1900-1949 Symphony

Question 1

Name 6 symphonies ca.1900-1949.

Answer 1

1. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.8 “Symphony of a Thousand” (1906-7)
2. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.10 (incomplete, 1910)
3. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No.2 (1908)
4. Jean Sibelius: Symphony No.5 in E-flat (1915)
5. Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D minor Op. 47 (1937)
6. Benjamin Britten: A Simple Symphony for strings (1933–34)

Question 2

Piece: symphony by Mahler, 8.

Answer 2

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.8 “Symphony of a Thousand” (1906-7)

• the first completely choral symphony to be written
• One of the largest-scale choral works in the classical concert repertoire. Because it requires huge instrumental and vocal forces it is frequently called the “Symphony of a Thousand.” Mahler himself did not sanction the name.
• The last of Mahler’s works that was premiered in his lifetime, the symphony was a critical and popular success when he conducted its first performance.
• The fusion of song and symphony had been a characteristic of Mahler’s early works. In his “middle” compositional period after 1901, a change of direction led him to produce three purely instrumental symphonies. The Eighth, marking the end of the middle period, returns to a combination of orchestra and voice in a symphonic context. The structure of the work is unconventional; instead of the normal framework of several movements, the piece is in two parts. Part I is based on the Latin text of a 9th-century Christian hymn for Pentecost, Veni creator spiritus (“Come, Creator Spirit”), and Part II is a setting of the words from the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust. The two parts are unified by a common idea, that of redemption through the power of love, a unity conveyed through shared musical themes.
• in renouncing the pessimism that had marked much of his music, he offered the Eighth as an expression of confidence in the eternal human spirit.
• The orchestral forces required are, however, not as large as those deployed in Arnold Schoenberg’s oratorio Gurre-Lieder (1911). The choral and vocal forces consist of two SATB choirs, a children’s choir, and eight soloists
• The unity between the two parts of the symphony is established, musically, by the extent to which they share thematic material. In particular, the first notes of the Veni creator theme — E-flat→B-flat→A-flat — dominate the climaxes to each part- In composing his score, Mahler temporarily abandoned the more progressive tonal elements which had appeared in his most recent works. The symphony’s key is, for Mahler, unusually stable
• This is the first of his works in which familiar fingerprints — birdsong, military marches, Austrian dances — are almost entirely absent.
• the predominant expression is not of torrents of sound but of the contrasts of subtle tone-colours and the luminous quality of the scoring

Question 3

Piece: symphony by Mahler, 10.

Answer 3

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.10 (incomplete, 1910)

• Mahler’s final composition. At the time of Mahler’s death the composition was substantially complete in the form of a continuous draft; but not being fully elaborated at every point, and mostly not orchestrated, it was not performable in that state. Only the first movement is regarded as reasonably complete and performable as Mahler intended.
• arguably his most musically dissonant work
• The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Tenth were highly unusual. Mahler was at the height of his compositional powers, but his personal life was in complete disarray, most recently compounded by the revelation that his young wife Alma had had an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. Mahler sought counselling from Sigmund Freud, and on the verge of its successful première in Munich, dedicated the Eighth Symphony to Alma in a desperate attempt to repair the breach. The unsettled frame of Mahler’s mind found expression in the despairing comments (many addressed to Alma) written on the manuscript of the Tenth, and must have influenced its composition: on the final page of the short score in the final movement, Mahler wrote, “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” (To live for you! To die for you!) and the exclamation “Almschi!” underneath the last soaring phrase.

Question 4

Piece: symphony by Rachmaninoff.

Answer 4

Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No.2 (1908)

• The premiere was conducted by the composer himself
• The score is dedicated to Sergei Taneyev, a Russian composer, teacher, theorist, author, and pupil of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• He moved his wife and infant daughter to Dresden, Germany, to spend more time composing and to also escape the political tumult that would put Russia on the path to revolution. It was during this time that Rachmaninoff wrote not only his Second Symphony, but also the tone poem Isle of the Dead.
• Rachmaninoff was not altogether convinced that he was a gifted symphonist. At its 1897 premiere, his Symphony No. 1 (conducted by Alexander Glazunov) was considered an utter disaster.
• He was very unhappy with the first draft of his Second Symphony but after months of revision he finished the work and conducted the premiere in 1908 to great applause.
• The second movement really only resembles a scherzo insofar as it relates to the early- to mid-Romantic tradition of symphonic movements, i.e. first movement allegro, slow movement, fast scherzo, and final allegro.

Question 5

Piece: symphony by Sibelius.

Answer 5

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No.5 in E-flat (1915)

• Sibelius was commissioned to write this symphony by the Finnish government in honor of his 50th birthday, which had been declared a national holiday.
• Meanwhile, various landmark works in other genres had presented further radical developments. In 1909 Schoenberg continued pushing for more dissonant and chromatic harmonies in his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. From 1910–1913 Igor Stravinsky premiered his innovative and revolutionary ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps). Ravel and Debussy were at work developing and performing their Impressionistic music. Though having spent nearly 30 years in the public spotlight, Jean Sibelius found his works receiving poor reviews for the first time with the 1911 premiere of his Fourth Symphony and, as James Hepokoski theorized, the composer “was beginning to sense his own eclipse as a contending modernist.”
• These events perhaps brought Sibelius to a point of crisis in his career, maybe forcing him to choose between changing his style to fill the more modern desires of audiences or continue composing as he felt best fit. The first version of this symphony kept his orchestral style (consonant sonorities, woodwind lines in parallel thirds, rich melodic development, etc.) while further developing his structural style. Hepokoski calls this structural development “sonata deformation” or the change and development of sonata form itself. The success of this change is reflected in the popularity of the Fifth Symphony to the present day.The first version of the Fifth Symphony still has much in common with the more modernist Fourth Symphony as it features some bitonal passages; the version from 1919 seems to be more straightforward and classicistic. Sibelius commented on his revision: “I wished to give my symphony another – more human – form. More down-to-earth, more vivid.”- The form of the symphony is symmetrical when it comes to tempo
• The symphony ends with one of Sibelius’s most original ideas (and one not included in the original version): the six staggered chords of the final cadence, each separated by silence.

Question 6

Piece: symphony by Shostakovich.

Answer 6

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D minor Op. 47 (1937)

• The premiere was a huge success, and received an ovation that lasted well over half an hour.
• The symphony opens with a strenuous string figure in canon, initially leaping and falling in minor sixths then narrowing to minor thirds. The sharply dotted rhythm of this figure remains to accompany a broadly lyric melody played by the first violins.
• The opening motif in the second movement, a waltz-like scherzo, is a variation of the first theme of the first movement.
• The second movement includes no brass at all. The strings are divided throughout the entire movement (3 groups of violins, violas in 2, cellos in 2; basses in 2).
• After his fall from favour in 1936 over the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the ballet The Limpid Stream, Shostakovich was under pressure to simplify his music and adapt it to classical models, heroic classicism being a prime characteristic of socialist realism. An adequate portrayal of socialist realism in music meant a monumental approach and an exalted rhetoric based on optimism. Shostakovich’s music was considered too complex, technically, to fall under the strictures of socialist realism. Lady Macbeth had been derided in Pravda as “a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds.” At the meeting of the Composers’ Union weeks after the Pravda article, Lev Knipper, Boris Asafiev and Ivan Dzerzhinsky suggested that the composer should be helped to “straighten himself out.” Essentially a non-person in an era of unprecedented state terrorism, Shostakovich appeared to have no choice but to comply.
• Many of Shostakovich’s friends and relatives were arrested and disappeared, and for a year the composer feared the same would happen to him. He completed his Fourth Symphony in April but withdrew the work the following year while it was in rehearsal.
• This was the situation Shostakovich faced in April 1937. If he were to do anything but yield to Party pressure, it would have to be subtle, as all eyes would be on him and whatever composition he wrote. His form of musical satire had been denounced and would not be tolerated so blatantly again. Falling back on venting his tragic side cautiously whilst otherwise toeing the line of socialist realism would amount to self-betrayal. He had to somehow turn the simplicity demanded by the authorities into a virtue, mocking it whilst in the process of turning it into great art.
• This work, he hoped, would mark his political rehabilitation, at least outwardly coming up to party expectations. It could pass for an example of the heroic classicism demanded by official policy.
• Shostakovich slimmed down his musical style considerably from the superabundance of the Fourth, with less orchestral color and a smaller breadth of scope. With this scaling down also came a refinement of his pithiness and a deepening of ambiguity.- With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich gained an unprecedented triumph, with the music appealing equally—and remarkably—to both the public and official critics, though the overwhelming public response to the work initially aroused suspicions among certain officials. The then head of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Mikhail Chulaki, recalls that certain authorities bristled at Mravinsky’s gesture of lifting the score above his head to the cheering audience, and a subsequent performance was attended by two plainly hostile officials, V.N. Surin and Boris M. Yarustovsky, who tried to claim in the face of the vociferous ovation given the symphony that the audience was made up of “hand-picked” Shostakovich supporters. Yet the authorities in due course claimed that they found everything they had demanded of Shostakovich restored in the symphony. Meanwhile the public heard it as an expression of the suffering to which it had been subjected by Stalin. The same work was essentially received two different ways.
• the political basis for extolling the Fifth Symphony was to show how the Party could make artists bow to its demands. It had to show that it could reward as easily and fully as it could punish.
• At the height of the Stalinist Terror, over half a million people were shot and another seven million despatched to the Gulag in just over a year’s time. Conservative estimates place the Gulag population at between nine and 15 million.
• During the first performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. The music, steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, contained echoes of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox requiem. It also recalled a genre of Russian symphonic works written in memory of the dead, including pieces by Glazunov, Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. Typical of these works is the use of the tremolo in the strings as a reference to the hallowed ambience of the requiem.
• For an audience that had lost friends and family on a massive scale, these references were apt to evoke intense emotions. This was why the Fifth Symphony was received and cherished by the Soviet public unlike any other work as an expression of the immeasurable grief they endured during Stalin’s regime.

Question 7

Piece: symphony by Britten.

Answer 7

Benjamin Britten: A Simple Symphony for strings (1933–34)
- The piece is dedicated to Audrey Alston (Mrs Lincolne Sutton), Britten’s viola teacher during his childhood. The piece is based on eight themes which Britten wrote during his childhood (two per movement) and for which he had a particular fondness. He completed his final draft of this piece at age twenty.- Eight main themes appear in the symphony, with two movements, the most famous is the pizzicato. The second movement is popular with mandolin players as it is pizzicato.