Allegro from Symphony No. 9, Op. 70 . . . Dmitri Shostakovich
(Born September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg; died August 8, 1975, in Moscow)

Many consider Dmitri Shostakovich to be music's last great symphonist. During the years between 1925 and 1970, he wrote fifteen works in this basic musical form. His symphonies have enormous variety in both character and size, but through all runs the essential symphonic idea of an extended, highly developed work based on a large number of contrasting themes. No other composer of the 20th century made so extensive, so important, so durable a contribution to symphonic literature. Shostakovich's symphonies combine somber tragedy, mordant wit, expressive melody, dramatic development and profound emotion under a brilliantly orchestrated surface.

His works form a historic extension of the great symphonic tradition of the last two centuries. From Haydn and Mozart through Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, the symphony moved in a fairly straight line. But then, with Bruckner and Mahler, it branched out in one direction, while French composers Chausson and Franck allowed their symphonies to metamorphose into something else. In Russia, Tchaikovsky and Borodin had still other lines to follow. The mature symphonies of Shostakovich combine qualities from the Tchaikovsky and Mahler lines into a new kind of modern Russian symphony.

Shostakovich's family was of Polish descent, but settled in Russia after his grandfather's exile in Siberia. As a boy, Shostakovich took his first piano lessons from his mother, and at the age of thirteen, he entered the Petrograd Conservatory. At nineteen, he completed his Symphony No. 1 as a Conservatory graduation piece in an era when the rulers of the Soviet Union felt that their new kind of society should support new kinds of art. Russian composers, poets, novelists and painters formed an avant‑garde, but before long, the government's ideas changed. In the late 1920's and early 30's, Communist aesthetic theoreticians attacked Shostakovich's next symphonies and his two operas for "bourgeois decadence" and ideological "formalism" and withdrew them from circulation.

With his Symphony No. 5, which Shostakovich humbly described as "a composer's reply to just criticism," he was able to re‑enter the mainstream of Russian musical life. He had difficulties of one kind or another with the authorities until the time of his Symphony No. 13 (1962), which he dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi's war‑time mass murders at Baba‑Yar. By then, his acknowledged position as one of the world's greatest living composers, which did not preserve him from public indignity, prevented him from being silenced for long. His last two symphonies were works of great originality of unconventional structure and content.

Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 9 during a six-week stay at a resort of the Composers' Union. He spent many evenings there with Dmitri Kabalevsky playing piano-duet arrangements of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, whose classical spirit is clearly reflected in this symphony. He completed the Ninth Symphony on August 30, 1945, and it premiered on November 3 in Leningrad, (now St. Petersburg) where it was a great success. Whole movements were encored, but a year later, it was the subject of a sharp political rebuke. The light tone, it was said, did not properly reflect the true spirit of the Soviet people.

The Symphony No. 9 has five movements. The first movement, Allegro, which you will hear tonight, is both witty and ironic. The first theme, which ends in a trill, almost sounds classical in the tradition of Haydn. Soon, it is inverted and we hear it in the flute, then in violins, and finally in the oboe. The lively contrasting theme is introduced in the piccolo, and then clarinets begin a duet before they are covered up by general gaiety. The development is contrapuntal, and the movement concludes with a high-spirited coda.

The symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.

Symphony No. 5, in C Minor, Op. 67 . . . Ludwig van Beethoven
(Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)

Fellow composer Robert Schumann, gave Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 the greatest praise possible when he wrote that, although it is often heard, yet it "still exercises its power over all ages, just as those great phenomena of nature that, no matter how often they recur, fill us with awe and wonder. This symphony will go on centuries hence, as long as the world and world's music endure."

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 has always been popular and recognizable because of the famous four-note phrase with which it opens. Ever ince Beethoven composed the symphony, critics and commentators have attempted to give that phrase some programmatic significance. Beethoven's not altogether trustworthy friend, Anton Schindler, presumably quoted the composer as saying it represented Fate knocking at the door. Schindler, however, had a reputation for not letting facts get in the way of a good story, and the conversation in which he quoted Beethoven took place years after Beethoven finished the symphony, which makes it a bit suspect anyhow. Accounts also say that Beethoven would say nearly anything to rid himself of annoying questioning about his compositions. Nevertheless, this statement began a never-ending stream of interpretations of the symphony.

Whether it has a programmatic significance or not, the phrase unquestionably has definite importance musically, as it recurs throughout the entire symphony. The repetition of this four note phrase differs from a later named technique called "cyclical form" in which a well-defined melody is stated in one movement, and retaining its original identity, is quoted and reused in another. Beethoven's method is to use his musical phrase as a germinal idea that generates new phrases, which resemble the original but are not identical to it. He begins with G and E-flat for the notes of the opening motive: these are two of the three notes that make up a C minor chord. It is in this way that he establishes the key of his symphony, and announces a rhythmic motif which repeats throughout the work, uniting the symphony's four movements.

Beethoven began to compose the Symphony No. 5 in 1804, just after he finished the Symphony No. 3, but put it aside to finish the Symphony No. 4. After that, he worked simultaneously on the next two symphonies. He completed Symphony No. 5 early in 1808 and the Symphony No. 6 in autumn of the same year. On December 22, 1808, he gave a concert in which his latest works were premiered. The program included Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6, the concert aria Ah, Perfido! a Latin hymn, the "Sanctus" from the Mass in C Major, a fantasia for piano solo - the "Choral" Fantasy, Op. 80 for piano, chorus, and orchestra - and the Piano Concerto No. 4. Beethoven conducted and in addition to playing the solo piano parts for this monumentally long concert. Since he completed the Symphony No. 5 at almost exactly the same time as he finished the F major Symphony No. 6 (the Pastorale), at the premiere, it was the Pastorale which bore the number 5. A contemporary observer said the concert lasted for over four hours. The occasion was memorable and stressful: the theater was unheated, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the soprano soloist had a bad case of stage fright. The orchestra stopped mid-composition several times, and the soprano who sang the aria was given a sedative for her nerves. Nevertheless, the Symphony No. 5 soon gained its designation as a masterwork. Somewhere between performance and publication, Beethoven renumbered the two symphonies. The C minor became the Symphony No. 5, and the F Major became the Symphony No. 6, and they remain thus today.

Beethoven perhaps intended the opening movement, Allegro con brio, to be mysterious yet powerfully dramatic. The thematic statement of the famous four-note motif appears first in the clarinet and violins, and in the recapitulation, the whole orchestra joins in with the same figure. An unexpected oboe cadenza at the end of the movement, according to the musicologist Michael Steinberg, has a special function, serving both to disrupt and to integrate.

Over the years, two critics in particular have in some way grasped the essence of this symphony with few words. Amadeus Wendt wrote: "Beethoven's music inspires in its listeners awe, fear, horror, pain, and that exquisite nostalgia that is the soul of romanticism." E.T.A. Hoffmann called the symphony "one of the most important works of the master whose position in the first rank of composers of instrumental music can now be denied by no one... It is a concept of genius, executed with profound deliberation, which in a very high degree brings the romantic content of the music to expression."

The Symphony No. 5 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. The piccolo, contrabassoon and trombone only play in the last movement, where they greatly enrich the sound of the orchestra.

Symphony No. 5, in C-Sharp minor: Adagietto. . . Gustav Mahler
(Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, in Vienna)

Mahler observed that "to write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world." In this work he took a completely new direction, as he put it, striking out in "a completely new style," one concerned with virtuosic orchestral technique, more intense use of counterpoint than he had previously used, and the abandonment of specific "programs." For Mahler, the Symphony No. 5 represented a great step forward in his symphonic development. He felt the need for a new and different means of instrumental expression, but he had trouble finding the exact orchestral language in which to do his explorations.

As Kapellmeister of the Vienna Court Opera, a conducting position, Mahler devoted most of the year to his conducting duties and was only able to devote himself to composing during his summer vacations in the Austrian Alps. Mahler called himself a "holiday" composer who, of necessity, forced all of his writing into a few weeks of vacation or into odd hours of early mornings that he was able to wrest from his work as conductor and musical administrator. The Symphony No. 5 was one of Mahler's great "vacation" pieces, a supreme example of his mastery of orchestration. He began it in the summer of 1901 in the mountains of Carinthia. Around the same time, he met Alma Schindler and was almost instantly attracted to this woman, a brilliant and beautiful twenty-year-old who was also a composer. In March 1902 they were married, and she quickly undertook the responsibility of making legible copies of his sketches. Mahler also spent the summer of 1902 on this work and devoted the autumn and winter mornings in Vienna to orchestrating it.

After a preliminary sight-reading in 1904, he deleted many of the percussion parts that were prominent in the first version. (Alma writes in her diary of "sobbing aloud" when she heard the percussion drowning out the rest of the orchestra.) Although the premiere on October 18, 1904 in Cologne went well, Mahler later made significant changes before conducting the work again in Amsterdam in 1906, and then revised it yet again for a performance in 1908. Finally, in 1911, only months before his death, he was able to write: "The Fifth is finished. I have been compelled to re-orchestrate it completely. I cannot understand how I could have written so much like a beginner at that time. It is clear that the method I had used in the first four symphonies deserted me altogether, as if a totally new message demanded a new technique."

Symphony No. 5 was an important turning point for him, as he moved from his earlier works to the maturity and purely orchestral mastery of his middle period. The fourth movement, the Adagietto, Sehr langsam ("Very slowly") is an ethereal slow movement. It is the most familiar and famous part of the symphony: it was conducted by Leonard Bernstein in a memorial to John F. Kennedy, as well as being used in the movie Death in Venice. Associated somewhat with death and mourning, it is, however, a love song without words written for Alma. Its orchestration is reduced to strings and harp alone, and it is composed in simple three-part form. The melody of this warm, intimate and poignant music is related to the Rückert song setting Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen ("I am lost to the world").

The score calls for harp and strings.

Symphony No. 8, in G Major, Op. 88: Allegretto grazioso . . .Antonin Dvořák
(Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves; died May 11, 1904, in Prague)

Antonin Dvořák, the son of a village innkeeper and butcher, began studying music when he took violin lessons from a local schoolteacher in his small village, and when he reached the age of sixteen, he left home to study in Prague. Five years later, he joined the orchestra of the National Theater, playing the viola (an instrument that in his time was designated the instrument of failed violinists). Soon thereafter he began to test his creative powers with extended compositions in the classical forms. He was almost completely unknown until 1875 when his talent came to the attention of Johannes Brahms, who helped him launch his career by securing for him a generous grant from the Austrian Imperial government in Vienna as well as recommending him to his own music publisher in Berlin.

Dvořák composed his Symphony No. 8 in 1889, an unusually productive year during which he confided to a friend, that he felt so overwhelmed with musical ideas he did not have time to put them all down on paper. He composed this symphony swiftly at his country home at Vysoká, beginning it in September and completing it November 8. Dvořák conducted the first performance with the Prague National Theatre Orchestra on February 2, 1890.

Symphony No. 8 gained international recognition more rapidly than any of Dvořák's other symphonies. After its well-received Prague premiere, he took the new work to England where it was performed in April 1890. Only a few months later, his friend Hans Richter conducted a performance in Vienna. Writing to Dvořák after this concert, Richter expressed his admiration: "You would certainly have been pleased with this performance. All of us felt that it is a magnificent work, and we were all enthusiastic. Brahms dined with us after the concert and we drank to the health of the absent father of [Symphony No.8.] Vivat sequens!" On March 11, 1892, the New York Philharmonic Society premiered the Eighth Symphony in the United States in a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House. The following year, Dvořák conducted a performance of the symphony at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

This symphony was originally published as Symphony No. 4, although it was actually Dvořák's eighth work in the symphonic form, and accordingly it is now known as Symphony No. 8. It is sometimes also known as his "English" Symphony, because a London firm issued it during a period when Dvořák was having a disagreement with his usual publisher, Simrock. In 1876, Brahms had introduced Dvořák to Simrock in Berlin, at whose request Dvořák composed his popular Slavonic Dances. During their years of collaboration, Simrock and Dvořák were frequently in disagreement about one basic issue: The publisher wanted Dvořák to produce more short works in the popular style of the Slavonic Dances, but Dvořák preferred to spend his time on the creation of the symphonies and serious chamber music.

Historians have always remarked on the Eighth Symphony's carefree and spontaneous nature, asserting that the idyllic, bucolic and folk-like character reflects its roots in the music of the Bohemian countryside. Here Dvořák allows his Bohemian personality to assert itself in his own individual rhythmic and melodic style. Dvořák's biographer, Hoffmeister, speaks of Dvořák's thoughts "breaking into flower, not like little blossoms lodged in the stony crevices of an architectural structure, but as the Czech meadows flower, in luxuriant garlands of varied charm and color." At this point, Dvořák was putting Brahms's imposing influence behind him and finding his own personal and natural means of expression. Dvořák wrote that he aimed in this work to compose a symphony ". . . different than the other symphonies, with individual thoughts worked out in a new way." Here and in the "New World" Symphony (Symphony No. 9), he took a novel approach to form and thematic development.

Dvořák uses a waltz-like Allegretto grazioso, instead of a scherzo for the third movement, including a contrasting central section that is almost Schubertian in character. Some critics have labeled the main theme the most haunting melody Dvořák ever composed; its roots have been traced to the folk music of Dvořák's native Bohemia. The trio's melody, which is like a folk dance, Dvořák took from his own (now never performed) comic opera, The Stubborn Lovers. The movement ends with a lively coda, Molto vivace, in the style of one of the composer's Slavonic Dances.

Symphony No. 4, in F minor, Op. 36. . . Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg)

Early in December 1876, Tchaikovsky received his first commission from the wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck. This commission initiated an extraordinary fourteen-year intimacy between the two who never met face to face but carried on a voluminous correspondence. Sporadic commissions evolved into a yearly stipend that freed Tchaikovsky from material worries and teaching burdens. He often visited von Meck's country estates, but only when she was absent.

In January 1877 as Swan Lake began rehearsals, Tchaikovsky started sketching his Symphony No. 4. By May, he felt so close to von Meck that he wrote, "I am very busy now with the Symphony I started this winter, which I want very much to dedicate to you, because I think you will find in it an echo of your innermost feelings and thoughts," but ideas for the opera Eugene Onegin distracted him. On June 8, he wrote, "I have finished the Symphony -- I mean in outline. If you do not wish to have your name on it, we can omit it. You and I will know to whom it is dedicated." Earlier in the same letter he confessed: "Something else that bothers me greatly. I cannot write you about it now."

What bothered him was his marriage plan: he was not concerned that the two women might be jealous of each other; the real problem was Tchaikovsky's homosexuality. To "shut the mouths of all despicable gossips," and because she threatened suicide, he had decided to accept the strange, insistent young woman who forced herself upon him despite his repeated explanation that he could not love her as a husband.

In a long letter of July 15, 1877, Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck, "Naturally, having lived thirty-seven years with an antipathy towards marriage, it is painful to be suddenly converted by destiny. . .. Have you not read again and again between the lines of my letters how deeply I cherish our friendship and how warm my feeling for you is? How much I wish to prove, not by word but by deed, all my gratitude and sincere love for you! I have only one way: my music. I shall inscribe on the [Fourth] Symphony, ‘Dedicated to my friend.'"

Tchaikovsky was married in July while he was finishing the symphony, and the couple spent about two weeks together. In early fall, the composer failed in a suicide attempt, and his brother took him to Lake Geneva, where he returned to composing. On January 7, 1878 he completed the symphony and on February 22nd in Moscow, it premiered with Nicolai Rubenstein conducting.

Neither critics nor public liked it, and Tchaikovsky did not again attempt symphonic form for eleven years after that. When the possibility of a Parisian performance arose in 1878, Madame von Meck paid rehearsal costs, but the performance did not achieve popular acclaim. Ten years later, Tchaikovsky wrote about a performance he conducted in Dresden, "The audience did not like the first movement very much. They liked the Andante better and the Scherzo still more. After the Finale, a real success." In London in 1893, the symphony triumphed at last.

The best description of the Finale is one Tchaikovsky wrote (here abridged):

The fourth movement [Allegro con fuoco]: Here is a peasant holiday festival. [A Russian folk song is heard.] No sooner do you forget yourself than merciless Fate reappears. The others pay no attention. There are simple, profound joys in the world. Take them and life will be bearable after all. The finale begins with a tempestuous string and woodwind theme. After it, the woodwinds quote the well-known Russian melody, "In the fields there stands a birch tree."

The Fourth Symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle and strings.

Classical Symphony (Symphony No. 1), in D Major, Op. 25. . .Sergei Prokofiev
(Born April 23, l89l, in Sontzovka; died March 5, l953, in Moscow)

The marvelous blend of economy, clarity, wit and whimsy that Serge Prokofiev gleaned from Haydn and Mozart appears in the Classical Symphony as the direct result of what he learned at conservatory and the special interest that a faculty member, Nicolai Tcherepnin had in him. Tcherepnin suggested that his students carefully study Haydn and Mozart, believing that a good understanding of their compositions would be valuable to young composers. Prokofiev learned how Haydn and Mozart used form, as well as how they achieved grace and fluidity stylistically.

In 1916, Prokofiev began to sketch his own symphony in the classical manner, and in 1917, the year of the Czar's abdication, the October Revolution, and Lenin's rise to power, he completed it. In his words, the Classical Symphony is "as Haydn might have written it, had he lived in our day." Prokofiev had no desire to imitate old styles but rather to update them. He sometimes referred to this work as his First Symphony (although he had written and discarded others in 1902 and 1908), and gave it the title Classical Symphony with the "secret hope that in the course of time it might turn out to be a classic." A forebear of the widespread neoclassicism of the 1920's, Prokofiev composed this symphony without depending on the piano keyboard. He said of his plan: "I had been toying with the idea of writing a whole symphony without the piano. I believed that the orchestra would sound more natural. That is how the project for a symphony in the Haydn style had come into being."

Humor is the symphony's predominant emotion. Prokofiev's early 20th century sensibility completely absorbs and transforms classicism, and to Western ears, the music even sounds particularly Russian. Although it unquestionably echoes Haydn's wit, it also has an irony that the later symphonies of Prokofiev and Shostakovich include, and it is much shorter than its Classical antecedents. The symphony plays with forms, melodies, phrase structures and rhythms typical of classicism and twists them around humorously.

With its four short movements, it is briefer than many Mozart and Haydn symphonies. The first movement, in perfectly shaped sonata-form, Allegro, begins with the violins enunciating the first theme followed by the flutes' contributions of additional melody and thematic material. The violins introduce the second subject, and the bassoons aid them. The second movement, Larghetto, is a prepossessing, slow dance in triple meter much like a stately minuet. In the third movement, where Haydn and Mozart usually placed a minuet, Prokofiev writes a different dance, a Gavotte, in duple time instead of the minuet's usual three, Non troppo allegro, displaying great good humor and grace. Its whimsical trio has low stringed instruments deliver a bagpipe-like drone. This movement was especially popular, and as a result, Prokofiev used the same idea again, enlarging it, when he composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet. The speedy sonata-allegro Finale, Molto vivace, brings the work to a close in a great flash of brilliance.

The Classical Symphony was first performed on April 21, 1918 in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting the Petrograd Court Orchestra. The symphony is scored for a classical orchestra: pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani, and a body of strings.