahler’s view, included even Beethoven’s shadow, so that when in his Second Symphony he reverted to a pattern of tumultuous instrumental movements ‘redeemed’ by subsequent vocal ones, even the harshest of his contemporary critics did not take him to task for following the model of the Ninth Symphony too closely. Mahler, and other composers after him in the twentieth century, would continue to look to Beethoven as the paradigmatic composer of symphonies, but by 1900, time had healed all – or at least most – anxieties.

Characteristics and programmes

In the second of her Lettres d’un Voyageur, George Sand noted that:

Since Gessner’s literary and artistic works are not without pretensions to the sublime, Sand’s revised impressions are not entirely purged of Miltonic associations. Nor is it clear that they should be. The history of the programme symphony is only partly about composers’ intentions, or indeed about their response to extra-musical stimuli. The search for programmatic points of reference in ‘abstract’ forms such as the symphony has been a source of entertainment to listeners from the ‘Pastoral’ onwards, certainly, and even before. One result of this has been to obscure what may legitimately be defined as a ‘programme symphony’. The ‘Pastoral’ helps to formulate one of the difficulties. Beethoven’s famous claim that it embodied feeling rather than representation seems to make it a key stage in the evolution of the programme symphony. Yet this has not proved incompatible with viewing it as a ‘characteristic symphony’ in the baroque manner. F. E. Kirby equated the central concept in the history of the programme symphony, the ‘poetic idea’, with a ‘single emotional character or quality throughout’. He defined ‘characteristic’ as ‘an attribute or set of attributes that distinguishes or characterizes something’ and that could involve either uniqueness or typicality, and suggested a repertory based on style and other factors that was the appropriate area for a music of this kind.⁶

The idea of a characteristic symphony has not been without influence. The increasing attention paid to it has led to some rehabilitation of Arnold Schering’s views of programmatic traces in composers of the classical era, as when James Webster noted that his ‘lack of attention to the distinction between authentic and inauthentic evidence and infelicities in the concrete interpretations’ did not prevent his article being ‘the best single survey of Haydn’s programmatic symphonies we have’.⁷ Webster cites evidence relating to Haydn’s portrayal of ‘moral characters’ or ‘characteristics’, which seems to go beyond what Kirby had in mind; a later writer on Haydn moves characteristics away from Kirby’s style-based examples to ‘connotations of emotion, unity, and humanity’.⁸ This seems to rehabilitate the programme in Haydn in a manner more akin to Schering’s ‘poetic idea, programme, or “romanzetto”’; but Webster had already distinguished between ‘programmatic or extramusical associations’ and symphonies that were ruled by ‘“characteristic” topoi . . . to be understood as associational, rather than as representations of tangible objects’, which seems to rework Beethoven’s famous formula.⁹ And it is clear that Webster views Haydn’s ‘explicitly characteristic symphonies’ as relatively early works devoted to times of the day, weather, the hunt and the sacred.¹⁰

The question arises as to whether the programme symphony emerged from the characteristic symphony or whether the latter was merely a subset of the former. Webster introduced the notion of a ‘strong’ programme (as in the case of Il Distratto) that depended on the dissemination of a work in association with a specific idea (which could be expanded to embrace a narrative) and thus stood above mere associations or characteristics.¹¹ That this is a better model for nineteenth-century orchestral music is arguable. But Webster also treats the ‘Farewell’ Symphony as a programmatic work based on an explicit narrative. There is a leap of faith here that is akin to later enterprises that would be labelled hermeneutic. The famous tale of the elaborately staged withdrawal of the musicians in the Finale is extended to the whole work, and its provenance is assumed to be authentic.¹²That there must inevitably be a doubt about this properly locates the ‘Farewell’ Symphony in the category claimed by Ludwig Finscher for the uncertain area ‘between absolute and programme music’, which is where George Sand should probably be located with her pleasant fantasies about Milton and Gessner.¹³

It is possible to note that characteristic and programme symphonies are rightly to be distinguished from one another by degrees of authority in the provenance of ideas or narratives, but that there is constant interchanging of elements between the two areas, reinforced by the open invitation to speculate provided by associations that are usually implicitly extramusical. But this does not resolve the questions of terminology on any firm basis. Even the description ‘characteristic symphony’ seems a little imposed on music by the musicologists’ desire to classify. The most exhaustive study of the characteristic in music between 1750 and 1850 has found only four explicit uses of ‘characteristic symphony’, among them the ‘Pastoral’ on the strength of a sketch rather than a title, and Spohr’s Die Weihe der Töne.¹⁴ The idea of the characteristic is thus as much a tool for interpretation as an explicit genre. And it also helps to distinguish between the ‘literary’ programme symphony that stems certainly from Liszt and Berlioz, and those works that celebrate nature through the use of topoi; the distinction may be illustrated somewhat later by the contrast between the seasonal symphonies by Raff and his more explicitly literary Lenore.

Finally, it is arguable that the nineteenth-century programme symphony operated at least in part by creating its own characteristic topoi to replace more conventional affects, or alternatively marshalled the characteristic into newer contexts by narrative programmes and associations with literature. In support of this may be cited a recent analysis of Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony by John Toews. He reads the work as programmatic in a double sense: the ambition ‘to recreate the essence of Bach’s sacred music for a new age’; and ‘the elevation of the individual soul into the divine order’.¹⁵ In the first sense, the formal structures are the programmatic content, and the characteristics are the psalm tone, amen and chorale that Mendelssohn cites (quotation is a major theme in studies of programmatic content, as already is evident in Schering’s and Webster’s tracking of liturgical elements in Haydn’s symphonies).¹⁶ The ‘Reformation’ is therefore ‘an historical program symphony’ whose generic echoes may be analysed hermeneutically (a more complex version of the explicitly historical symphony that Spohr essayed somewhat later). Bach’s music stands for the Reformation that ensured the triumph of the second element. Quotations and generic references became central to, and substitute for the ‘characteristic’ in the nineteenth-century programme symphony, as ‘an essential means of rendering more precise the spoken character of the music’.¹⁷

Nineteenth-century dilemmas

Beethoven supplied the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony with something more than mere movement titles. In this respect, arguably he outstripped Berlioz in one of the key works of the emergence of the programme symphony, Harold en Italie. The status of Berlioz as a composer of programme symphonies is currently rather uncertain, given that only one of his four symphonies, Symphonie fantastique, can be considered programmatic in the strong sense: it was disseminated with a declared extramusical idea elaborated into a narrative. Stephen Rodgers, the latest writer to consider how far Berlioz contributed to the genre, takes a rather broader view of the matter than some of his predecessors.¹⁸ Is Roméo et Juliette to be considered dramatic or programmatic, or perhaps a mixture of the two? The question is hardly specific to Berlioz, since there are other works both by contemporaries (for example Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang) and by later composers (Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and Sibelius’s Kullervo) that tell stories partly by instrumental associative means, partly by direct setting of texts. Here the manner in which Berlioz interpreted Beethoven is of interest, since Rodgers points out that Berlioz interpreted Beethoven’s Sixth and Ninth symphonies in similar ways, treating the programmatic clues of the one in much the same way as the literary text setting in the other.¹⁹ Regardless of origin, interpretation yielded a ‘poetic’ narrative. With Berlioz, there is early evidence of Mark Evan Bonds’s notion, broached in Chapter 14, of adapting the Ninth Symphony’s ‘basic strategy to purely instrumental symphonies by imbuing implicitly vocal ideas with a quality of transcendence’.²⁰ But with Berlioz, a real narrative is often created, whereas modern reading of Beethoven’s symphonies tends to concentrate on ‘an implied significance that overflows the musical scenario, lending a sense of extramusical narrative to otherwise untranslatable events’.²¹ The narrative sense or shape in Beethoven helps to explain why musicologists have manoeuvred ‘between absolute and programme music’.

Some commentators in Germany drew quite explicit parallels between Berlioz’s achievement in his symphonies and the ‘Pastoral’: Peter Cornelius saw Harold en Italie as the successor to the ‘Pastoral’ but without Beethoven’s inwardness (a topos of New-German Berlioz criticism).²²But among other commentators on the programme symphony, such as Richard Pohl, who was even more receptive to New-German ideas, it is clear that it was above all the vocal Ninth, not the ‘Pastoral’, which was the foundation of the modern symphony.²³ That the modern symphony was programmatic was a given, but ‘in the higher sense’ involving ‘a quite specific ring of ideas with a precisely formulated musical content, to ally poetic intentions with the musical content . . .’²⁴ The specific idea was not necessarily as detailed as a programme book, felt by Pohl to be welcome but not absolutely essential.²⁵ It is in the face of comments such as these that it becomes apparent that ‘programmatic’ has come to mean something rather different from the characteristic or the topos.

As the most persistent advocate of programmatic interpretation of the nineteenth-century symphony, Constantin Floros has isolated as the key idea in Liszt the notion of ‘Erzählung innerer Vorgänge’, elaborated by Liszt as some common factor in nation or epoch whose interest resided more in ‘inner events than in the actions of the external world’.²⁶ The specific turn that the programme symphony took in the nineteenth century was thus in some part an interpretation by writers digesting the lessons of Herder and Hegel; programmes and poetic ideas were reflections of ideals, a notion that jumps out of the pages of Franz Brendel, the chief propagandist of the New German School. When it came to drawing lessons from Berlioz’s programme symphonies, he differed in subtle ways from Franz Liszt. One writer has accurately noted that Brendel’s starting point was idealism, whereas Liszt was more inclined to invoke nature and its imagined laws.²⁷As a result, Brendel gave intellectual credibility to the German tradition that viewed Berlioz as ‘more the representation of outer than inner feelings’ and hence of a failure to build adequately on the inner psychological Tonmalerei represented by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.²⁸

It almost certainly was not Liszt’s concern to establish such a picture of Berlioz when he produced his celebrated essay on Harold, an essay that is as much about the type of music Liszt wanted to write as the music that Berlioz had written. Thus he compared Berlioz’s first two symphonies as poems to Byron, Senancourt and Jean Paul, and specifically related this to psychological depiction.²⁹ Liszt’s aim was ‘the poetic programme and the characteristic melody’ and something of that was to be found in Berlioz as well as drama; indeed the drama was to be found in symphonic form in Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust as well as in Roméo.³⁰ Programmes, poetic ideas and the symphonic in Liszt’s picture of Berlioz were to some degree independent of genre and also of mere narrative. As Wolfgang Dömling has noted, it was no accident that Liszt chose to write of the symphony by Berlioz that had no direct narrative rather than the Symphonie fantastique.³¹ Among Liszt’s own works, it has been claimed that there are certain instances where ‘the program is not the crucial form-determining factor it has long been assumed to be’.³² This view is based mainly on pieces with allusive titles that hint at Liszt’s ‘modern’ hero of a ‘philosophical epoch’: Tasso, Prometheus, Orpheus and Faust. This group of works is based on ‘the numerous and prominent correspondences between these pieces and earlier compositional and theoretical models of sonata construction’.³³ It also continues to treat symphonic poems alongside programme symphonies under the same aesthetic banner; Liszt’s highly ambivalent legacy to the writing of programmatic orchestral music. If the traditional picture of the programme symphony in the hands of Berlioz and Liszt involved extensive mixing of genres, then the years that followed Liszt’s works produced a plethora of terms and titles that thoroughly confused the concept of how poetic ideas and symphonic music might go together.

Epigoni and hybrids

If we ask what distinguished the programme symphony in the later nineteenth century from the host of other descriptions that owed something to the idea of a symphonic poem, it is possible to answer at the level of generalities:

This distinction relegates the extramusical to the level of the secondary. The definition would do to distinguish symphonic poem from programme symphony, abstract symphony and Finscher’s hybrids. But it is at least arguable that it is easier to say what a programme symphony is or might be than to define a symphonic poem. Something of this might be apparent from consideration of that strange area in the composition of symphonic works that stretches from the last symphonic utterances of Liszt and Spohr in the late 1850s to the appearance of Brahms’s First Symphony in 1876, a period marked by the evolution of various ‘nationalist’ symphonists and the earliest works by Bruckner, and by much else that has been described under the term ‘forgotten symphonies’ (this gap is filled in by David Brodbeck in Chapter 4).³⁵

One catalogue of symphonic novelties in the period 1850 to 1875 (Table 15.1) reveals these among numerous other generic titles (some so specific as to be hardly generic).³⁶ The influence of ‘symphonic poetry’ is traceable in quite a few of these (even more when descriptive titles augment the generic description), and yet they outnumber the group of explicitly entitled symphonic poems. Although not so noted by Grotjahn, they also stand up well to the number of symphonies whose titles proclaim them to be in some measure programmatic.³⁷When we consider this neglected area, it is quite thinkable that Finscher’s now celebrated formula be adapted to suggest not merely the lurking presence of quasi-programmatic content in abstract-seeming symphonies, but also programmatic works whose resemblance to ‘absolute music’ is close enough to engender confusion, as well as works between symphony and symphonic poem that flirt with the idea of the programmatic but withhold the substance (as in Brahms’s tantalisingly entitled Tragische Ouvertüre, which has its symphonic counterpart in Draeseke’s Symphonia tragica).

Table 15.1 Rebecca Grotjahn’s catalogue of mid-nineteenth-century generic titles

As an example of the manner in which programmatic elements may infiltrate abstract designs with apparently minimal change to normal working procedures, we can take Friedrich Gernsheim’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor, which, the composer noted, had its ‘point of departure’ in the idea of ‘Miriam’s Song of Victory’ (the composer in his youth had been greatly taken by Handel’s Israel in Egypt).³⁸ Yet he denied that it was programme music (perhaps to be expected in a composer reckoned among the followers of Brahms by contemporaries) and insisted that it was a mood picture, thus begging the questions of how far a mood picture incorporated a ‘poetic idea’, especially since the second movement was acknowledged as a portrait of Miriam herself in distress on a summer night by the banks of the Nile with timbrel. Yet the context of Gernsheim’s programmatic comments indicates that this is essentially a work of struggle and triumph on the model of two other symphonies in C minor, and is not to be regarded as more or less programmatic than Beethoven’s Fifth or Brahms’s First. Nor is it substantially different in style, technique and form from Gernsheim’s other symphonies. As one instance we may take a feature of the first movement: the development and reprise are elided, with no real thematic return to the first subject – the reprise is tonal until the entry of the second subject renders it also thematic. This is only slightly more extreme than Gernsheim’s practices in his other first movements: to alter the return of the first subject by placing it over a dominant pedal, by inverting its position from treble to bass, or by abbreviating it and altering its continuation. His finales exhibit the same range of tricks with more emphasis perhaps on rescoring than rewriting. The Third Symphony essentially preserves the main features of symphonic form that Gernsheim inherited from Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. Only the presence of a harp (a sign of lurking narrative content) betrays an interesting departure from the composer’s normal practice. Of this ‘Miriam’ Symphony, it is possible to echo Michael Kennedy’s summary of Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony: ‘This is a programme symphony, but it is also perfectly acceptable as “absolute” music.’³⁹

By comparison, a composer like Joachim Raff who had belonged (albeit half-heartedly) to the New German School went rather further in adapting symphonic form to programmatic purposes. This was more marked in works with literary or quasi-literary programmes than in those that recall the characteristic symphony. Thus the symphonies (nos. 8–11) based on the four seasons and the Symphony No. 7, ‘In the Alps’, all conform to four-movement form and have titles that adhere to content that was typical of such programmes from the Baroque onwards, or reinterpret them in Romantic spirit: ‘Spring’s Return’, ‘Man’s Hunt’, ‘First Snow’, ‘Harvest Laurel’, ‘By the Hearth’, ‘In the Inn’, ‘By the Lake’; and ‘Walpurgis Night’, ‘Ghost Dance’, ‘The Hunt of the Elves’. The Third Symphony, ‘Im Walde’, imposes a part structure on the movements in anticipation of Mahler’s practice in some symphonies, which reflects a slightly more elaborate programmatic framework, particularly in the Finale, with its evocation of Wotan, Frau Holle and the Wild Hunt. In this it anticipates the much more literary Fifth Symphony, which groups its four movements into three parts: Liebesglück (embracing a sonata Allegro and a slow movement); Trennung (a military march for a departing hero); and Wiedervereinigung im Tode, an Introduction and Ballade based on Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore.

This programme includes elements of mood painting such as would have seemed acceptable to Gernsheim. In Bürger’s poem, the love idyll is not present; the opening depicts Lenore’s beloved far away at the Battle of Prague with Frederick the Great’s army. The Symphony’s stylised insistence on a happy love affair thus has no direct pictorial stimulus, and results in a sonata structure that is more extensive and tonally more wide-ranging but not substantially different in approach to that of Gernsheim in ‘Miriam’. The Andante quasi allegretto is equally plausible as an abstract symphonic argument; in echo perhaps of Liszt’s Faust Symphony the two movements of Part I privilege E, C and A♭ as tonal centres, but so would Brahms’s First Symphony when it appeared a few years later. C is also the key of the march in Part II, in which there are clear signs of an army vanishing into the distance and despairing lamentation in the trio. In this, characteristics and topoi are dominant. In stressing that the Finale is specifically linked to Bürger, Raff thus distinguishes it from the more stylised opening movements and parts, and it is here that a story is most obviously told. Elements of the march return, recalling the examples of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Berlioz’s Harold, the horse’s hoof beats sound in percussion, and after some music that can be interpreted loosely as the conversation between Lenore and her ghostly returning soldier, the remainder of the movement is dominated by his horse’s galloping figuration (Berlioz’s ‘Ride to the Abyss’ is an obvious model, more so than Liszt’s Mazeppa), and chorale phrases that reflect both passing funeral cortèges and (after the wild ride has ceased) the dying Lenore’s vision of eternity. The riding figuration is a characteristic certainly, and the chorale is one of the nineteenth-century symphony’s equivalents of a topos that inhabits programmatic and seemingly abstract works on a regular basis.

Programmes and clues to content thus hang on titles that correspond to Liszt’s well-known analogy of the ‘thread of Ariadne’, the clew that guides the listener through the novel events of the works.⁴⁰ Yet musicology has become fairly sophisticated in ‘bringing music to speech’, and it is arguable that there are plentiful hints in absolute symphonies to suggest a content that is not simply abstract. This remains true of works that followed Weimar or Leipzig. Essentially, music ‘between absolute and programme’ initially depended on quotations and allusions to provide a content. At times such readings tended towards the excessively concrete: Finscher’s attempt to relate Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony to the European craze for Scott’s novels has not found complete favour with commentators.⁴¹ This has not diluted the value of the attempt ‘to interpret from their historical context the content of musical works that traditionally had hitherto tended to be reckoned as either absolute or programmatic, and whose trans-musical dimension seems to have been submerged under arbitrary interpretation or vague general concepts’.⁴² Initially, such attempts depended on precisely the kind of elements that can be identified in Gernsheim and Raff: chorale, alphorn and quasi-Beethovenian conflict can unlock a content of a kind in Brahms’s First Symphony, to which ‘quotation’ or allusion (the ‘Joy’ theme) can add a dash of verisimilitude or homage depending on context, though whether this adds up to ‘nothing less than the most concrete and most ambitious programme of ideas that was ever to provide the foundation of a symphony between Beethoven and Mahler’ is at the very least debatable.⁴³It is perhaps more appropriately read as the basis for the kind of ‘plot archetypes’ that Anthony Newcomb has seen in Schumann and others; the narrative pattern of Beethoven’s Fifth, ‘suffering leading to healing or redemption’, is readable in Brahms and Gernsheim and also, with suitable modifications, in Bruckner.⁴⁴ Perhaps this seems meagre as general wisdom outside the context of specific analyses. Nonetheless, Finscher’s approach may be seen as the ancestor of the infinitely more subtle reading of Brahms’s Second Symphony by Reinhold Brinkmann, perhaps the most valuable study of abstraction yielding content in the literature about the nineteenth-century symphony.⁴⁵

That the generation after Liszt tended to respond in hesitant fashion to programmes in the symphony is also suggested by Tchaikovsky’s Manfred. That the presence of programmatic elements leads to a looser treatment of traditional form is not especially surprising in Tchaikovsky’s case, since his later symphonies, the Fourth and Sixth in particular, tend towards a more episodic separation of subject groups and individual themes that encourages the listener to think programmatically even where precise details are lacking. The resulting weakening of the traditional tensions of sonata form in opening movements proceeds in Manfred to the point where it makes less sense to talk about specific forms. Although the opening movement seems to begin with an introduction, a first subject in B minor and a modulating transition, the arrival of the second subject, possibly associated with Astarte, involves changes of key, tempo and metre. The sonata structure then disappears. When the ‘first subject’ returns, B minor is restored, but not the initial metre or tempo. A Lisztian threnody as combined reprise and coda (as in Hamlet) takes over. There is more than one way in which the movement might be assimilated to traditional formal structures, but the modifications operate under extramusical stimulus, as in Francesca da Rimini.

Continuity and convergence?

In his history of nineteenth-century music, Carl Dahlhaus claimed that: ‘as far as the technical assumptions of the monumental style were concerned, at the stage of compositional evolution around 1900 there was little or no difference between the symphony and the symphonic poem’.⁴⁶ He is thinking of the symphony and symphonic poem in the hands of Mahler and Strauss. Although this is far from the clearest formulation in Dahlhaus’s book, it is possible to understand his gist from consideration of what he termed Vermittlung (mediation) in Liszt between the sonata tradition and the characteristic: the idea of using changes in tone and characteristics to produce formal coherence ‘sublates the tradition of the character piece into Liszt’s conception of the symphonic’.⁴⁷ Characteristics create structural and expressive connections through restatements and transformations rather than defining a dominant tone as previously. This, accordingly, is a key to understanding both movements in symphonies (the first movement of Mahler’s Seventh is his illustration of Weltanschauungsmusik that in the absence of a specific programme of ideas can be read as ‘self-sustaining’ and ‘formal-logical’) and symphonic poems such as those by Strauss.⁴⁸

Here is an acknowledgement that an important reconciliation of ideas was taking place. That Liszt’s transformation of the symphonic by programmatic means was an important factor in the genesis of the ‘monumental’ orchestral style of the early twentieth century recognises on one hand that for all Mahler’s insistence that programmes should perish,⁴⁹ symphonies might still be ‘read’ as texts if one knew the signs. On the other hand, the role of Liszt in the evolution of the tone poems of Strauss is acknowledged in anticipation of a prominent argument of recent years. The relationship between Liszt and Strauss has been re-examined with a view to establishing to what extent they shared a common view of the status of the poetic idea in the symphonic. Recent writers have tended to consider the link a strong one: in Walter Werbeck’s view, the notion that Liszt wrote poetic music while Strauss wrote witty illustrative programmatic music has ceased to be tenable. The programmes that they chose may have been different in tone and mood, but their approaches were fundamentally similar, albeit with a substantial injection of orchestral polyphony from Wagnerian models in Strauss’s case.⁵⁰ As chapters 1 and 11 have stressed, it is possible with Strauss to see the convergence between symphony and symphonic poem move to its consummation in single-movement works that now have the dimensions of symphonies, in the Symphonia domestica and the Alpensinfonie, while with Mahler, the Lisztian ‘relativisation’ of formal categories enables symphonic movements to employ characteristics as though they were Lisztian poems.⁵¹

In spite of this, however, the programme symphony and the symphonic poem have remained stubbornly apart. It has become clear that the ‘formal-logical’ symphony with the associative title (the Harold tradition) remained alive and well to the point that commentators have regularly supplied associations that may actually diverge from the starting point of the composer’s journey (as the question of the originating idea of Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony suggests). The idea that the programme symphony might tend towards a single-movement structure, thus eliding the distinction between it and the symphonic poem, can be traced perhaps in early works by Shostakovich and in Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, but the ‘formal-logical’ symphony has followed the same path, most famously in Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7. His career as a whole followed a curious trajectory leading from a symphony that was at once programmatic, multi-movement and partly choral to a last work that was abstract, single-movement and purely instrumental. As if to indicate that programmatic and absolute still retained certain distinguishing features, the Seventh Symphony was paired at the end of the composer’s career with a symphonic poem, Tapiola. To complete the picture, sketch studies have revealed that hermeneutic clues relating to Sibelius’s sense of nature lurk within his earlier symphonies.⁵²

Coda: quotation and characteristics

The importance of quotation as key to content and ideas has been recognised in more than one study. A typical survey of the nineteenth-century symphonic literature has concentrated largely on composers who have contributed to programmatic symphonies and symphonic poems: Mendelssohn and Spohr, Berlioz and Liszt, Mahler and Strauss, with the addition of Saint-Saëns and the debatably programmatic Bruckner. What constitutes quotation is by no means clear, however, since the techniques involved included ‘changes of parameters’, compositional technique (e.g. fugue to bolster religious sonorities), citation of styles, generic references and thematic combinations.⁵³ At least a few of these encroach once more on the sphere of characteristics (e.g. stile-antico counterpoint in a Haydn symphony). The notion that the symphony could present ideas as in a public oration, as conceived in the eighteenth century, yielded to associations and poetic glimpses afforded by titles, homilies (as Liszt’s programmes often appear), appended poems and analogies; the poetic substance of works of art is treated as transmutable from literature to the visual arts to music. As a result, the relationship of ‘absolute music’ to content became complex. When Gernsheim denied that his associative allusive symphony was programmatic, he anticipated a host of others who rushed on to the bandwagon of absolute music in denial at the evocative power of citation and allusion. But who on hearing the chimes of Big Ben in Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony can believe that it is only a symphony by a Londoner? And who on discovering the echoes of war in his Pastoral Symphony can ever believe in Philip Heseltine’s cow staring over a gate?⁵⁴The listener’s impressions, like those of George Sand, change under the stimulus of interpretation, authorised and unauthorised, overt in the ‘strong’ sense, or buried among the fantasies and jottings of composers’ private letters and sketches.

Context and infrastructure

At the time of the October revolution in 1917, Russian musical life was rich and international in outlook.¹ The capital until March 1918, St Petersburg (after 1917 Petrograd, then Leningrad), was well established as a European musical centre, with a flourishing modern music scene. In Switzerland, Stravinsky was still at work on Les Noces; in Russia, Prokofiev was just beginning his professional career and the internationally acclaimed star of the Imperial Opera Fyodor Chaliapin was at the height of his international fame when the Bolshevik takeover turned their country upside down. The financial and administrative consequences of the revolution were quickly felt, as previous sources of financial support for musical institutions collapsed, affecting every institution from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theatres to the Conservatoires as well as the private finances of Russia’s most distinguished musicians and composers. Previously funded by a mixture of Imperial and private sponsorship, in 1918 all institutions became wholly dependent on the State in accordance with the Soviet policy of nationalisation. As early as February 1917, the Petersburg Imperial Orchestra was renamed the State Symphony Orchestra, directed at first by Serge Koussevitzky; under its second conductor Emil Cooper (from 1920), it became the State, then the Leningrad, Philharmonia. By the spring/summer of 1918 there were already several orchestras active in Petrograd, including the demobilised Preobrazhensky orchestra, who gave classical concerts that included two symphonic cycles devoted to Beethoven and to Wagner’s music. Other symphonic concerts took place in the Theatre of Music Drama and their programmes consisted of the same mainstream repertoire: Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Rimsky Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Skryabin. The State Philharmonia ran a series of ‘People’s Concerts’ aimed at the new mass audience: programmes included Mozart’s Requiem, Berlioz’s Funeral and Triumphal Symphony, the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Skryabin’s Prometheus. In these early years before emigration decimated the ranks of musical talent in Russia, Nikolai Tcherepnin, Albert Coates, Aleksandr Ziloti, Gregor Fitelberg and Serge Koussevitzky were the main conductors at these concerts.² In Moscow, theatre orchestras gave the majority of symphonic concerts, headed by the orchestra of the Bolshoi; the Moscow Philharmonia (Mosfil), founded in 1921, was for a time known as Rosfil (the Russian Orchestra of the Soviet Philharmonia), and after 1928 as Sofil (Soviet Orchestra of the Philharmonia). In addition to these pre-revolutionary survivors, one especially important new ensemble was formed: Persimfans, the famous conductorless orchestra, which was founded by Lev Tseitlin in 1922 and survived until 1932.

The body charged with the administration of cultural affairs was Narkompros, the Commissariat for Enlightenment, headed by the liberally inclined Anatoly Lunacharsky (until 1929). But in the traditional informal Russian fashion, various semi-formal ‘circles of friends’ still met during the 1920s to discuss and share their musical interests, and the most productive of these, at least initially, was the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM) based in Moscow (established in 1923), and its short-lived Leningrad counterpart, the LASM (established in 1926). Their concerns were chiefly the performance of new Western and Soviet music, and their membership was influential enough to sponsor major musical events, symphonic and chamber concerts, and to liaise with the International Society for Contemporary Music in sending Soviet composers to ISCM festivals in Europe. The foremost Soviet musicologist, Boris Asafiev (pseudonym Igor Glebov), coordinated similar events in Leningrad. The other major group was dedicated to furthering the cause of music written by and for the proletariat: the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). Initially founded in 1923 with a handful of members, RAPM gradually grew in strength and influence to the point where, by 1930, they were easily the dominant force in Soviet musical life. This chapter in Soviet musical history has been well documented, and it is necessary only to note that, with the Central Committee’s Resolution of 1932 ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations’, all factionalism in cultural life came to an abrupt halt, to be replaced by creative unions that were directly answerable to the powerful, State-monitored Committee of Arts Affairs.³

Despite cultural losses caused by the wave of emigration after 1917, the period 1920 to (approximately) 1937 was an extremely fertile period of cultural exchange between Russia and Western Europe. Visiting foreign conductors included Otto Klemperer and Fritz Stiedry (both until 1937), Oscar Fried (who made his permanent home in Moscow), Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber, Hermann Abendrot and Heinz Unger; George Szell and Alexander Zemlinsky also visited the Soviet Union. These were musicians deeply steeped in Austro-German tradition and who were largely responsible for the popularity of Mahler in Leningrad in the 1920s and 30s.⁴ Under their direction, Soviet audiences heard an impressive range of Western music, both old and new. A glance at concert programmes from the late 1920s gives a fair idea of typical concert repertoire during these years. In February 1929 Klemperer and the Sofil performed Weill’s Suite from The Threepenny Opera, Janacek’s Sinfonietta, Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète and Petrushka, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erdeand Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. An ASM-sponsored concert of May 1928 included Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Strauss’s Don Juan; their second concert, conducted by V. Savich, featured Liszt’s Les Préludes, Respighi’s Fountains of Rome and the Russian premiere of Prokofiev’s Suite from The Steel Step. Repertoire for workers’ concerts was necessarily simpler, consisting of a mixture of songs, chamber works, overtures and symphonies by mostly nineteenth-century Western and Russian composers (Beethoven, Borodin, Liszt, Wagner and Musorgsky featured prominently).

Although the principal aims of the ASM were not specifically didactic, its members were nevertheless involved in the wider project to ‘bring music to the masses’. Asafiev was a prolific music writer for the Narkompros popular paper Zhizn’ iskusstva (Life of Art), addressing the issue of how best to introduce the new audiences to what he and others regarded as their shared musical heritage and writing programme notes and brochures for distribution at concerts. It is evident that those in positions of power, like Asafiev, regarded themselves chiefly as facilitators and educators. Although historians tend to divide the ‘modern’ and ‘proletarian’ wings very sharply, both sides were driven by educational zeal and shared more common ground than might be assumed. They both believed that the proletariat required guidance on what to listen to; although RAPM was openly opposed to light music in a way that other groups were not, it is clear that for Asafiev, Lunacharsky and other powerful figures in musical life, the emphasis was on education by way of exposure to art music, whether that was to be Mozart, Glinka, Beethoven or even Stravinsky. In short, the whole climate of Soviet musical life in the 1920s and early 30s was directed by a deep-seated patriarchalism in which Western and Russian ‘classics’ played a central, and fairly uncontroversial, role.⁵ The custodians of high art, at least from the non-proletarian side, were not substantially different in background, taste and education than their pre-revolutionary predecessors had been, and only they were able to exert influence over repertoire through inviting foreign conductors and performers, hosting concerts and liaising with the West. Even when RAPM assumed greater power in 1929, their years of triumph were very short-lived, and even then they were not able to exercise significant influence over the mainstream concert life of the Leningrad and Moscow philharmonias. In any case, when it came to orchestral repertoire, their main difference of opinion was not concerning the importance of retaining the Western classical and Romantic legacy (if selectively), but rather on the role of Western modernism in Soviet musical life. In comparison with the bitter disputes over Schoenberg, Hindemith and Stravinsky, the presence of Austro-German classical and Romantic repertoire in Soviet musical life was relatively uncontroversial. Though RAPM are sometimes assumed to have opposed all Western music except for Beethoven, this is a simplification of their position (which was in any case hardly rigidly uniform). An article by Lev Lebedinsky in Proletarskiy muzïkant (Proletarian musician) in 1929 suggests works by the following composers as suitable for workers’ audiences: Schubert, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Mozart, Rossini, Bizet, Grieg, Chopin, Haydn, Bach and Verdi.⁶ What is more, the scheduling of those works remained stable during the whole period from the revolution to Russia’s entry into the Second World War. Although, as will be seen, writers focussed on socio-historical consideration of Western composers, relating them to progressive social trends wherever possible, it is doubtful whether this would have had a significant bearing on actual concert repertoire. The overall picture that emerges when critical and scholarly articles are set alongside concert programmes is one of synergy rather than dictat: the only ‘Party line’ one could speak of during the 1920s and early-to-mid 1930s is that of mass education. Apart from the huge popularity of more overtly ‘revolutionary’ figures such as Beethoven, most Western composers slotted in somewhere between passively reflecting social forces and actively resisting capitalism – both equally valid from the point of view of Marxist–Leninist aesthetics.

‘The dying culture of the feudal classes’: Bach, Mozart and Haydn

Perhaps unexpectedly,⁷ one of the staples of Soviet repertoire in the earliest years was Mozart’s Requiem.⁸ The first People’s Concert, in a series promoted by Narkompros targeting specifically proletarian audiences, took place on May Day 1918 in the Winter Palace – a performance of the Requiem as a memorial to the victims of the revolution.⁹ As with a number of religious works, including Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and even Bach’s B Minor Mass, the Requiem’s Christian content was considered of less significance than its status as part of the Western classical canon. Musicologists advanced historical arguments as to why such repertoire was appropriate in the new Soviet state. In Muzïkalnaya nov (Musical Virgin Soil), the journal that from 1924 was the ‘Organ of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians’, the proletarian writer Sergey Chemodanov placed Bach, Haydn and Mozart firmly in the context of those artists who belonged to the ‘Third Estate’ – the title given to those in pre-revolutionary France who were not members of the clergy or the aristocracy. In other words, they were members of the rising eighteenth-century bourgeois class, who overturned medieval feudalism and laid the foundations for republicanism and democracy. Since, Chemodanov argued, ‘the whole atmosphere of the pre-revolutionary epoch was saturated with the psychological struggle of two cultures, the obsolete feudal and the rising Third Estate’, Bach’s music expressed this turning-point in history, while the ‘salon elegance’ of Haydn and Mozart’s music anticipates the victory of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie ‘over the dying culture of the feudal classes’.¹⁰ The ‘deep, lucid lyricism’ of Bach’s Protestant music, ‘leading the change from the dark chasms of Catholic gloom’ is accompanied by a shift from polyphony to homophony that Chemodanov believes articulates the cult of individualism that saw its full flowering in the sonata forms of Haydn and Mozart: ‘Musical monism, which reached its end in Bach’s fugues, gave way in the eighteenth century to dualism, which did not only not oppose the individualistic ideology of the third estate, but on the contrary, drew closer to a connection with the interrelation of classes of that time.’¹¹ In this context, Bach’s sacred works represent not an obsolete form of Christian worship but the start of the break from feudal (Catholic) Europe, looking ahead to the Enlightenment and so to Revolution. What was true for Bach was even more so for his successors, and the music of the three titans of the classical style – Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven – is thus interpreted as practically a call to arms: ‘It is this very heroism . . . which sustains 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy that serves as the ideology of the third estate, already close to the storm of the French revolution.’¹²

Such overtly political arguments were undoubtedly convenient for the images of composers so accredited with passive revolutionary sympathies. But they did not completely dominate music criticism. Asafiev’s articles on Mozart in the popular paper Zhizn iskusstva of the following year focus on the composer as a personality and an artist rather than as a vehicle for historical forces. They are also a subtle defence of art for art’s sake in the new Soviet context: ‘If we feel that art – no abstract concept but a living force produced by great people – is a concrete revelation of this force, then it is impossible to invent a more vital and great, beautiful revelation or expression of this force than the figure of Mozart.’¹³ The composer’s personal qualities are also asserted: ‘[Mozart] was not a slave to his own suffering . . . he was not a proud person and his music did not display him as a person, did not postulate or declare his own “I”, but [he] created music just to be art, as knowledge of the world through the expression of his own artistic sense in sound.’¹⁴ It would be hard to find a more complete Soviet avowal of the doctrine of art for art’s sake than this: once the personality of the composer is placed beyond reproach, their music requires no further justification. From two very different perspectives, then, Soviet readers are urged to accept Bach, Mozart and Haydn as representative of their own time; certainly not as models to be emulated by Soviet composers, but as founders of the classical tradition that was offered to the new Soviet listeners as their own birthright.

Notable by its absence in the journals of the 1920s was any serious discussion of the fact that Mozart and Haydn were dependent on rich aristocratic patrons, and played a full part in court musical life. Boris Shteynpress’s 1935 article ‘On Mozart’s Instrumental Music’ confronts this issue at the very same time as repeating essentially the same argument that the classical style was inherently democratic:

Both Mozart and Haydn are seen as compromised figures, unable, for social and financial reasons, to transcend their dependence on aristocratic patronage; and so ultimately, Shteynpress argues, ‘the author of the Jupiter Symphony must undoubtedly give way to that of the Eroica and Appassionata’.¹⁶ But it is important to note that there is nothing fundamentally new in Shteynpress’s arguments: the Soviet apologia for Western classicism remains the same in the 1930s as it was in the 1920s. Only Asafiev’s insistence on the validity of beauty for its own sake finds no echo in the 1930s, which, given the pressurised nature of musical discussions about definable expressive content during that decade, is hardly surprising.

‘Every revolution is a grandiose symphony’: The Beethoven cult

Beethoven enjoyed a status in the Soviet Union that can only be compared to that of Shakespeare and Pushkin.¹⁷ Since there was enough anecdotal and documentary evidence to paint him as a true revolutionary, he was feted by all sides of the cultural spectrum. Famous incidents such as Beethoven’s refusal to stand aside for the Imperial family at Teplitz, his angry rejection of Napoleon after he became Emperor, his flight from Prince Lichnowsky’s castle and the letter which followed it (‘Prince! What you are, you are by birthright. Of princes there have been and will be thousands. Of Beethovens there is only one’)¹⁸ all fed the Soviet image of Beethoven as an artist whose music was directly inspired by the French Revolution and the rhetoric of personal freedom and fraternal equality that surrounded it. Beethoven was not just a fellow-traveller to the Soviets – someone whose ideals were passively sympathetic to the revolution – he was himself claimed as a revolutionary, and as such was an obvious role-model for Soviet composers. For those seeking to render Western classical music appealing and relevant to the proletariat, this romanticised version of Beethoven was invaluable. From Lunacharsky’s introductory speeches at workers’ concerts to Asafiev’s programme notes, to articles in the popular music and arts press, the message was clear: Beethoven was a revolutionary like us, and we are the rightful heirs of his revolutionary message.

Like Lenin and other colleagues in the early Bolshevik administration, Lunacharsky’s musical tastes were conservative and his broad aim was social engineering – the cultural education of the proletariat on a vast scale – rather than producing Bolshevik propaganda.¹⁹ In his article ‘Great Sisters’ of 1926, he reels off a series of assertions typical of this period: ‘Not for nothing did Beethoven’s music come out of the French revolution; it was saturated with it . . . Such a demigod of the musical world as Beethoven . . . is able to plunge into the deepest musical poetry which, being expressed in the language of human consciousness, raises mountainous problems, struggles, and victories.’²⁰ In the centenary year 1927, several music journals devoted whole issues to Beethoven.²¹The Narkompros journal Muzïka i revoliutsiya had a special issue in March, headed by Lunacharsky’s article ‘How Beethoven Lives for Us’; Evgeny Braudo’s article ‘Beethoven-Citizen’ claims that in the Eroica ‘the musician and social activist is revealed in all his depth and breadth’; ‘revolutionary rhythms run through [the Eroica] like a red thread; its rhythm is of the electrified crowd rushing to storm the Bastille’.²²

A more dispassionate note was struck in Boleslav Pshibïshevskiy’s article in the RAPM journal Proletarskiy muzïkant in 1931. Pshibïshevskiy was the director of the Moscow Conservatoire from 1929, under whom its name temporarily changed to the Feliks Kon Higher Music School. The article was openly mocked and censured in the 1930s;²³ but what is most striking about it now is rather how uncontroversial Pshibïshevskiy’s observations actually were. Noting that Beethoven, typically for his time, was ‘a revolutionary in thought but not in deed’, he describes the composer’s dependence on aristocratic patrons as tragic-comic: ‘The point here is not the personal inconsistency of Beethoven, but rather the tragedy, though perhaps it would be better to speak of a tragic-comedy, of the famous petit-bourgeoisie which allowed itself and its own revolutionary philosopher, Hegel, to be at the same time the philosopher of the Prussian king, or Beethoven to dedicate the most revolutionary of all his works, the Ninth Symphony, to that same king, the reactionary Friedrich Wilhelm III.’²⁴ Pshibïshevskiy’s tone may be less reverent than that of other writers, but he does go on to assert that Soviet music needs to synthesise Beethoven’s ‘dialectic’ and Musorgsky’s realism to forge a new proletarian music – hardly an original claim, either in the 1920s or the 1930s.

As with Mozart and Haydn, the same arguments in support of Beethoven’s revolutionary credentials were voiced in the 1930s as they had been in the 1920s. After 1932, there might have been a backlash against the excessive canonisation of Beethoven in the preceding decade, especially as appropriated by the more militant members of the proletarian wing. But there was no such reaction; in the absence of any alternative hero, Beethoven was still the most persuasive revolutionary composer of the past. Pavel Veis’s attack on Pshibïshevsky in 1933 accuses the former Conservatoire director of ‘vulgarization and distortion’, but nevertheless repeats his central argument: that Beethoven’s music ‘undoubtedly belongs to that bourgeois legacy which has enormous significance for the proletariat’.²⁵

Efforts to bring Beethoven’s music to the masses continued well into the 1930s, preserving an important legacy of proletarian activity from the 1920s. ‘Beethoven brigades’ were charged with the task of educating (and entertaining) the Red Army. In 1935, one report of such an evening at the Theatre Bureau of the Central House of the Red Army was published in Sovetskaya muzïka. One concert included movements from the Moonlight and Pathètique Sonatas, the first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata, fragments from Egmont and the Scottish songs, interspersed with readings from Beethoven’s letters and talks about his life. Even between acts the audience was not permitted to relax: the brigade put on readings from Lenin, Goethe, Romain Rolland and Nikolay Bukharin in the foyer, and held question-and-answer sessions with the audience. One soldier went straight to the heart of Beethoven’s rather paradoxical position as a revolutionary, asking why he dedicated works to counts and princes. The reply is predictable: ‘He had no choice. It was a matter of struggle for existence, for pay. But he never humbled himself before them.’²⁶

As Beethoven’s close contemporary, Schubert was not afforded anything like the same degree of adulation, but was nevertheless extremely popular in the 1920s. His centenary year followed Beethoven’s in 1928, though it was marked in a far more muted manner. Muzïka i revoliutsiya, however, published a special Schubert issue in October that neatly sets out Schubert’s rather more ambiguous credentials as a fellow-traveller, much in the same way as Chemodanov had contrived to do with Bach, Haydn and Mozart. Mikhail Pekelis pointed out that Schubert, unlike his direct predecessors, had no links with the aristocracy and wrote his music for amateurs and friends, drawing attention to his use of folk dances and melodies and his new brand of ‘lyrical symphonism’.²⁷ Concert programmes for workers’ clubs throughout the 1920s reveal that Schubert songs were regular favourites, whether performed as originally intended, or in special arrangements for folk instruments; a review of such an event in 1928 reports that the overture from Rosamunde was played on folk instruments and the F minor Moment Musical on balalaika and in a second transcription for mandolin and guitar.²⁸

Fellow travellers: Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Brahms

Of these five composers, Liszt was probably the most popular figure in Russian musical life before the revolution. He had visited Russia in 1842 and 1843 and had close connections both with Vladimir Stasov, Mily Balakirev and the Russian National School and also with Anton Rubinstein, whom he knew and admired as a pianist, composer and conductor. Virtuosic Romantic piano repertoire was a staple of Conservatoire pedagogy and concert life in both Moscow and Petersburg, and this tradition – in which Chopin, Liszt and Schumann featured prominently – continued seamlessly into the Soviet period. During the 1920s, Schumann’s orchestral music was not performed with anything like the regularity of Liszt’s or Berlioz’s but he had his supporters nonetheless. In 1926, Mikhail Ivanov-Boretsky asserted that ‘Every bar of Schumann’s music is far from formalism . . . and is saturated with a genuine, deep romanticism understood as the reflection in music of the composer’s spiritual life.’²⁹ As one of the group of artists who marked the transition from classical Enlightenment heroism to a self-absorbed style of individualism and pessimism, Schumann played a role in what Soviet critics perceived as the gradual decline of the Austro-German symphonic tradition and was thus vulnerable to criticism. Ivanov-Boretsky came to his aid again in 1930 with an article on his revolutionary choruses, reproducing the unpublished 1848 song ‘To arms!’ in his own handwritten manuscript and arguing that only those little acquainted with Schumann’s biography would describe him merely as a dreamer who was sunk in his own creative work.³⁰A later evaluation of Schumann in 1933 was rather less supportive: Mikhail Cheremukhin grouped Schubert and Schumann together as great realist song composers, citing Die Schöne Müllerin and Dichterliebe as exemplars, but nonetheless remaining slightly critical of Schumann:

Though sitting just outside the scope of this chapter, it is interesting to note that Berlioz – whose revolutionary sympathies were far better documented – fared much better, which perhaps reveals the importance of having an ideologically respectable biography. His Funeral and Triumphal Symphony commemorating those who died in the 1830 revolution is obscure in the West today, but was frequently performed in the Soviet 1920s, as was his Symphonie fantastique. The first recorded Soviet performance of the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony took place on 8 November 1918, at the second of Lunacharsky’s ‘People’s Concerts’ in Smolny, Petrograd. Liszt’s orchestral works were also regular fixtures in the concert programmes of the 1920s, and, as with Beethoven, there was enough revolutionary lore around him to preserve ideological credibility and his reputation remained stable during the whole Soviet period. In the 1930s he had a powerful supporter in Georgy Khubov, an intelligent and influential music critic. The fact that Liszt’s revolutionary interests waned after 1848 was an inescapable part of his biography, which Khubov did not try to ignore; nor did he overlook Liszt’s aristocratic connections. In this regard, Khubov’s apologia for Liszt recalls earlier defences of Beethoven: ‘[Liszt] understood early on the pain of moral humiliation of the “artist in the role of a lackey”’; he felt the ‘deep dissatisfaction of [his] generation of artists with bourgeois society, [was] conscious of [his] own exceptional creative talent and [his] inability to find a means of concrete application . . . One must understand all this in order to “excuse” his blunders, errors, unhealthy tendencies . . . in order to approach the essence of the internal contradictions of Liszt’s creative development.’³²

Very little mention is made of Mendelssohn in the journals of the 1920s and 30s, but performance data from the Leningrad Philharmonia show that, in Leningrad at least, the most frequently performed work was the Violin Concerto (eighty-four times between 1921 and 1971), with the Third and Fourth symphonies receiving twenty-one and twenty-eight performances respectively.³³ Only the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Violin Concerto were in Persimfans’ repertoire, which suggests that Mendelssohn’s music was never strikingly popular, but maintained a steady, uncontroversial presence in Soviet musical life.³⁴ Where Brahms was concerned, Soviet writers seemed inclined equally to polite uninterest – a common accusation was that of ‘academicism’ – or genuine enthusiasm. The most notable attempt to situate Brahms in a favourable political context can be found in Ivan Sollertinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic brochures written between 1936 and 1941. As a piece of ideological posturing, Sollertinsky’s position is as extreme in its mode of expression as anything penned by a member of RAPM, and it is a reflection of the anti-Western xenophobia of the period that his views were so widely circulated and appreciated:

It is unclear whether this kind of writing was actually required in order to facilitate the continuing performance of Brahms’s music, or whether Sollertinsky sincerely believed in his own rhetoric, but Brahms’s symphonies do seem to have been more frequently played in the 1930s than they had been in the 1920s. There seems to have been no obvious reason for the comparative neglect of Brahms and Mendelssohn in critical literature as well as concert life in the 1920s, other than that neither composer had anything remotely ‘revolutionary’ in his biography, and so did not make especially attractive topics for Soviet critics eager to demonstrate their ideological and scholarly credentials. Sollertinsky’s brochures represent a very different approach from that found in the 1920s: their more aggressively political tone reflects the hardening in cultural attitudes that took place from the mid 1930s on.

One of the most substantial articles in the post-RAPM years to address the wider issue of romanticism in music was that by Lev Kaltat and David Rabinovich, ‘Fighting for a Heritage’, in the third issue of Sovetskaya muzïka in 1933. These former RAPM supporters now offered measured criticism of their former policies, describing RAPM’s fixation with Beethoven and their notions of ‘acceptable’ repertoire as ‘narrow and confined’.³⁶ More importantly, they go on to describe the German Romantics (Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Weber) as democratic in their portrayal of the ‘petit-bourgeois intellectual . . . the burgher, the craftsman, the peasant’ as the heroes of their music. Liszt and Wagner, on the other hand, exemplify the collapse of revolutionary idealism after 1848, where artists could choose one of two paths: that of the proletariat or that of the ‘reactionary bourgeois-aristocratic bloc’. The ‘third way’ represented by Brahms was dogged by ‘dead academic forms’ and ‘expressive epigonism’.³⁷ No reader of Muzïka i revoliutsiya in the 1920s would have found these arguments startling, and their portrayal of the Romantics as democratic also echoes Sollertinsky’s arguments on behalf of Mahler and Bruckner, which were published as early as 1929.³⁸ It is a revealing reminder of how much common ground some former RAPM members and the wider musical community shared after 1932 that by 1938, the same writer, Rabinovich, was bemoaning the lack of Western classical repertoire in the Mosfil 1937–8 season. There were almost no performances of Bach’s music, no Handel or Haydn at all, only ‘pitiful snatches’ of Mozart, one solitary Schubert work (unnamed), no Mendelssohn or Schumann, and only Brahms’s Third Symphony and piano concertos were heard.³⁹ Perhaps in response to this and other criticism they had received, Mosfil announced their 1939–40 season in August 1939, in which Bach’s B Minor Mass, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, Mozart’s Requiem, Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Haydn’s The Seasons were all planned alongside Soviet works. As the 1930s drew to a close, then, these and other canonical works of Western classicism and romanticism still occupied their central role in Soviet musical life.

‘The last of the Mohicans’: Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss

Of these three late Romantics,⁴⁰ Bruckner was by far the least well represented in Soviet programmes. An early performance of his Seventh Symphony (by Fritz Stiedry) in 1926 was apparently coolly received, and in Sollertinsky’s list of Mahler and Bruckner performances in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1942, Bruckner’s symphonies were programmed just twenty-three times, as compared with Mahler’s forty-six (repeat performances not counted).⁴¹ But Bruckner, like Mahler, had keen supporters. There was a Bruckner and Mahler society that met regularly in Leningrad during the 1920s to perform their symphonies in four-hand arrangements, in which Sollertinsky played an active part.⁴² Soviet concert reviews of the 1920s and 30s are intermittently sprinkled with complaints about the dearth of Bruckner performances, and as late as 1935 Aleksandr Ostretsov, reviewing Fried’s performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, bemoaned the fact that in Moscow Bruckner’s symphonies were still very little known. The substance of his review recalls the historical posturing typical of the 1920s:

Sollertinsky was one of the most powerful advocates of Bruckner’s music in the 1930s, as he was of Mahler’s. But to advocate a favourite composer in this decade required substantial ideological justification: where symphonic repertoire was concerned, every composer needed to be appropriately framed in Soviet rhetoric. In his 1940 brochure for the Leningrad Philharmonia’s performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Sollertinsky argued, much as he had done for Mahler,⁴⁴ that Bruckner’s music encapsulates the crisis of capitalist social alienation and search for man’s true place in the world:

With the statement ‘Bruckner is the Schubert of the second half of the 19th Century’, Sollertinsky sums up his picture of the composer as an artist deeply rooted in folk culture, transplanted to the cruel environment of the capitalist city. However, the fact that Bruckner spent his entire career in the nineteenth century made him a slightly different – even safer – proposition than Mahler, whose last six symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde were written in the twentieth century. During the 1920s, some proletarian critics hostile to Western modernism seemed unsure where Mahler belonged – with Schoenberg and Expressionism, or with the late Romantics. In 1922, Evgeny Braudo’s article ‘On Expressionism in Music’ claims that, though Mahler was antipathetic to the Russian listener, he was popular with the German public. This in itself is recognisable in the rhetoric of the time as an insult, which Braudo immediately expands upon: ‘It is impossible to ignore the sign of the times in the fact that Mahler holds such sway over the soul of the contemporary West.’⁴⁶ In other words, Mahler’s popularity was a symptom of the decline of Western culture into decadence; by implied contrast, it was only in the Soviet Union that the more spiritually robust Beethovenian symphonic tradition could be renewed.

The irony is, of course, that Mahler’s music swiftly became far more popular in Soviet Russia that it did in some parts of Western Europe, Britain leading the way in its mistrust of what seemed like overblown, over-complex symphonies. Those features of Mahler’s music that had always been the most controversial – his juxtapositions of the serious and the banal – registered with Braudo as equally objectionable, complaining of its

What is striking today about this review is how acute Braudo’s experience of Mahler actually was, and how freshly his music sounded to Russian ears. In Leningrad, where Mahler’s symphonies were frequently played, critics were more responsive; but in Moscow old prejudices evidently took some time to die (or simply to emigrate). The Moscow ASM critics Viktor Belyayev and Leonid Sabaneyev were both Mahler sceptics; in 1924 Belyayev echoed Braudo’s suspicion of Mahler’s German popularity, sarcastically dubbing him, together with Strauss, ‘the apparent idols of German lands’. It seems curious at first glance that Mahler’s music should be more favourably received in the more conservative climate of the 1930s than it was in the 1920s. But as a late Romantic rather than a modernist, Mahler was not a favourite of the Moscow ASM camp; and it is hardly surprising that the proletarian critics did not clamour for performances of symphonies lasting over an hour, and which were completely unplayable by untrained musicians. It was Sollertinsky – a versatile and popular lecturer and scholar in Leningrad and from 1937 to 1944 artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic – who did most to popularise Mahler’s music in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Through his programme notes for Philharmonia concerts, public lectures and a monograph devoted to the composer, Sollertinsky propagandised on behalf of Mahler’s music, even arguing (albeit rather obliquely) that his symphonies made ideal models for Soviet composers because of their ‘democratic’ musical language and ambitious expressive scope.

Cheremukhin, the critic who wrote disparagingly of the ‘narcotic’ effects of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, was equally at sea when it came to Mahler. In the same article, he links Mahler with Reger and Hindemith as proponents of dry contrapuntalism: ‘May this “horizontal unfolding” music be the bearer of valuable realist expression? I don’t think so.’⁴⁸ Clearly, Sollertinsky had not managed to convince everyone. But it is important to note how few criticisms of Mahler there actually were in the 1920s and 30s; Strauss fared far worse, and yet his music also continued to be performed. As Sollertinsky’s writings on Mahler demonstrate, it was relatively easy to paint him as a fellow-traveller, broadly in sympathy with the proletariat. Such anecdotes as Mahler’s joining the Vienna May Day parade in 1905 and his Dostoevsky-inspired expression of fraternity (‘How can one be happy when a single being on earth still suffers?’) were all grist to Sollertinsky’s mill in this respect.⁴⁹

The fact that Strauss was still alive and flourishing undoubtedly made him more suspect a figure than Mahler. Critical hostility became even more pronounced after 1933, when Strauss’s role as president of the Reichsmusikammer tainted his reputation throughout Europe and America. But even as early as 1923, Sabaneyev (who would soon emigrate to the West) expressed a deeper-seated ambivalence to his music: ‘It is easy to relate his creativity to the new Germany and to a militaristic, crassly grandiose striving for pomposity, parade, outer glory. Strauss’s creativity is a good barometer of the . . . archetypal new German.’⁵⁰Whereas in Beethoven militaristic rhythms reflect the general revolutionary atmosphere, in Strauss they sound like a celebration of victory: ‘like some Wagnerian Kaisermarsch’.⁵¹ While not denying Strauss’s brilliance, Sabaneyev cautions: ‘in the midst of all these attributes . . . he has many features of insincerity, pretence . . . [and] window-dressing’.⁵² Nevertheless, Strauss’s tone-poems, in particular Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan, were frequently performed throughout the 1920s and it was only after 1933 that criticism of the composer gradually became more pointed and his music less often played.

As the 1930s moved into the period of High Stalinism (approximately 1934–53), there was a shift away from programming Western music and towards celebrating the Russian ‘classics’, especially Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky. The influx of foreign musicians gradually dried up after 1937, and the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact in 1939 further damaged relations with the West until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hand in hand with this growing isolationism, though, were more positive developments: after protracted struggles between the Moscow Composers’ Union and the Moscow Philharmonia, the 1937–8 season featured festivals both of pre-revolutionary Western and Russian and of new Soviet music.⁵³Young, talented Russian conductors like Evgeny Mravinsky and Kirill Kondrashin took the place of their Austro-German predecessors, and the growing establishment of Shostakovich as a major symphonist after the premiere of the Fifth Symphony in 1937, together with the return of Prokofiev in 1936, meant that a strong Soviet tradition at last began to take root in the concert hall. It was, therefore, a combination of positive and negative factors that would see concert repertoire changing in the late 1930s. Once reliant on the personal support of conductors for performances, Soviet composers were empowered by the formations of their Unions in 1932 with the support in publication, radio coverage and concert programming that followed, albeit gradually. While the High-Stalinist period saw Western (and early Soviet) modernism excluded from concert schedules, canonic works of Western classicism and romanticism maintained a relatively stable presence in 1930s Soviet musical life. What began as an inspired project to bring art to the masses thus formed the basis of concert life in the first two decades of the Soviet Union, with Austro-German symphonism at its heart.

International clearing-house

The commercial wealth, relative social openness and cosmopolitanism of eighteenth-century Britain ensured that the emerging genre of the symphony would find a ready market there, at least in London. Indigenous symphonic composition, however, got off to a slow start, and the few native pioneers, such as Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kelly (1732–81), J. A. Fisher (1744–1806) and John Marsh (1752–1828), were overshadowed by émigré colleagues, most notably C. F. Abel and J. C. Bach, and, of course, Haydn, whose twelve symphonies for the impresario Salomon constitute Britain’s most enduring, albeit indirect, contribution to the early history of the genre.⁷To this may be added the Royal Philharmonic Society’s commission in 1822 of what eventually turned out to be Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven, of course, loomed large across the nineteenth century (and the twentieth, as we shall see), but in many ways more as moral exemplar – gratification-deferring narratives of growth and disciplined triumph over adversity resonated throughout bourgeois Europe and America – than direct musical model. For the latter, British composers were more likely to turn to Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, and later Mendelssohn and Schumann. Although Jurgen Schaarwächter has argued that the leading figures of mid century, Cipriani Potter (1792–1871) and William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), demonstrated more individuality and independence from German models than has generally been assumed, the nineteenth-century British symphony for the most part rarely strays from continental mores, and relatively conservative ones at that.⁸

This remains largely true even as we approach the twentieth century and the first phase of the so-called English Musical Renaissance. Though the concept requires the careful interrogation that it has recently begun to receive, there was certainly a tremendous upsurge of musical activity during this period, and this affected the symphony as much as any other domain. Most importantly for the symphony, there was a sharp improvement in opportunities for orchestral performance. This was especially marked in London; the capital had for some time lagged well behind the provinces, notably in failing to sustain a stable orchestra to rival an ensemble such as the Hallé in Manchester, and thus failing to fulfil its early promise as a major centre for the nurturing of the genre. The introduction of the Henry Wood Promenade concerts at the Queen’s Hall in 1895 confirmed the emergence of orchestral music as a legitimate and established genre in modern British concert life, a status which it had struggled to attain during the course of the nineteenth century, not least against the enduring grip of the oratorio tradition founded by Handel.⁹ Although orchestral conditions in London still lagged behind those of most continental centres, it is no doubt hardly coincidental that there was an upsurge in symphonic composition in Britain during this period, at a time when the symphony, as opposed to the symphonic poem and other orchestral genres, was already beginning to wane in its central European heartland. Yet despite this profusion of new works, the symphonies of Charles Stanford (1852–1924) and Hubert Parry (1848–1918), and now lesser-known contemporaries such as Frederic Cowen (1852–1935) and Alexander Mackenzie (1847–1935), remain firmly in the mould of Schumann, Brahms and at times Dvořák. The last of these offered some guidance in the incorporation of nationalistic and folkloristic elements, as featured in Cowen’s justly admired ‘Scandinavian’ Symphony of 1880, or Stanford’s ‘Irish’ Symphony of 1887; as in other countries, such locally or exotically inflected interpretations of an essentially German genre became common during this period. Yet Tchaikovsky and Wagner, who were popular with audiences and became mainstays of the Wood Promenade programmes, had little impact on British orchestral music until Elgar around the turn of the century.¹⁰It is striking, too, that the most recent German symphonists outside the Brahms camp, Bruckner and Mahler, were largely dismissed in Britain (certainly by critics, who were extremely conservative for the most part), effectively choking off the German symphonic tradition in the mid-1880s with Brahms’s last symphonies.¹¹Richard Strauss was harder to ignore, but as the acknowledged specialist of the ‘inferior’ genre of the programmatic symphonic poem, he was treated with considerable suspicion.

Resistance to the more ‘progressive’ stream of German music was of course part of broader debates about the future of music in general, and in particular the future of absolute music, which nineteenth-century concert life had come so to venerate. This involved, in turn, profound and culturally resonant issues of the proper relationships of intellect, emotion, and sensation and sensuality in music (the colouristic possibilities of the late Romantic orchestra made the latter element especially contentious), and the question of whether the classical symphonic legacy should become primarily a museum of masterworks or a living tradition (evincing a split between custodial performance and creative innovation). As their preferred models suggest, British composers and critics in the last two decades of the nineteenth century favoured a conception of the symphony that emphasised clarity of form, thematic integration, a sense of expressive restraint and control, and a robust diatonicism – all in the service of an idealistic goal of moral improvement.

Not surprisingly, in this great age of empire, racial theorising and growing Anglo-Saxon pre-eminence on the world stage, some saw issues of national and racial character at stake in the history and future of music and the symphony. Hubert Parry, writing on the growth of the symphony in the first edition of Grove’s great dictionary, opined that ‘the development of pure abstract instrumental music seems almost to have been the monopoly of the German race’, and while the programme symphony ‘might perhaps be fairly regarded as the Celtic counterpart of the essentially Teutonic form of art’, in reality it was ‘scarcely even an offshoot of the old symphonic stem’.¹² Given the sense of close Anglo-German racial kinship that still obtained during this period, the inference could be drawn that Anglo-Saxon composers, unlike their French or Italian counterparts, were likewise well-suited to take on the challenges of the genre. The American composer Horatio Parker, professor at Yale and teacher of Charles Ives, whose own works enjoyed considerable success in Britain around the turn of the century, went further, and also saw transnational implications:

Though Parker does not mention the symphony specifically (and wrote only one of his own), his extolling of an abstract, reserved and economical musical aesthetic aligns closely with the symphonic approach of most of his British contemporaries. As we shall see, these transatlantic Anglo-Saxon affinities would have implications for mid-twentieth-century symphonic developments.

Not all were so sure, however, that a manly musical Anglo-Saxonism (notions of self-possessed masculinity were central to this racial discourse), based on the more sober strands of German composition, was the right direction for British music. As a new century dawned, more experimental traits began to develop, and a split opened up between the conservatively Teutonic Royal College of Music and the relatively cosmopolitan Royal Academy of Music. The latter was more open to Russian, French, and other non-German music, and to the symphonic poem and programme symphony; RAM products such as Josef Holbrooke and Granville Bantock produced innovative programme symphonies in the first decade of the century, breaking sharply with the prevailing mould. Indeed, questions were beginning to be raised about the creative fruits of the largely RCM-led Renaissance, and in a time of increasing geopolitical competition with Germany, it was disappointing that the works of Parry, Stanford and other luminaries of the movement had failed to make a lasting impact on the continent. When in 1905 Sir Edward Elgar declared that ‘English music is white, and evades everything’, he hit a nerve.¹⁴

Passing the torch

It was Elgar, in fact, who three years earlier had finally stormed the German citadel, as it were, with the triumphant Düsseldorf performance of The Dream of Gerontius, and Richard Strauss’s famous encomium to the British composer, hailing him as the ‘first English progressivist’¹⁵ – Elgar’s remarks therefore carried particular weight. Yet the work in question was an oratorio, by then an English speciality, and there remained a sense that for British music truly to come of age, it had to beat the Germans at their own game, as it were, the symphony (even if most modern German composers, Strauss included, had turned away from it). Elgar duly obliged, with the premiere in Manchester in December 1908 of his Symphony No. 1, which became an extraordinary worldwide success and the first really decisive landmark in the history of the British symphony. A London premiere followed within a few days, and tumultuous public acclaim led to hastily-arranged additional performances; the Symphony was even included in a free concert at the Harrod’s department store.¹⁶ It was quickly taken up across the United States; the conductor of the New York premiere, Walter Damrosch, who a few years earlier had urged Elgar to write a symphony (Elgar was ‘the only man living who could do it’ – a telling indication of how pessimistically some viewed the state of the genre), described the slow movement as the greatest orchestral Adagio since Beethoven.¹⁷Artur Nikisch, who conducted the Symphony in Leipzig, ranked it with the best of Beethoven and Brahms, and even dubbed it ‘the fifth of Brahms’;¹⁸ it was warmly received also in Vienna and St Petersburg. Yet Nikisch’s remark, though it would have fitted symphonies by Parry or Stanford well enough, seems to miss the mark with Elgar by a wide margin, not least in the dazzling orchestral rhetoric of the work, indebted as much to Wagner, Berlioz and Strauss (and even lighter French composers) as to Brahms. Samuel Langford, reviewing the premiere in the Manchester Guardian, surely came closer, in saying that ‘[Elgar] has refertilised the symphonic form by infusing into it the best ideas that could be gathered from the practice of the writers of symphonic poems’ (a genre to which Elgar himself had contributed).¹⁹ Despite its outwardly conservative four-movement plan, recent commentators have viewed the work as an extraordinarily original response to symphonic tradition (not least in the unusual tonal and formal scheme of the first movement, where there is even some disagreement over the key of the main portion of the movement),²⁰ and as a piece riven by the contradictions of incipient musical modernism. Edwardian audiences were nevertheless struck primarily by a sense of power and mastery, and responded enthusiastically, and with national pride, to the message of ‘a massive hope for the future’ which was as far as Elgar would go in identifying any programmatic content. In terms of rivalry with Germany, it was surely appropriate, if arrived at largely circumstantially, that the satirical magazine Punch should tie the success of the Symphony in with a current scare over British naval vulnerability to a growing German navy.²¹

Yet in the same way that Elgar’s climaxes seem to be disintegrating even as they attain their summit (James Hepokoski’s astute observation),²² Elgar’s triumph, and with it an established place for British symphonic composition on the international stage, was short-lived (at least for now), as the whole symphonic tradition that he so brilliantly embraced, and the institutional performance culture that sustained it, came under increasing strain.²³ Just a few weeks into 1909 the first performance of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 announced his momentous break with tonality. Elgar’s Second Symphony was premiered less than a week after the death of Mahler (who had conducted the First Symphony in New York) in 1911, but failed to capture the public imagination in the same way as its predecessor. The last major landmark of the British symphony to appear before the First World War was a work that seemed more in tune with the swiftly changing social and artistic ethos. Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony, premiered in London on 27 March 1914, was immediately acclaimed, although wider success would be delayed until after the War. His first work in the genre, the Whitman-based choral A Sea Symphony, had been premiered in 1910; moving beyond its predecessor’s generalised spiritual quest, A London Symphony offered a more obviously modernist engagement (indebted to another dimension of Whitman) with the metropolis, the nation, and by implication the largest empire in the world. It attempted ambitiously to forge a sense of historical and spatial totality in a vision largely untouched by Elgar’s nostalgic autobiography, in the process drawing on popular and folk music, modern French models and even Stravinsky. Vaughan Williams’s voice is more obviously communal than personal, in a unique work, which although not as fully realised as Elgar’s symphonies, was ultimately more original, and more nationalistically distinctive; indeed, the quiet Epilogue would turn out to be something of an English symphonic trademark.²⁴ Yet the Epilogue, in taking the doubt and disintegration confronted (more explicitly than in Elgar) throughout the work and dissolving it into mystical oblivion, seems now darkly prophetic of the events that would shortly rock the fundamental assumptions both of Western civilisation and the symphonic tradition itself.

Ashes to ashes

The First World War called into question, and to some decisively repudiated, all optimistic narratives of human progress, and to the more extreme pessimists, notions of traditionally coherent and authentic personal expression across the arts. Given the symphony’s close association with such narratives of individual and communal selfhood, it came under particular pressure. Added to that was the growing impact, or at least wider dissemination, of pre-war modernist challenges to tonality and formal continuity – the foundations of the symphony – particularly in the works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In continental Europe, through a variety of factors addressed by David Fanning in Chapter 5, the symphony would prove to be to all intents and purposes moribund as a continuous living tradition: only in the Anglo-Saxon world, in Scandinavia and in the Soviet Union, would it find significant new life. In social and political terms, Britain, though certainly plagued by economic problems, was the least affected of any major musical nation by the kind of radical upheavals experienced elsewhere during the inter-war ‘long weekend’ of the 1920s and 1930s, and so it is perhaps no surprise that symphonic narrative continued to make more sense than in most other places.

Yet even in Britain a clear sense of direction was slow to emerge in the 1920s and even beyond. Numerous symphonies were written, adding new voices and styles to the already significant diversity of the pre-war period, but few seemed more than ad hoc solutions: with some notable exceptions, the symphonies of the inter-war years were a mixed bag, and offered many false dawns. Matters were complicated by broader questions over the cultivation of a distinctively British (or at least English) national musical style: was this a good thing, and if so, what should it, or did it, comprise? For many people the emerging leader of British music was Vaughan Williams; but the contemplative and folksong-inflected pastoral ethos that was the most prominent and influential strand of his music in the early 1920s seemed ill-suited to traditional symphonic dialectic. Indeed, when his third work in the genre, A Pastoral Symphony, appeared, it constituted for some almost an anti-symphony.²⁵ This work also raised a central question for the symphony anywhere in the post-war era (one which had begun to rear its head even in the decade before 1914): to what degree could the genre be separated from the tonal system, and the attendant phrase structures, thematic rhetoric and developmental protocols that had underpinned its evolution? In Vaughan Williams’s case this question turned not only on his folksong-derived melodic materials, but also the attenuated cadential drives of his modal harmonic materials, influenced by Debussy and Ravel. In retrospect it has been possible to discern in this work cogent and original musical argument rather than the rambling rumination emphasised in contemporary responses; yet the inconclusive ending, with a wordless soprano suspended in space, as it were, was in certain respects more subversive of established generic precepts than any ending in Mahler or Sibelius: it certainly did not offer an obvious model for symphonic progeny. Vaughan Williams himself would not start sketching another symphony until the end of the decade – the longest symphonic hiatus in his career. The refusal of the other leading composer of the early 1920s, Gustav Holst, to engage in any traditional way with the symphony contributed to the uncertainty.

In the meantime others were trying different paths. For most British composers the major issues of the period were the (very slow) absorption of elements of continental modernism and, given a broad rejection of atonality, how to revivify tonality in the modern age; also at issue was the rise of popular music, especially jazz, and whether this had its place in a symphonic context (the genre had, after all, always included dance elements, and jazz was still viewed primarily in terms of dance). That said, contemporary popular music had little impact on Arnold Bax, who was in many respects the leading British symphonist of the period up to the mid 1930s; he was certainly the most prolific mainstream figure, producing all seven of his symphonies during the inter-war years (Vaughan Williams completed only two between 1918 and 1939). Yet despite in some ways offering an antithesis to Vaughan Williams, favouring a more traditional orchestral rhetoric and lush chromaticism, based in part on pre-1914 Russian models, Bax was seen by many – and continues to be seen, despite efforts at reclamation – to be too prone to rhapsodic construction for a place in the symphonic pantheon.²⁶At least in his symphonies of the 1920s; by the 1930s, however, Bax, like many of his contemporaries, was attempting to emulate a more rigorous model – Sibelius, to whom we shall need to turn in more detail shortly.

By this time a number of enormously important developments had taken place in the infrastructure of musical dissemination and appreciation, and while these were enjoyed virtually worldwide and thus are not uniquely British, Britain played a leading role in several key areas. Most important were recording and broadcasting, which opened up vast new audiences for classical music, and new ways of listening – repeatedly, in the case of records, something perhaps of special relevance for the demanding genre of the symphony. Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony was the first British symphony to be recorded in its entirety, in 1925, and both the Elgar symphonies would follow several years later, conducted by the composer, as part of his extraordinary and to that point unparalleled investment in the new medium. Of even wider impact was the swift expansion in classical music coverage, including contemporary music, by the young BBC, which received a tremendous boost in 1927 when the Corporation took over the Proms series, with the latter’s commitment to providing in most years a complete Beethoven cycle, as well as a good deal of other core symphonic repertory.²⁷ The kind of broader musical culture yearned for by Elgar in his Peyton lectures was becoming a reality.²⁸

It was still rare to hear Mahler or Bruckner in London, despite the efforts of the BBC with more recent music from Central Europe. Sibelius was a quite different matter, however: around 1930 he was coming to be seen not only as the most desirable model for the British symphony, a position he would hold until the 1950s, but also more broadly as the authentic face of musical modernism.²⁹ It was largely under this influence that a number of British composers would begin to converge and engage with the symphony in a more coherent fashion; or at least in a way that engaged directly with the Beethovenian tradition, rather than more diffuse late-Romantic conceptions of the genre. One of the most influential (if idiosyncratic) books of the period, Constant Lambert’s 1934 Music Ho!, having extolled the virtues of jazz, and questioned the genuine originality and importance of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, proceeded to enthrone Sibelius as the true musical god of the first quarter of the twentieth century – the heir to Beethoven, and a more genuinely radical and modernist figure than any of his contemporaries.³⁰The British Sibelius cult actually had a long history, going back at least to Bantock (to whom the Finn dedicated his Third Symphony), but now became unusually widespread and intense. At a time when Sibelius was generally out of favour in Germany and the rest of continental Europe, such adulation was rivalled (outside Finland) only in the United States.³¹ Sibelius seemed to offer a way to reclaim the symphony from Romantic excess, offering formal discipline and clarity without the perceived artificiality and emotional detachment of Franco-Russian neo-classicism. On both sides of the Atlantic it can be argued that as with Parry and Parker at the turn of the century, loose conceptions of race once again played a role, in this case drawing on a perceived kinship between certain Anglo-Saxon traits of temperament and a broader Nordic identity (an affinity commonly identified in contemporary racial theorising). Peter Franklin notes that Sibelius was frequently treated as an honorary Briton in terms of character, not least in a sense of emotional restraint and control.³²Such affinities became all the more suggestive as Sibelius’s long-mooted Eighth Symphony failed to materialise, and it began to appear that the Seventh, premiered in the mid 1920s, might have been his last (as it indeed turned out to be):³³ with no obvious Scandinavian successor in sight, and the symphony apparently dormant in Germany, the idea that the baton of the mainstream symphonic tradition might pass to a British composer or composers, as it had for a fleeting moment with Elgar, seemed increasingly plausible.

Almost right on cue, December 1934 saw the premiere of a symphony that to many appeared to deliver on this promise, and in decidedly Sibelian terms: Walton’s First Symphony was received almost as enthusiastically as Elgar’s First. Yet it was a year of mixed portents and omens for the British symphony, open to differing oracular interpretations. By coincidence, Elgar’s Third was originally scheduled for inclusion in the same BBC Symphony Orchestra season that unveiled the Walton, but the composer died in February, leaving the work only incompletely sketched; Holst, who died a few months later, had also been at work on a symphony, his first attempt at what seems to have been intended as a relatively traditional approach to the genre; Delius also passed away that year, though without ever having shown any inclination towards the symphony. All of this did nothing to dampen the intense anticipation of the Walton, though heightened expectations seem to have affected the composer, who was unable to complete the Finale in time for the premiere. Yet the performance, of the first three movements only, went ahead anyway, a sign of the importance placed on the creation of a work in this exalted genre by Britain’s leading composer of the post-war generation. Walton did produce a finale in time for a performance the following November, and the work went from strength to strength, receiving more performances in its first few years than any British symphony since Elgar’s First; a recording was rushed out within less than two months of the first performance of the complete version, underlining the importance both of this Symphony and of the relatively new technological medium.³⁴

Many were led to hail Walton as the new leader of British music, and the conversion of a former enfant terrible to the symphony, and in its ideal guise as the pinnacle of seriousness and ‘pure’ music, added further weight to the epiphany. Walton’s Symphony was widely compared to those of Sibelius (and to some degree Beethoven), yet in retrospect the connections, though obvious, seem mostly superficial, for example the long oboe note with concluding flourish which opens the first movement, or the extensive use of pedal notes in the same (although even these do not function in the same way as Sibelius’s). One can argue for some sense of gradual revelation of a long-deferred telos in the first movement, confirmed by almost overwhelmingly massive brass writing, but the course of the Symphony as a whole seems less inevitable, and the Finale has disappointed many; it is notable more for its incorporation of popular music elements, in the jazzy fugue that dominates the movement, than for the rather forced Sibelian grandeur of the closing pages, with their apotheosis of first-movement material. In any case, the Symphony (again echoing Elgar’s First), proved to be something of a magnificent dead end. Walton himself would not return to the genre for over twenty-five years, producing in 1960 the fascinating but poorly received Second Symphony (his last, as it turned out).

By the time the complete version of Walton’s First appeared, however, another remarkable British work (which Walton thought the greatest symphony since Beethoven)³⁵ had presented a much more disturbing modern response to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition – one which risked making the Walton, and particularly its triumphal conclusion, sound hollow. Vaughan Williams’s explosive Fourth Symphony, premiered in April 1935, challenged audiences and critics not just on account of its violent dissonance and rhythmic disjunctions – which though in such stark contrast to his A Pastoral Symphony had in fact been brewing for some time in his more recent scores – but for its full-scale engagement with a Beethovenian legacy of orchestral rhetoric and thematic development that he had avoided in most of his mature music. Most troubling of all, it presents a bleakly parodistic and disturbing encounter with that legacy, twisting formal and gestural elements of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies in a way that seems to repudiate the per aspera ad astra plot archetype of these works (an archetype audaciously reinvented in Walton’s First): rather than contemplatively withdraw from such aspirations, as in his previous symphony, Vaughan Williams now confronted them head on, with a ferocious irony in places that rivals that of Shostakovitch. The work has always been something of an enigma, apparently even to its own composer, and attempts to explain its towering anger in terms of the First World War, the state of contemporary Europe or frustrations in Vaughan Williams’s personal life, are inevitably and damagingly reductive (though all probably played a part, the war in particular).³⁶ They have also distracted attention from the work’s more purely musical achievement, which represents perhaps the most ambitious attempt of the period in any country to integrate atonal (or at least anti-tonal) elements into the traditional thematic and formal procedures of the symphony, partly through the manipulation of tightly constructed melodic cells. The composer’s widow claimed that the work sprang from reading a review of a modernist orchestral piece by another composer, and at one level it may be viewed as a barbed commentary on developments in contemporary music.³⁷

Vaughan Williams’s Fourth owed little, if anything, to Sibelius, but his serene Fifth, begun in 1938 but not completed until 1943, is dedicated to the Finn and bears definite traces of his influence; it joins the later symphonies of Bax, Walton’s First and E. J. Moeran’s G minor symphony of 1939 as one of the most important monuments to the Sibelius cult in England. Across the Atlantic, too, Sibelius left his mark on a number of notable symphonies, including Samuel Barber’s First, already considered in Chapter 11, and Roy Harris’s Third; both are in one movement, echoing Sibelius’s Seventh, a formal model less obviously influential in Britain. But American composers were also attentive to developments in British music. Vaughan Williams’s symphonies, beginning with A London Symphony in the 1920s, established a strong presence in America, as did those of Bax, a number of which were premiered there. Vaughan Williams’s Fourth was particularly successful in the United States, where its accommodation of certain modernist elements into a symphonic context – though not its explicit violence and parody – would prove influential on American symphonists of the 1940s, including figures such as David Diamond and Peter Mennin, now largely neglected. More broadly, the Second World War cemented the sense of Anglo-Saxon affinity, especially in the idea of fighting an heroic battle for freedom and democracy over totalitarianism; it also brought in as ally, albeit relatively briefly, the other great symphonic nation of the era, Russia (brutal totalitarianism in that country notwithstanding).

Yet the most successful British symphony to emerge from the war years and their immediate aftermath, an international success rivalling that of Elgar’s First, was not one of triumphant heroism, but a work widely interpreted as portraying, after glimmers of hope in its first movement, only devastation: Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony, begun in 1944 and premiered in 1948, ends in a movement of frozen near-paralysis, apparently drained of all life, that many interpreted as representing a post-nuclear abyss (though resisting all explicit programmatic interpretation, the composer himself referred to it privately as ‘the Big Three’).³⁸His remaining three symphonies, with the partial exception of the Eighth (1956), are broadly pessimistic; heroism is engaged directly in the seventh of the cycle, Sinfonia Antartica (1953), based on his music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, but in terms only of endurance and stoicism, while the Ninth (1958) is a profoundly ambivalent work involving a programme centred on Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Thus concludes what is still surely the most impressive and wide-ranging symphonic cycle to have been composed by a British composer to date.

Wider still and wider

This is to run ahead a little, however. By the late 1940s a new generation of composers, most notably Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, had come to the fore.³⁹ Britten was at this time establishing opera as the core of his life’s work, and, always wary of anything redolent of the British musical establishment as represented by Vaughan Williams and his generation, engaged only obliquely with the mainstream symphonic tradition (even when British perception of that mainstream later came to include his beloved Mahler).⁴⁰ Although Tippett was also critical of some trends in British inter-war music, he was not as hostile as Britten to the prevailing climate, and the centrality of Beethoven and the sonata archetype – never congenial for Britten – to his aesthetic seemed to demand involvement with the symphony. He would eventually produce four published works that mark important stylistic junctures in his varied career, and which to some degree epitomise broader concerns of the time.⁴¹His Symphony No. 1 (1945) attempts with tremendous energy (though not complete success) the difficult task, first tackled by Beethoven in his last period, of combining dualistic sonata conflict with the more monistic, continuous structures of pre-classical music, as in the variations on a ground bass that form the work’s slow movement. Over a decade later in his Second Symphony (1957), Tippett tackled a new challenge, that of incorporating in a symphonic context the dramatic ruptures and discontinuities pioneered by Stravinsky, and which from this point on were to shape a broader style-shift in Tippett’s music. The Third Symphony (1972) takes this one step further, engaging with directions in post-war continental music: in the first movement the composer conceptualises a dualism between musical archetypes that he characterises as ‘arrest’ and ‘movement’, a reaction in part to what he saw as the ‘motionless’ quality typical of the music of Boulez and other leading figures of the 1950s and 1960s.⁴² But in the Finale of the work he also dramatically confronted the humanistic significance of the symphonic legacy in a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima world. His own text asks, ‘They sang that when she waved her wings / The Goddess Joy would make us one / And did my brother die of frost-bite in the camp / And was my sister charred to cinders in the oven?’, and Tippett juxtaposes quotations of the so-called ‘horror fanfare’ that launches the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth with powerful evocations of the blues genre, and with material from earlier in the Symphony. The Fourth Symphony, which followed six years later, returns to a familiar archetype of symphonic narrative, in the form of a one-movement birth-to-death scenario, beginning and ending with the evocation of human breathing.

Tippett’s ambitious and humanistic view of the symphony established him as the natural successor to Vaughan Williams. While most British symphonists of the post-war era did not on the whole attempt to reach so far, Tippett’s symphonies do reflect certain broader trends, above all the impetus to bring within the bounds of the genre a wider and wider range of contrasting materials and styles: to build on its history as a metaphor for the exploration, even resolution, of psychological and social contrast or conflict, as a vehicle for trying to make coherent the increasing fragmentation of post-Enlightenment modernity, which was being pushed to new limits after 1945, in Britain as elsewhere. Though this expansion of symphonic range was paralleled to some degree in other countries, most notably the United States, the extent of Britain’s commitment to the genre at this time was essentially unique. Indeed, the 1950s and 1960s constituted the most fertile period of any for the British symphony, in terms of the sheer number of new works produced, and the number of talented younger figures entering the scene: Malcolm Arnold, Alan Rawsthorne, Peter Racine Fricker, Richard Rodney Bennett, Robert Simpson, to name only some of the most prominent. Some of the new names, notably Benjamin Frankel, Egon Wellesz, Franz Reizenstein, Roberto Gerhard, and later Andrzej Panufnik, were émigrés escaping from fascist or communist continental regimes, giving a newly literal dimension to the idea of Britain as a refuge for a central European symphonic tradition neglected by, or driven from, its birthplace.

Of course the commitment to the symphony reflected to some degree the relative conservatism of British music, and the full reach of continental modernism as it was developing at this time, especially electronic music, would not really take hold in Britain until the mid 1960s. Not surprisingly, the two leading young British composers who were receptive to continental trends in the 1950s, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, did not turn to the symphony at this point (Birtwistle has never done so). Nevertheless, the range of new materials assimilated into the symphony during this period remains impressive. Although a Hindemithian neoclassicism (already evident in Tippett’s First) was the prevailing style for many, there were a number of attempts to assimilate twelve-tone procedures into a symphonic context (and in a more traditional way than Webern), as in the symphonies of Humphrey Searle, and even, idiosyncratically, in Walton’s Second; although this at one level challenged the tonal foundations of the genre, twelve-tone techniques lent themselves well to thematic development and transformation, and could even assimilate tonal elements, as Berg had demonstrated soon after the invention of the method. Other currents were also in the air, however, which had to do more with genres and styles than raw musical materials. Mahler had finally started to make a significant impact in Britain,⁴³along with Shostakovitch (both already important to Britten, of course, despite his own ambivalence towards the symphony); Malcolm Arnold’s inclusion of popular and light musical styles, including brass-band music, in a number of his symphonies, suggests the influence of both composers, and a continuing expansion of social and political terms of reference. Like a number of his contemporaries, including William Alwyn, Arnold was heavily involved in writing film music, and several works from this period, most notably Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica, have strong connections to the cinema.

The fact that Vaughan Williams was still composing symphonies in the 1950s helped maintain a sense of continuity with the pre-war scene, even as Britten rose to take the older man’s place as the leading figure in British music. But the early 1960s saw genuine upheaval, precipitated in part by the appointment in 1959 of William Glock as BBC Controller of Music. Glock set out to give more prominent coverage to continental (and American) musical modernism, especially music since 1945, than it had received under the previous regime, and a rift developed between the new modernism and an older conservative British consensus, with contemporary tonal music (which by extension still included most recent symphonies) becoming a polemical issue. Many tonal composers felt marginalised by the new regime; though the real extent to which they were deliberately frozen out remains a matter of debate, the perception was real enough, and caused profound distress in a number of cases. Yet in the case of the symphony even the more modernist, primarily atonal, composers, such as Alexander Goehr and Jonathan Harvey, were still contributing to the genre; as noted already in the case of Tippett’s Third, a more conceptual, abstract understanding of symphonic principles could allow for use of materials well beyond the bounds of tonal or even twelve-tone procedures. And at the end of the decade, the extraordinary young prodigy Oliver Knussen made a personal approach to the symphony, complete with complex (though hardly old-fashioned) unification, the centre of his early output, which included three symphonies.

It is true that Knussen and Tippett aside, many of these works tended to be one-off experiments with the symphony. But in any case, as it turned out, the perceived modernist institutional hegemony was not the permanent climate-change that it had seemed at the outset. With regard to the symphony, the single most striking sign of change came in the mid 1970s, when Peter Maxwell Davies embarked on writing a symphony, and acknowledged direct influence from none other than Sibelius. That Davies’ language in the work was nevertheless uncompromisingly modernist is less important, perhaps, than the willingness to invoke Sibelius, and the fact that he then went on to write seven more works in this genre, the most recent, Antarctic Symphony (2001), commissioned to commemorate Vaughan Williams’s own Antarctic film score and symphony of 50 years earlier;⁴⁴ indeed Davies’ symphonic output as a whole now constitutes one of the most impressive British contributions to the genre. His change of heart was, of course, part of a broader re-evaluation of a narrow conception of modernism that began to gather pace around 1980, and entailed a fracturing of avant-garde hegemony spreading well beyond British music. That said, most of his younger colleagues, including Marc-Anthony Turnage and Thomas Adés, have avoided the symphony, though they have certainly written large-scale orchestral works that can be described as symphonic. James MacMillan is an exception, having composed three symphonies to date; yet even though MacMillan is perhaps the most successful of recent British composers in cultivating a wide audience for complex modern music, his symphonies, like those of Maxwell Davies, cannot be said for the moment to have firmly established themselves in the repertoire. It is a sobering fact for modern British symphonists that none of them has been able to come even close to competing with the runaway success of Anthony Payne’s speculative completion of Elgar’s Third Symphony, premiered in 1997, an extraordinary phenomenon that highlights the continuing gulf between much contemporary composition and the broader musical public.⁴⁵ To this may be added the popularity of recordings of symphonies by Vaughan Williams and Bax, and by once obscure composers such as George Lloyd and William Alwyn: such composers have benefited enormously from the recording boom that began with the advent of the compact disc in the early 1980s. At a time when Scandinavian countries in particular, and Germany to a lesser extent, have been reviving their symphonic output, perhaps Britain is in compositional terms no longer the citadel of a living symphonic tradition that it once was. Yet the appointment of a British conductor, Simon Rattle, to the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2002, an event quite unthinkable a century ago, shows just how far Britain’s wider relationship with the symphony and its institutions has been transformed since the days of ‘Das Land ohne Musik’.