Choral symphony

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A choral symphony is a large musical composition, generally including an orchestra, a choir and soloists, which adheres to some extent to the tenets of musical form for a symphony in its internal workings and overall musical architecture.^[1] The term "choral symphony" in this context was coined by Hector Berlioz when describing his Roméo et Juliette in his five-paragraph introduction to that work.^[2] The direct antecedent for the choral symphony is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The Beethoven Ninth incorporates part of the Ode an die Freude ("Ode to Joy"), a poem by Friedrich Schiller, with text sung by soloists and a chorus in the last movement. It is the first example of a major composer using the human voice on the same level with instruments in a symphony.

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 True to symphonic form 1.2 Music and words as equals 1.3 Words determining symphonic form 1.4 Programmatic versus symphonic 1.4.1 Beethoven 1.4.2 Berlioz 1.4.3 Mahler 1.4.3.1 Second Symphony 1.4.3.2 Third Symphony 1.4.3.3 Eighth Symphony 2 List of choral symphonies 3 Bibliography 4 References

[edit] Overview

[edit] True to symphonic form

Choral symphonies, unlike the Beethoven Ninth, can utilize text settings, choruses and sometimes soloists throughout their compositions, not in just one or two sections; Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony, written in 1906-1907, was the first to do this, followed in 1909 by Ralph Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony. Both these works justified their status as symphonies, having been symphonically conceived and remaining true to symphonic form after their subsequent conceptions.^[3] Berlioz attempted to explain as much years earlier regarding Roméo et Juliette:

Even though voices are often used, it is neither a concert opera nor a cantata, but a choral symphony.

If there is singing, almost from the beginning, it is to prepare the listener's mind for the dramatic scenes whose feelings and passions are to be expressed by the orchestra. It is also to introduce the choral masses gradually into the musical development, when their too sudden appearance would have damaged the compositions's unity .....^[2]

As in both opera and oratorio, the text helps serve both musical and programmatic ends. The difference between the choral symphony and these other genres is in their overall forms. The oratorio was somewhat modeled after the opera. Their similarities include the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. The choral symphony, conversely, remains essentially a symphony. It can (but not necessarily) utilize sonata form and have a similar ordering of movements as a purely orchestral symphony. Even when the number of movements are extended, as is the case with Berlioz' Roméo, as long as the form remains essentially symphonic, it does not cross from symphony in to oratorio, even if the form itself has been extended. As Robert Collet wrote about Berlioz, the line between his dramatic works for the stage and his dramatic works for the concert platform may have been a fine one, but the composer knew where to draw it.^[4]

[edit] Music and words as equals

Like the oratorio, however, the written text shares equal standing with the music, just as the chorus and soloists share equality with the instruments. Igor Stravinsky phrased this point succinctly when he said about the texts of his Symphony of Psalms that “it is not a symphony in which I have included Psalms to be sung. On the contrary, it is the singing of the Psalms that I am symphonizing.” This decision was as much musical as it was textual. Stravinsky wanted to employ considerable counterpoint in his symphony. To facilitate doing so he chose to use "a choral and instrumental ensemble in which the two elements should be on an equal footing, neither of them outweighing the other."^[5]

This desire for balance was also Mahler's intent in writing his Eighth Symphony for exceptionally large forces. Though the composer's doing so earned the work the subtitle "Symphony of a Thousand" from his press agent (a soubriquet which has stuck to the symphony to the present day), Mahler's aim was not pure grandiosity but to maintain as perfect a balance between voices and instruments as possible. This is something of which he would have had considerable experience from working as an opera conductor nearly all of his adult life.^[3] Like Stravinsky, Mahler employs these forces on an extensive and extended use of counterpoint, especially in the first movement, "Veni Creator Spiritus."^[6]

Vaughan Williams also insisted on a balance between words and music. Though it was Walt Whitman's poems that inspired him to write A Sea Symphony, it was his own intent to set them within symphonic bounds and stay within the four-movement norm.^[7] As the composer wrote in the program notes for the symphony,

The plan of the work is symphonic rather than narrative or dramatic, and this may be held to justify the frequent repetition of important words and phrases which occur in the poem. The words as well as the music are thus treated symphonically. It is also noticable that the orchestra has an equal share with the chorus and soloists in carrying out the musical ideas.^[8]

Nevertheless, the words also had their influence, with the physical exhultation characteristic of Whitman's poetry producing a grandiloquence and musical poetry as unexpectedly direct as the words. This was even more apparent when comparing the symphony to the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Written at roughly the same period, the Fantasy shows taut and strict control of material in marked contrast to the expansiveness of the symphony.^[9] The symphony is also profuse in melodic invention; it has enough tunes in its four movements for other composers to write at least three symphonies.^[10]

[edit] Words determining symphonic form

Sometimes the text can determine not only tone, but also the basic symphonic outline for the composition to follow. With Sergei Rachmaninoff the four-part structure of Edgar Allan Poe's The Bells naturally suggested the four movements of a symphony with its outline of the circle of life: youth, marriage, maturity, and death. The gestation of Dmitri Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, was only slightly less straightforward. He set the poem Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko almost immediately upon reading it. He initally considered keeping this work as a single-movement composition. What changed his mind was discovering three other Yevtushenko poems in the poet's collection Vzmakh ruki (A Wave of the Hand). These additional poems prompted him to proceed to a full-length choral symphony.^[11]

Conversely, Shostakovich had also originally planned his Seventh Symphony as a single-movement choral symphony with a text from the Ninth Psalm on the avengement of innocent blood shed.^[12] He was also influenced by Stravinsky in doing so; he had been deeply impressed with the latter's Symphony of Psalms, which he wanted to emulate in this work.^[13] He realized later that the work encompassed far more than this.^[14] He expanded the symphony to the traditional four movements and made it purely instrumental.

The text can also encourage a composer to expand a choral symphony past the normal bounds for the genre of the symphony. Berlioz intended to follow a design much like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for his Roméo et Juliette, only with four instrumental movements instead of three before the choral finale. This would have also placed it within the same formal schele overall as Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique. While he still considered the musical structure to hew to this plan, he overlaid "extra" movements to fill out the drama illlustrated in the work. As a result, the symphony is actually in seven movements. He also calls for an intermission after the fourth movement, the "Queen Mab Scherzo," to remove the harps from the stage and bring on the chorus of Capulets for the funeral march which follows.^[15]

While some critics have argued similarly that Mahler allowed his text for the Eighth Symphony to dictate his writing the piece in two movements, this is actually not the case. He merely telescoped slow movement, scherzo and finale into one continuous movement.^[3]

[edit] Programmatic versus symphonic

[edit] Beethoven

Even with a balance between words and music, the question arose whether having words and voices in a symphony was an abomination of the rules governing that genre. Beethoven thought that perhaps this was so, even intending to discard the choral ending to his Ninth Symphony and replace it with a purely instrumental one.^[16]

Part of the quandary for Beethoven was the direction in which his compositional style was heading. His finales during his late period had extended far beyond the normal parameters of classical form. It was as though he were elaborating the limitless vareity of endings his mind could create, in a dizzying display of his creative powers.^[17] At the same time, his ever-present skepticism warred with his will to affirm and transcend; no matter what the symbolic affirmation, doubt survived. Beethoven may have been becoming convinced that his colossal endings were overwhelming the works they were intended to crown, throwing off classical balance and intruding compositional and dramatic issues normally reserved for earlier movements of a sonata style. The Grosse Fuge is just one case in point.^[18]

There was also the nature of written text, which was verbal and philosophical rather than musical. Even if the "Ode to Joy" satisfied Beethoven's prophetic and apocalyptic intent by showing Elysium after surviving storm and chaos (Gesamtkunstwerk ), by doing so with words he ran the risk of diluting the power of sound and narrowing the range of the music's potential meanings.^[18] By introducing a choral finale, he seemed to advance Richard Wagner's assertion on the inferiority of music: "'Where music can go no farther, there comes the word' (the word stands higher than the tone)."^[19]

Moreover, the narrowing of musical meanings seemed to also introduce the question of considering the earlier movements as ideological constructs rather than as music.^[20] The instrumental finale Beethoven contemplated for his Ninth would have sidestepped the ideological diminution of the choral finale, along with the Gestamtkunstwerk conception and denotational vocabulary, leaving music's expressive powers unhindered.^[21]

Eventually, Beethoven realized that he had underestimated the achievement he had won— that, rather than fixing or limiting the meanings implied by the music, the text became a prime vehicle for enlarging the music's meaning.^[21]

[edit] Berlioz

Rather than question how a text might show music inferior to it, Berlioz instead showed how an orchestra could supplant a text wordlessly to expand meaning—not just any text, but Shakespeare. He wrote in his preface to Roméo:

If, in the famous garden and cemetery scenes the dialogue of the two lovers, Juliet's asides, and Romeo's passionate outbursts are not sung, if the duets of love and despair are given to the oprchestra, the reasons are numerous and easy to comprehend. First, and this alone would be sufficient, it is a symphony and not an opera. Second, since duets of this nature have been handled vocally a thousand times by the createst masters, it was wise as well as unusual to attempt another means of expression. It is also because the ery sublimity of this love made its depiction so dangerous for the musician that he had to give his imagination a latitude that the positive sense of the sung words would not have given him, resorting instead to instrumental language, which is richer, more varied, less precise, and by its ery indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in such a case.^[2]

As a manifesto, this paragraph became more significant than its author could have imagined for the amalgamation of symphonic and dramatic elements in the same composition.^[22] While Berlioz planned initially for Roméo to follow the same pattern as Beethoven's Ninth and adhere to symphonic ideals stringently, he had to break with those ideals and sonata-style organization as he progressed on the work. He found strophic forms and free sectionality more congenial to the dramatic purposes he had in mind. He achieved balance and coherence by a musico-dramatic framing similar to that he had used for his Grande Messe des morts (Requiem). He reprises the opening instrumental "swordplay" used to illustrate the warring Montagues and Capulets and maintains a clear formal balance beginning the opening strophes and Friar Lawrence's aria in the last scene.^[23]

Despite this expansion past the classical boundaries of the sympjhony for dramatic purposes, Roméo remained indebted structurally and musically to Beethoven's Ninth. This was due not just due to the use of soloists and choir, but in Berlioz' keeping the weight of the vocal contribution in the finale, and also in aspects of the orchestration such as the theme of the trombone recitative at the Introduction.^[24] At its core, the composer felt, Roméo remained Beethovenian in scope and design, with the exception of including both a scherzo and a march as he had in the Symphonie Fantastique. The "extra" movements—the introduction with its potpourri of subsections and the concluding tomb scene—functioned merely as bookends for the drama.^[25]

By keeping the idea of symphonic construction closely in mind, Berlioz was able (per his manifesto) to express the main portion of the drama in instrumental music while setting the more expository sections and narrative sections in words. The three principally instrumental sections—"Fête chez Capulet," "Scène d'amour" and "La reine Mab"—can be considered the equivalent of first movement, slow movement and scherzo.^[26]

[edit] Mahler

[edit] Second Symphony

Not only was there no schism or discrepancy between programmatic and symphonic concerns when it came to Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection, but it became a programmatic impetus that allowed him to complete it.^[27] It had begun as a huge single-movement tone poem, Totenfeier (Funeral Rite)^[28], remaining one of the composer's most imposing symphonic structures, unorthodox in tonal organization but unambiguously and even classically articulated. It also left him stuck with the challenge of how to follow such a movement.^[29] While there was a time lag between its composition and that of the finale, with its setting of Klopstock's "Resurrection Ode," there is no discontinuity. On the contrary, the final movement complements the opening one.^[30]

[edit] Third Symphony

Even with its program, the Second Symphony followed the Beethovenian pattern of three instrumental movements and a choral finale (the fourth movement, Urlicht, being a bridge from slow movement to finale). The Third Symphony broke from this pattern. Two movements for voices and orchestra follow three purely instrumental ones, then return to instruments alone for the finale. The progress of movements make sense only in a programmatic one.^[31] Both the first and final movements are huge, flanking what are essentially intermezzi which themselves frame weightier episodes discussing "animals" and "mankind."^[32] But with the finale, originally titled "What Love Tells Me," (and in this case he was talking about agape or godly love,)^[33] some might think Mahler took a hint from Berlioz about instruments sometimes being more eloquent than voices.

[edit] Eighth Symphony

Initially, Mahler planned for the Eighth Symphony to have four movements:

1. Veni, Creator Spiritus
2. Caritas
3. Scherzo: Christmas Games with the Christ Child

   This movement would have included two songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"

4. Creation through Eros (Hymn)

What the sketches for these movements did not have were words; though the opening theme was articulated to fit the words "Veni, creator spiritus," Mahler may have planned this work to be purely instrumental. Mahler dated these sketches "Aug. 1906." Somewhere in the eight weeks which followed, Mahler replaced the contemplated hymn to Love with a similar idea based on the closing scene in Part II of Goethe's Faust, with the ideal of salvation through the eternal womanhood (das Ewige-Weibliche). He interrupted his holiday to conduct The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival. There, critic Julius Korngold spotted a well-thumbed copy of Faust protruding from his coat pocket.^[34]

The dramatic and intellectual plan for the symphony would affect both its content and its overall musical structure—affirming Goethe's symbolic vision of the redemptive power of human love, eros, while linking it in "Veni, Creator Spiritus" to both the creative spirit who inspires the artist and God the Creator who endows the artist with creativity.^[35][36] As Mahler wrote to his wife Alma,

The essence ... is really Goethe's idea that all love is generate, creative, and that there is a a physical and spiritual generation which is the emanation of this "Eros." You have it in the last scene of Faust, presented symbolically. The wonderful discussion between Diotima and Socrates ... gives the core of Plato's thought, his whole outlook on the world... The comparison between [Socrates] and Christ is obvious and has arisen spontaneously in all ages ... In each case Eros as Creator of the world.^[37]

As the composer took a non-narrative approach to expressing a personal philosophical idea, the symphony metamorphosed from being completely instrumental to completely choral, becoming the first completely choral symphony to be written.^[3][36] Not just the choice of text became crucial to convey Mahler's intentions, but even the way in which he chose to set it. "Veni, creator spiritus" ("Come, creator spirit") might as well have read "come, creative spirit" since the music for it reportedly came at such a white heat of inspiration.^[38]. Yet in a 1906 conversation with Richard Specht, the composer confirmed that the music, not the text, had remained paramount:

"This Eighth Symphony is noteworthy for one thing, because it combines two works of poetry in different languages. The first part is a Latin hymn and the second nothing less than the final scene of the second part of Faust...Its form is also something altogether new. Can you imagine a symphony that is sung throughout, from beginning to end? So far I have employed words and the human voice merely to suggest, to sum up, to establish a mood...But here the voice is also an instrument. The whole first movement is strictly symphonic in form yet is completely sung...the most beautiful instrument of all is led to its calling. Yet it is used only as sound, because the voice is the bearer of poetic thoughts."

Mahler's treatment of what he considered "the cardinal point of the text" and the brodge from "Veni, Creator Spiritus" to Faust—that is, "Accende lumen sensibus" ("Kindle our Reason with Light")—show us how he intended to treat the text as music, to be manipulated as needed. While his first statatement of this line by the soloists is quiet, the word order is reversed—"Lumen accente sensibus," or literally "Light, Kindle with Reason." The great outburst with all voices in unison, including those of children, coincides with the first presentation of the line in its proper order. The change there of texture, tempo and harmony make this the most dramatic stroke in the symphony.^[39] Likewise, he presents other lines of "Veni, Creator Spiritus" in a tremendously dense growth of repetitions, combinations, inversions, transpositions and conflations. He does the same with Goethe's text. There he makes two substantial cuts, one of 37 lines and another of seven, presumably on purpose, along with other omissions, inversions and altered word forms.^[40]

[edit] List of choral symphonies

In chronological order:

Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) (1827) Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz) (1835) Symphony No. 2 (Mendelssohn) (1840) Faust Symphony (Liszt) (1854) Dante Symphony (Liszt) (1856) Symphony No. 2 (Mahler) Resurrection (1896) Symphony No. 3 (Mahler) (1897) Symphony No. 3 (Ropartz) (1905) Symphony No. 8 (Mahler) (1906-1907) * A Sea Symphony (Vaughan Williams) (1909) * Atalanta in Calydon (Bantock) (1911) ** Vanity of Vanities (Bantock) (1913) ** A Pageant of Human Life (Bantock) (1913) ** The Bells (Rachmaninoff) (1913) *

Symphony No. 3 (Enescu) (1916–18) First Choral Symphony (Holst) (1923-1924) Symphony No. 2 (Shostakovich) To October (1927) Symphony No. 3 (Shostakovich) The First of May (1929) Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky) (1930) * Spring Symphony (Britten) (1947) * Symphony No. 13 (Shostakovich) Babi Yar (1962) * Symphony for Voices (Williamson) (1962) ** Symphony No. 3 (Bernstein) Kaddish (1963) * Harmonium (John Adams) (1980-1981) * "The Dawn is at Hand" (Williamson) (1989) ** Symphony No. 9 (Henze) (1997) **

Works with an asterisk indicate text used throughout entire composition.

Works with two asterisks are written for unaccompanied voices but are still considered choral symphonies.^[41]

[edit] Bibliography

• Carr, Jonathan. Mahler—A Biography. Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press, 1997. ISBN 0-87951-802-2.
• Holoman, D. Kern. Berlioz. Cambridge, Massachusstts: Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-674-06778-9.
• Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
• Kennedy, Michael. The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-19-311333-3.
• Kennedy, Michael. Mahler. New York: Schirmer Books, 1990. ISBN 0460125982
• Latham, Alison (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-866212-2.
• Maes, Francis. A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. by Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
• Sadie, Stanley (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols. London: Macmillian, 1980. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Simpson, Robert (ed.). The Symphony, 2 vols. New York: Drake Publishing, Inc., 1972.
  • Volume 1: Haydn to Dvorak ISBN 0877492441
  • Volume 2: Mahler to the Present Day ISBN 087749245X
• Solomon, Maynard. Late Beethoven—Music, Thought, Imagination. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003. ISBN 0-520-23746-3.
• Steinberg, Michael. The Symphony. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-506177-2.
• Steinberg, Michael. The Choral Masterworks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-195-12644-0.
• Volkov, Solomon. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. ISBN 0-06-014476-9.
• Volkov, Solomon. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: The Free Press, 1995. ISBN 0-02-874052-1.
• Volkov, Solomon. Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator, trans. by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Knopf, 2004. ISBN 0-375-41082-1.
• White, Eric Walter. Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1966. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-27667. (Second edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. ISBN 0520039831.)

[edit] References