Talk:Symphony No. 9 (Schubert)

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Please could you elaborate on the how the meaning of the nickname has changed? An encycopedia is no place for cute riddles.

I'm unable to help you directly, but if anyone can answer a little question of my own (any professional orchestral violinists will be able to help here) then this may serve to answer your own query.

I heard a snippet of commentary on Classic FM (the UK commercial classical music radio station) mentioning that a given symphony was micknamed "The 'C' Monster" by violinists because of the sheer physical effort involved in playing it. Unfortunately my attention was diverted before I could learn the identity of the composer and which of that composer's works had thus been nicknamed. However, given the sheer size of Schubert's No. 9 (the Coda alone is an immense 180 bars - more information here) and Robert Schumann's exclamation in a letter to his wife that he had found "a symphony of heavenly length" among Schubert's papers, this leads to the possibility that this work was originally nicknamed "The Great" upon account of the fact that it is a colossal piece of music, but "The Great" now refers to the fact that it is regarded as Schubert's crowning glory among his symphonies. In the meantime, could any violinists please tell me if this piece is indeed the one nicknamed "The 'C' Monster"? The size of this work would fit it nothing else, plus it is described in the web page link I gave earlier as containing passages for staccato violins, and I can imagine that maintaining continuous staccato violin playing for many bars would indeed require considerable physical effort! Calilasseia 05:37, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The name 'Great C major' is nothing more than a way of contrasting Schubert's 9th Symphony (in the modern numbering) from his 6th Symphony in the same key, which could then be referred to as the 'Little C Major'. The issue, then, is the fact that both works have the same home-key, NOT that the later symphony is 'long', 'colossal', 'a glorious masterwork', or exhausting to play.

Pf.

[edit] Trombones in a Symphony

Beethoven most certainly can not be credited as the first composer to use trombones in a symphony. Just to cite one example I have in my own recording collection: Joachim Eggert's Symphony #3 in E-Flat, which predates Beethoven's first use of trombones in a symphony. Eggert's Symphony was also not the first to do so, it's just one moderately well-known example that easily dismisses this repeated false statement; it's also often cited because the trombones have a much more expanded role than they do in Beethoven's 5th Symphony, so not only were they used in a symphony prior to Beethoven's 5th, they were used more widely in a symphony before Beethoven's 5th. For the life of me, I absolutely cannot imagine why this tired old legend of Beethoven being the first to use trombones is repeated again and again. When will this die? He wasn't first to do this, he wasn't even close. I'm removing this false granting of credit; at least, it added nothing to the article and so should not be missed. But false statements have no place here. Of all the musical "urban legends", this one is the most baffling with regards to its unending refusal to die.