B minor Symphonies

Richard Taruskin's five-volume history of music, the Oxford History of Western Music, keeps giving me ideas for posts. In discussing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony he mentions the very few other symphonies in this key. Let's have a look at them.

You would think that there would be scads of symphonies in this key, only two sharps away from A minor, but no. The only previous one by a major composer is one of a group of six written by C. P. E. Bach in 1773 for Baron van Swieten. It is in three movements, Allegretto, Larghetto and Presto. It is not a lengthy work and is for strings alone.

The decade of the 1770s was noted for its "storm and stress" mood in music. The symphony had traditionally been rather a cheerful, convivial kind of music. But composers soon started to use the resources of the orchestra to paint some darker moods. Still, until the 19th century, symphonies in minor keys are relatively rare. Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor stands out for that reason. In 1772 Joseph Haydn wrote a symphony in B major and cast the second movement in B minor. The work is scored for two oboes, bassoon, two horns and strings. Here is the whole symphony. The second movement, Poco Adagio starts just after the five minute mark. It is in the style of a siciliana.

Given that fairly modest background to the idea of a symphony in B minor, Schubert's Unfinished stands out even more strongly. Every composer, at least in those days, probably had a few unfinished symphonies in his drawer. When you start to compose quite often the music just doesn't unfold as it should, or you get side-tracked into some dull ideas or just lose your way. So there they sit, sketches of potential works. Schubert had a few unfinished symphonies of his own. But The Unfinished is a bit different. There is a manuscript full score of the first two movements, two pages of a Scherzo, a piano sketch of the rest of the Scherzo and that's it. The nickname "Unfinished" may be just that, a nickname for a piece that Schubert decided was complete after just two movements. It was written in 1822, before the "Great C Major" that I discussed in these two posts. Like a number of Schubert's larger works it was never performed during his life. The Unfinished wasn't even published until 1866!

The symphony begins with a mysterious "preface theme" in the low strings. In the score it is phrased in two-measure groups, but it is just as easily heard as 2 + 3 + 3 as I have bracketed it in the example below. Here is the opening group of themes from the first movement:

Click to enlarge

Despite the fact that the nearest model for Schubert in the symphony genre was Beethoven, and despite the fact that Beethoven did use "preface themes" (usually to replace a slow introduction), this sounds nothing like Beethoven. That opening theme in the bass is very mysterious. You could say, "yes, but Beethoven had a very mysterious beginning to his 9th Symphony in D minor, did he not?" Yep, but the 9th Symphony of Beethoven was written in 1824, two years after this one! This symphony, apart from being in a very unusual key, has also very unusual themes. The texture here, with the strings accompanying the winds in the third theme above, owes little to Mozart and Beethoven, but we find it in Rossini, in the overture to the Barber of Seville, for example. Now let's listen to the music. Here is the whole Unfinished with the score:

There is just a touch of the operatic in the first movement, especially in the forzando chords in the full orchestra that from time to time punctuate the texture, followed by suspenseful pizzicati. Twice we return to that bass "preface theme" and each time it seems more ominous. What Schubert is doing here is inventing how to create romantic subjectivity in music. This was first done in the smaller forms, the songs and impromptus heard in the salons where Schubert achieved his success. Now he is moving it to the larger concert hall. He had no immediate influence because no-one heard this music until the second half of the century, but when they did, it made a huge impact on the romantic symphonists like Brahms and even Mahler.

There was one other symphonist who felt the impact of the Unfinished and that was Tchaikovsky whose 6th symphony is not only in B minor, but also ends with a slow movement! Here it is:

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Introduction to Shostakovich

Shostakovich spent nearly all his life under the Soviet system and twice—once in the 1930s and once in the 1940s—his music was banned from performance and publication. Despite this, and the need to be constantly wary of falling into Stalin’s disfavor, Shostakovich developed into one of the finest composers of the 20^th century—perhaps the greatest if we accept the opinion of the English composer William Walton. Shostakovich did not follow the usual path of modern composers who as a group became convinced that music had to be atonal and cut all ties with the music of the past. Instead he made use of the traditional forms such as string quartet, symphony and even followed in Bach’s footsteps by writing preludes and fugues for piano in all the keys. He was disdained for this by ‘right-thinking’ avant-garde composers but audiences came more and more to love his music. When his 5^th Symphony was premiered in Leningrad in 1937 the audience, according to Mstislav Rostropovich, sat silently in tears and then erupted into 40 minutes of applause. Musicologist David Fanning has said that, “Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow countrymen, and his personal ideals of humanitarian and public service, he succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power.”

His fifteen symphonies comprise an immense body of work that frankly we are still coming to terms with. The First Symphony was written in 1925 when he was nineteen years old as a graduation piece from the conservatory in Petrograd (later Leningrad and currently St. Petersberg). It was an instant success and is in the repertoire of most orchestras today. His Fifteenth Symphony was written in 1971. All together they take up ten or eleven CDs, ranging in duration from twenty or so minutes to nearly an hour and a half. Honestly, I could spend a month posting every day on just one of the more important symphonies. What I want to do right now is briefly introduce them with a few of the shorter movements. But first some background. Here is the Wikipedia article on Shostakovich. There is a great deal of controversy over Shostakovich's relationship with the Soviet regime, but the article steers a neutral path and is a good place to start.

Now for the music. My first sample is the third movement of the Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112, subtitled The Year of 1917, written in 1961. The third movement is titled Aurora and depicts the battleship Aurora that fired on the Winter Palace, beginning the Russian Revolution. What it is supposed to represent is not as important as how the music goes about it. If you don't have excellent speakers with your computer I recommend finding a CD of this movement so you can really hear the weight of the sound. Here is an enthusiastic performance conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:

The abrupt ending is because this movement shades directly without pause into the last movement. Next is the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, dating from 1937. This somewhat demented waltz (labeled an Allegretto) is the comic relief following the soul-wrenching first movement. Shostakovich had a real sense of humor that contrasted dramatically with his darker side:

The Symphony No. 14 (Opus 135) was completed in the spring of 1969. It is a sombre work for soprano, bass and a small string orchestra with percussion. There are eleven movements, setting poems by four authors. Most of the poems deal with the theme of death, particularly that of unjust or early death. Here is the first movement, on a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca:

Eerie in its absolute simplicity. I intended to put up just the first movement, but I wanted this performance by Fischer-Dieskau and the only clip I could find includes the second movement. Just pause the clip at 4:44. For my last excerpt here is the third movement of the Symphony No. 8 in C minor (Opus 65) written in the summer of 1943 in the middle of WWII. Shostakovich describes it as a march with elements of a scherzo. Here is Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw:

This movement too ends abruptly because it goes directly into the next. So, four brief movements from four symphonies: one stirring and martial, one a frivolous and demented waltz, one desolate sorrow and one ominous and threatening. Few composers have this kind of range. I hope you have found at least one of these excerpts compelling. If you did, I suggest listening to the whole symphony of which it is a part.

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