BBC Music magazine organised one hundred and fifty-one of the world's top conductors to vote for twenty symphonies that they considered the best. BBC Music gave each conductor three places and finally selected twenty of the greatest symphonies to date, based on the number of votes.
Judging from the voting results, the ordering of individual works is somewhat unexpected. For example, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony of Destiny did not make it into the top ten, Mozart's last symphony, Jupiter, ranked third, while his other, the more famous Symphony no. 40, was in fifteenth place. However, if you carefully taste this list, you will find that the selected repertoire is indeed the "essence of the essence" in the vast symphony library of the West, whether it is from the perspective of musical techniques, musical language or stylistic expression, it is a representative of the top works of various historical periods. The whole list looks so shiny that you can't open your eyes.
Bruckner
20th place: Bruckner's Seventh Symphony
The Seventh Symphony is Bruckner's most widely known work, showing Brückner's late achievements.
This is a veritable "masterpiece", the whole song is close to seventy minutes, close to most of the movie. And its writing process is indeed as storylike as a blockbuster movie: Bruckner hesitantly wrote from 1881 to 1883, with some revisions in 1885. The composer dedicated it to the Bavarian monarch Ludwig II.
The work is often referred to as "Lyric," although there is no evidence that the composer himself endorses the term. In 1884, after the premiere of the song at the Bunkerhaus concert hall in Leipzig, the sixty-year-old Brückner took the stage five times, cheering and applauding for fifteen minutes— although the vitriol critic Hanslik said that the work was an "endless extension of darkness and boredom", but the work made Brückner's name quickly compared with his contemporaries Brahms, Wagner, and others.
The beginning of the piece is a typical "Bruckner" opening: a long, solemn melody rises slowly, simple and serene. The whole allegro movement is like a thick and huge shadow, and three themes as huge as a tree grow in it. Halfway through the slow writing of the second movement, Bruckner was upset because he had gone to Munich to meet Wagner once during writing (which was also the last time the two had met), and Wagner said he wanted to direct the work. Soon after, however, Wagner died in Venice. When Bruckner heard the news, he wrote a quiet and sad epilogue for the second movement... If you pay a little attention, you will find that he is obviously written in the "Wagner-style trumpet" of the Ring of the Nibelungen. Bruckner later said that this passage was a mourning for the master's funeral.
The biggest feature of the third movement is that Bruckner, unusually, writes an agile and lively melody that is controlled by an agitated fixed tone. The finale has a beginning like the first movement, and after a long period of contrast, it returns to the exhilarating theme at the beginning of the whole song.
Before the story was finished, Bruckner went to Wagner's grave to pay tribute to his predecessors and peers who had helped him greatly. More than a year after the success of the premiere, he raised money for Wagner's commemorative statue through charity performances.
It seems like a story of friendship, as is the story told in many movies. However, we often guess the beginning of the story, but we can't guess the end of the story - this song, which Hitler considered as as great as "Becky", often performed at the time of the Nazi triumph. Curiously, on March 1, 1945, when the radio announced Hitler's death, the German radio station also played the song.
Beethoven
19th place: Beethoven's Sixth Symphony
"Bei Liu" has a familiar name: "Pastoral". Beethoven began writing in the fall of 1807 and completed in 1808, making it one of his few title pieces. Unlike the structure of the four movements of the symphony in the classical period, the Sixth Symphony has five movements, which, like "Shell Five", is first conducted by Beethoven himself, first "Shell Six" and then "Shell Five".
Beethoven himself described the song this way: "Pastoral, the expression of feeling is better than the depiction." The first movement, after reaching the village, evokes a pleasant feeling in people's hearts; the second movement, the view of the creek; the third movement, the reunion of the villagers, is broken by the thunder and lightning and storm of the fourth movement; the fifth movement, the feeling of benefit is accompanied by gratitude to God. ”
In the era when "Bei Liu" was written, symphonies were often not used to depict landscapes and weather. However, there is a long history of the use of music to represent landscapes in Western music, such as Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and some of Haydn's oratorios. In this work, Beethoven presents his music almost in an astonishing way— four words: tranquility as water. In the first movement of more than five hundred bars, Beethoven repeats his thoughts in a simple way, very "quiet" and very clear, very "slow" and very gentle. Harmony transitions are not at all as "frequent and intense" as in his other works, with more than fifty bars switching harmonies at the end of the first movement near the unfolding section, while the second movement sounds like "lazy" – it can be matched with the recently popular "Ge You Paralysis".
Perhaps even more astonishing is that this lighthearted and carefree work of joy is from the same pen as the "violent" Fifth Symphony. Some people may question why this masterpiece is ranked nineteenth? That's because you see here and don't yet know how many of Beethoven's symphonies were selected.
18th: Brahms' Second Symphony
In the summer of 1877, on the shores of Lake Wörth, Brahms' favorite resort, the composer wrote this "romantic" symphony, as "romantic" as its owner's feelings. The scenery inspired the composer, who Brahms described the small mountain village beneath the Alps: "It's full of melodies, and you have to worry about stepping on them. This made Brahms look like an excited backpacker.
This pastoral work is often associated with his predecessor Beethoven and is called "The Pastoral of Brahms" – but don't let him know, he'll be angry! Brahms never wanted to be regarded as "Beethoven's second", and of course, Brahms did establish his own unique historical place when he backed beethoven's rich symphonic legacy.
Compared to Brahms's usual melancholy, this work should be his most "sunny" work, although it also has a "dark" side. Brahms once half-jokingly said that music should be printed with a "black border"—we can fully feel his intentions, and he used timpani and trombone early on when he introduced "melancholy" in the first movement, but this did not last long, and in the second movement he immediately came with a relaxed, warm and personalized melody. The third movement contains an elegant Baroque dance, and the fourth movement is a completely dramatic movement, with brilliant melodies burning like dry wood and as enthusiastic as celebrating victory.
Brahms's dream lover Clara was the first critic of the work. When Brahms played the melody on the piano during the writing process, Clara said that the work was more original than its predecessors, and predicted that it would be welcomed by the public. As she expected, on November 30, 1877, when the Second Symphony was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic, it received rave reviews.
One of the attractions of this work is that Brahms strikes a balance between "romantic nature" and "classical tendencies". He can be serious or relaxed, solemn or enthusiastic, but either way, it hits the listener's hazy and shadowy state of mind from time to time.
Brahms
Shostakovich
17th place: Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony was the youngest (1937) to be included in the charts. At the time of writing this work, the young Shostakovich was in the midst of a serious personal crisis, and one of his previous operas, Mrs. Macbeth of Mchinsko County, was criticized and boycotted by the "Soviet people". As a result, Xiao Wu's writing was censored by the "cultural police", and chinese readers who experienced the "Cultural Revolution" should not be difficult to imagine what that means to a literary and art worker.
The genius composer Shostakovich seems to have found a way to "walk a tightrope" — oh no, it should be , "tie your head around your waist." A path was found between subserviing to the orders of the Soviet dictatorship and expressing the extreme sorrow of the people under Stalin's rule, and in the end, the work was miraculously approved and miraculously liked by the Soviet authorities and ordinary people.
Thirty minutes of applause after the premiere! Imagine taking the high-speed train from Beijing to Tianjin and applauding non-stop in the middle of the way?
No more analysis, who listens who knows.
To sum up the work in the words of The Old Shaw in the final stages of his life: "I think everyone knows what happened in 'Fifth'. Joy is forced, creation is under threat, like someone beating you with a stick while shouting at you – your task is joy! Your task is to rejoice..."
Friendly reminder: In the final part of the work, there is a march theme of the army, and now we can guess whether it is showing the solidity of Stalin's political system or mocking it?
16th place: Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
The work, completed in 1812, had an unusual premiere location: the Auditorium of the University of Vienna. This "ordinary" performance starting point seems to indicate that it is a grossly underrated work. In fact, it premiered as a charity show for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau.
The entire work uses elaborate rhythms that hint at some sort of dance — wagner, his "fan," who says these vivid rhythms penetrate the work and are "sacred dances." The first movement was later commented as one of Beethoven's best. The second movement was also very popular, and after the premiere of the day, the movement was immediately taken out separately and played again. Later, the movement was often performed as a separate repertoire.
In a sense, this work can be said to be a transformation of the musical style of Beethoven's Symphony, entering a "late style" similar to Adorno's words. In the previous decade, he had written a large number of masterpieces such as "Bei Wu" and "Bei Liu" as never before, like the water of the Yangtze River, and from this work, he never wrote that kind of "violent" music again. On the one hand, his health began to deteriorate and his hearing began to decline; on the other hand, he seemed to have learned from the "divine machine" and began to think about many philosophical propositions of human nature, and his ability enabled him to transcend the pain of the body and begin to find new ways of expression. Listening to the work repeatedly, the listener may be able to recall what he is looking for.
Composer and critic Antony Hopkins commented on the work: "The Seventh Symphony perhaps makes me feel a real Spontaneity than Beethoven's other works, and the notes seem to fly up from the score, as if we were standing on the tip of the tide." ”
Beethoven himself has said affectionately that this is one of his best works - full of "disobedience to argue" posture.
Juvenile Mozart
15th place: Mozart's Fortieth Symphony
Mozart completed the thirty-ninth, forty- and forty-first three final symphonies in the last three years of his life. As you know, the three were written at the same time, and were completed in June, July, and August 1788, respectively, and the latter two capitals were selected for this list.
Conductor Nicholas Hannonkurt believes that Mozart wrote these three symphonies as a whole. His reasoning was that the Fortieth Symphony looked like an "intermediate work", that it did not have an introduction like "Thirty-ninth" and did not have a finale like "Forty-first".
Of Mozart's forty-one symphonies, only two are composed in minor key, one is the Twenty-Fifth Symphony and the other is the Fortieth Symphony. "Composing in minor key" – Oh, excuse me, I have always refrained from appearing musical terms in the guide text that may cause difficulties in understanding, and my focus is actually on the latter fact: composers of the typical classical era rarely use the minor key to compose symphonies, except for a while in the late 1860s and early 1770s. This exception is precisely because Goethe's famous work The Troubles of Young Werther triggered the "Wild Rush" movement of the classical period, influencing the creation of other arts, including music, starting with literature and then affecting other arts, including music.
Mozart certainly had his reasons for using minor keys, and his opera The Marriage of Figaro offended the nobility and there was something wrong with its patronage. What's more, the death of his beloved daughter, the illness of his wife, and the successive hitting of Mozart with sad things also influenced Mozart's creation—he tried to express a certain sadness in a minor key, whether or not he ultimately achieved this goal, but at least that's what Mozart thought.
Analyzing the musical technique of this work is actually of little significance, because it seems too "simple". The short but lingering motive that came in was later used so much in contemporary pop music that many people often forget that its original creator was the genius Mozart.
Its musical elements such as rhythm and tone lead to different interpretations of the work. For example, Schumann believes it possesses "the lightness and elegance of ancient Greece." Of course, the more general understanding is that it has a sad tone and nervous emotions, such as Charles Rosen (the author of the book Classical Style) said it was a work of "passion, violence and sadness".
Either way, Mozart is right, and of course, you are.
14th: Sibelius's Seventh Symphony
Sibelius conceived a work in 1918 and did not write it until 1924. At the time of its premiere, the title of the work was "Symphony of Fantasy No. 1", and apparently the composer had not yet decided what to give the work a name. When it was published in 1925, the score was labeled "Symphony No. 7".
The origin of the name determines not only the expressive character of the work ("fantastical"), but also its form – Sibelius "subverted" the structure of the symphony since Haydn, a symphony in which only... A movement! When he first conceived the work, Sibelius thought of creating a "passage of joy and dynamic passion of life" and envisioned it to be completed in three or four movements, which, after repeated revisions, was eventually written as a "single", which the critic Layton Robert described as "radically original in form, cleverly manipulated in rhythm, uniquely tonal, organically structured as a whole".
The music for Symphony No. 7 is derived from an unfinished symphonic poem called "Kuutar", the title of which roughly means "Spirit of the Moon". "Kuu" is the moon god of Finnish culture (equivalent to Chang'e in China), a theme here that later evolved into the sprawling slow passage at the beginning of the Seventh Symphony.
Despite being a single movement, Sibelius presents a variety of themes, atmospheres and structures. Everyone who listens to this work should be shocked by the huge "aura" of this work, and the melody of the long lines continues to rise and fall endlessly. The use of near-constant rhythmic patterns throughout the song, always changing the tonal contrasting themes, finally unifies the work.
After writing the Seventh Symphony, Sibelius lived for thirty-three years. During these thirty-three years, he never wrote a symphonic work except for the completion of the symphonic poem "Tapiola". There is evidence that he once tried to write the "Eighth" Symphony, but was later burned by him. So, "Seventh" was his last symphonic work, and Sibelius used it to make his final declaration.
Sibelius
13th place: Bruckner's Eighth Symphony
This is Bruckner's last completed symphony, representing all the complexities and contradictions of his later period.
Before the age of sixty, Bruckner was basically an obscure composer, and it was not until his Seventh Symphony was performed that he "became famous overnight". So, after writing the Eighth Symphony, he was a little unconfident and sent the score to Levi, the conductor who conducted the Seventh Symphony, but the latter unceremoniously refused him and asked him to revise it. So, there were two versions of the work, the second revised in 1890, when Bruckner was sixty-six years old.
Livay later revealed that he refused because the work was so difficult that he didn't have time to rehearse. But Bruckner was "blessed by misfortune", and his modifications resulted in several major changes: the wonderful tragic ending of the first movement replaced the original strong sounds that looked bright; a deeply contagious melody replaced the original relatively unclear middle of the three-tone sound of the second movement (the harmonic song); and the tonality of the third movement (the slow plate) was reorganized to make the expression of the movement more powerful. Later, under the influence of his student Joseph Schalke, he cut six more passages from the fourth movement.
However, the well-known music critic Hanslik said after listening to the slow-motion movement: "The details are interesting, but the whole is strange, in fact, it is annoying." The peculiarity of the construction of this work is, in short, that is, the insertion of Wagner's theatrical style into the symphony"—but this time it seems much more polite than Hanslik's evaluation of Bruckner's previous works. Fortunately, there are as many positive reviews as there are bad reviews. Hugo, who attended the concert, said in a letter to a friend: "This is a great work" and "surpasses other symphonic masterpieces in the intellectual range, wonderful and sublime." Its success is the light of triumph that transcends darkness once and for all..."
Bruckner's Eighth Symphony was given another name, Apocalyptic, a word derived from the Bible that is reminiscent of the end of the world. At the beginning of the fourth movement, the magnificent sound is like a landslide, the sonorous and powerful timpani drum and the brilliant brass music are extremely powerful, compared to the soft and rich slow plate of the third movement, is it used to depict the beauty of heaven and the destruction of the world? Brookner, a devout Christian, used his Eighth Symphony to leave the world with a mystery that only he himself knew.
12th place: Brahms' Third Symphony
Six years after writing the Second Symphony, Brahms wrote the Third Symphony in the summer of 1883, the shortest of all four of Brahms's symphonies.
The premiere of the work was conducted by Hans Richter, the most famous conductor of the time, who said the work was Brahms's "Heroic Symphony" — apparently, he meant that it could be compared to Beethoven's world-famous Heroic Symphony. Hanslik also bluntly stated that Brahms's "Third" impressed him with "almost perfect artistry" compared to the first two symphonies.
All four movements of the work end in a "quiet" way. In the writing of the third movement, Brahms broke with the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition by replacing the usual quick harmonics with a slightly faster allegro, with moderately restrained speeds and strongly lyrical melodies that formed the general feature of the movement. The finale is a warm lyrical movement with a rich and varied melody, and the end of the movement echoes the beginning of the whole work.
Listening to this work today, the audience will undoubtedly feel that it is pure classical music, that is, the familiar, comfortable, immortal "classical taste"; but for the people of that era, this work is novel. For the orchestra, the performance was difficult; for the listener, it was difficult to understand—but he was not a radical composer, no matter how novel Brahms's music was, and he adhered to a certain principle of the ancient paradigm, although he was so misunderstood that he was considered conservative. In fact, anyone who has seen Brahms' score can understand that the complexity of harmony in his works exceeds that of many composers of classical era, and in this sense, his music is beyond tradition, even beyond the times.
11th place: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
This is probably the most familiar beethoven work for Chinese listeners, and certainly one of the most famous works in the history of music. Indeed, the work is so impressive that just listening to the first few seconds of the first movement, one can remember that distinct thematic motive, just as one glance can remember the Mona Lisa's smile.
It seems a little hard to believe why just a few notes, so bluntly strung together, can become so exciting and widely circulated. Although many consider this not to be Beethoven's best work, just as Hamlet is not Shakespeare's best work, as Schumann predicted: "This work will be like a great natural phenomenon, permanently exerting its power on people of different ages, as long as music and the world exist, it will be heard by people in the next century." ”
I don't know how the audience who sat in the theater and heard the work for the first time when it was first performed in 1808 reacted. If one can understand and remember the first four bars, one can feel that the remaining thirty minutes of the whole song are familiar and intrinsically mechanical, and we can hear the "knock of fate" in almost every bar of the first movement.
The Fifth Symphony Beethoven conceived from 1804 and wrote almost simultaneously with the Sixth Symphony between 1807 and 1808, with both works premiered at the same concert. During this period, many things happened in the world—the Napoleon I War, the political upheavals in Austria; so much happened to Beethoven himself—the pain of hearing loss in the ears and the relentless blow of this fact to a musician had a great influence on Beethoven's creation.
Research on the manuscript shows that Beethoven put a lot of thought into the first few subsections. There are many different approaches to the famous "three long and one short" thematic motivation at the beginning of the piece, with many conductors strictly enforcing allegro rhythms, some handling freely and solemnly, slower and more stable in speed, and some playing in a four-note gradually slower manner.
Whatever the way it is interpreted, one thing is certain, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony penetrates the human heart in the most solemn way than ever before, and together with the imagination of Beethoven, it constructs its own greatness, so that the appeal of the work to people has never diminished or disappeared.
10th place: Mahler's Third Symphony
A widely accepted view is that Mahler served as a bridge in the history of music, connecting the Nineteenth-Century German-Austrian tradition on the one hand and the modernism of the early twentieth century on the other. If so, then this Third Symphony is undoubtedly the most important pier.
Throughout the summer of 1893, Mahler immersed himself in writing this unusually large symphony in a hut near Lake Assé near salzburg—it would take about ninety to one hundred and fifty minutes to play six movements in its entirety—from Beijing to Shanghai, listening to music, and when the work was finished, it was time to put away the small table and fasten the seat belt and prepare to land. The whole work can be roughly divided into two parts: the first movement of more than thirty minutes as the first part, and the other five movements, which constitute the second part of the work.
Like his other four symphonies, Mahler would creatively provide a title for some kind of work to interpret his work. Of course, he doesn't make these things public, only posting them in his "circle of friends" – he will share upgraded versions of various titles with different friends at unspecified times. Mahler wrote the title for each movement of the Third Symphony, which were: "Pan awakens, summer parade", "The flowers on the grass tell me", "The beasts of the forest tell me", "Man tells me", "Angels tell me", and "Love tells me". In an 1896 letter to a friend, he said the entire symphony was "a summer afternoon dream."
Mahler
These titles, written by the composer himself, are undoubtedly helpful in understanding the work. The first movement can be structurally divided into two parts: "Introduction, Pan God Awakening" and "Summer Parade". In this sprawling movement, two theme groups alternate, eight horns, perhaps a child's song, or a parade horn? The next four movements are relatively concise, clear and natural, related to flowers, related to beasts, and related to people... Oh yes, and it's also about imaginary angels. Mahler introduced the vocals in the fourth movement, containing a "Midnight Song" sung by a soprano, a song from Nietzsche's "Says Zarathustra". The fifth movement is a free four or five minutes, without pause in between, switching from the quiet of midnight to the light of the morning light, and the clear morning bell of the band. The last movement does not need much to describe, it is labeled "slow, tranquil, deep experience".
The whole work tells the listener in an unforgettable way how vast Mahler, who was only thirty-six years old at the time, had a vast vision and vision—although his house on the shores of Lake Assay had only a small window.
9th place: Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony
This is Tchaikovsky's last symphony, titled "Pathétique" (Pathétique). It's the most veritable title in history, and Tchaikovsky is a man of all faith—no one doesn't feel the sadness that seeps into the soul from this work. A music scholar in the United States named Richard Taruskin even said that many suicidal acts were provoked by the work.
Tchaikovsky
In April 1891, Tchaikovsky began to brew this symphony. As he began, he was suddenly very worried that his inspiration was running out. In a letter to his patron, Mrs. Meck, he said, "It was a little difficult at the beginning" and "I've squeezed through my numb head." But then things got better, and after four months of intense work, he finally finished writing the last bar of the finale.
The music begins with a quiet theme sentence played by a clarinet, which is repeated in later dramatic unfolding passages. Like most of Tchaikovsky's works, the song is full of rich melodies, and it is appropriate to describe it in one Chinese word: poignant. In the second movement, there is a passage of Tchaikovsky's favorite theme, which is so profound and striking that it is impossible to ignore its existence. The third movement, a minor waltz played by strings, sounds very uneasy, with an ominous hint that this may be the theme of so-called "fate". The fourth movement also begins with a theme sentence, and the middle section violently unfolds to promote the movement of the music. At the end of the finale, the melody of sadness continues to weaken, weaken again, and finally disappear completely, leaving only a boundless emptiness...
Nine days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky died at the age of fifty-three.
8th place: Brahms' First Symphony
Six years after Beethoven's death, Brahms was born. But in Brahms's consciousness, writing music is on Beethoven's side. It was with this concern that he began to write the First Symphony. After at least fourteen years of incubation and struggle (Brahms himself said, it took twenty-one years from sketching to finally completing), and in the middle experienced countless drastic modifications and several abandonments. Just when his friends thought he might put the unfinished manuscript on the shelf like a normal procrastinator, Brahms came up with this "stunning" masterpiece in 1876.
The work was nicknamed "Beethoven Tenth", which came in large part from the expectations of the public and his friends that he would inherit Beethoven's musical legacy. More importantly, of course, is that the work has many similarities with Beethoven's Symphony – critics believe that the theme of Brahms's finale in the First Symphony is very similar to the theme of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It is also said that at the beginning of the first movement, Brahms uses a "theme of fate" similar to that in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This, of course, annoyed Brahms, who felt that it was tantamount to saying that he was plagiarizing. However, Brahms himself admitted that he used Beethoven's usual creative technique in his work, and he paid tribute in a sincere way to his revered predecessors.
The song begins with a grand introduction in which three key elements appear simultaneously are noteworthy: a low drum sound, a rising string melody, and a descending woodwind melody. The second and third movements have a lighter but more tense tone than the first and last two movements. The final movement begins with a very slow introduction, and the melody is "gloomily dramatically modified" (Hanslik).
Hugo Wolf once said of Brahms: "When Brahms wrote his symphonies, he didn't care what was going on outside. This is certainly not necessarily a compliment, but it explains, to some extent, the fact that Brahms was indeed a composer who successfully developed Beethoven's meticulous symphonic thinking. Through The First Symphony, however, Brahms gave himself the courage to leave behind the ghost of Beethoven who was hovering beside him forever.
7th place: Berlioz's Symphony of Fantasy
The title is an important clue to the interpretation of this work. Berlioz's title music has another big title, "An Episode in the Artist's Life." Completed in 1830, the song is divided into five movements, each with its own title, which Berlioz wrote on the cover of the work.
Describing the song, the conductor Bernstein said it was a musical expedition to the psychedelia because of its illusory and dreamlike nature, and because history shows that Berlioz was partly influenced by opium when he completed the work. Bernstein also said that Berlioz's music looks like you go through a journey and end up screaming at your own funeral.
Bernstein is right at least for one thing, and that is that Berlioz is telling a story with his work. In the composer's own parlance, a talented artist is full of fantasies, poisoning himself with opium in extreme despair, because of a hopeless, unrequited, and fruitless love. This is clearly a portrayal of the composer himself, berlioz fell in love with an actress named Harriet Smithson when he was young, the kind that fell in love at first sight, but... Any outcome counts as a result, doesn't it?
The five movements of the symphony are: "Dream- Passion", "A Ball", "Field Scenery", "Guillotine", "Dream of Sabbath Night". A "creative trait" that is often mentioned in the history of music says that the work creatively uses a creative technique called "dominant motivation". It's actually quite simple to say, for example, one of the uses is to use a certain tone to represent a person, and fixed, like a symbol, as long as the person "appears", the tone will sound, and so on, so that it is easy to tell the story. In the "Dream-Passion" movement, there is an obvious recurring theme to symbolize the erratic heroine.
Berlioz
The ending of the music (the story) seems to provide some kind of hint, and Berlioz uses a famous religious theme, "The Wrath of the Gods," in the final movement, which was first used to symbolize the judgment of the last days. The composer took the lead in using the tuba, and then other brass pipes echoed the theme, which really achieved a thrilling effect.
If I had also learned berlioz to add a title to his work, I would have written a longer one for this passage: "This work by the authentic Frenchman Berlioz is a well-deserved milestone in early Romanticism." ”
6th place: Brahms' Fourth Symphony
This is brahms's last symphony. The first attraction is that it presents a wonderful musical theme as soon as it comes in, and this theme appears in various different forms over and over again in the music. Its structure is extremely "simple", but it has a "wonderful" sophistication, and at the same time- to use the popular phrase now - "beautiful to cry". However, behind this simplicity, clarity, and beauty, there is a profound meaning.
In the treatment of music, the work does not seem to be special: the first movement is full of drama and passion; the second movement takes a sharp turn and reveals a "quaint" calmness and moderation; the third movement turns into joy, and the sound of the triangle at the end reverberates faintly "grimaces" in a solemn and sonorous orchestra; the fourth movement is a rare example of the symphony Of Pasakalia, whose musical theme is similar to the Chakon dance that prevailed at the French court in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the composer has made a meticulous treatment. Let the theme appear in more parts than just bass parts.
However, the whole work is rich in various allusions and allusions, especially the creation of Beethoven and the famous Greek dramatist Sophocles, who Brahms was reading at the time of writing. After Brahms' death, the conductor Felix Weingartner vaguely spoke out his interpretation. He said: "I cannot escape the impression that the ruthless fate has driven the great things created by some Creator into decline... The finale is a veritable carnival, the equivalent of the sudden burst of joy in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Why is it "going down"? Weiingatner seems to have something to say?
The composer and writer Jan Swafford, in his biography of Brahms, recorded that in 1883, when the Fourth Symphony was almost in shape, Brahms wrote to his publisher: "In Austria, where everything is collapsing and deteriorating, you can't expect music to be better. It is a pity and a shame, not only for the music, but also for this beautiful land and amazing people... I have always believed that the great catastrophe is coming. Why did Brahms say that?
All indications are that Brahms' fears are not unfounded. There was an anti-Semitic tendency in Austria at the time (in 1895, the new mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, had achieved political success through a conservative "anti-Semitism" program). This ethos quietly spread in Austria and Germany, and later everyone knew about it – in order not to go too far, we returned to music.
We cannot say that Brahms predicted the creation of the Nazis, and he was not the only one who had similar concerns at the time. But we know that in Brahms's last symphony, he sang everything he saw with music, sang his despair, and he wrote into those notes the solemn structure and the mournful voice.
Of course, this may not be a concern for listeners, because for many listeners, the beautiful music itself trumps everything, which is perhaps the reason why this work has become one of the most performed tracks since the twentieth century.
5th place: Mahler's Second Symphony
In addition to the Eighth Symphony, Mahler's Second Symphony was his most successful and popular symphony during his lifetime, and an important work that laid the foundation for his life's aesthetic purpose.
In 1888, Mahler wrote a single-movement symphonic poem, Totenfeier. Later, he spent five years turning the work into the first movement of the Second Symphony. In 1893, he finished the second and third movements, but the fourth movement took a lot of trouble, and he always wanted to join the chorus in the final movement like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so he spent a lot of time looking for lyrics until he found Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's poem "Die Auferstehung". He then inserted a song, "Urlicht," as the penultimate movement, so that the whole piece was completed. The two movements at the beginning and the end are the two largest movements in the whole piece, and the last movement is even longer than the middle two movements combined, partly because they are six years apart in creation, and more importantly, of course, because they have different structures and expressive intentions, which can be seen in the title proposed by Mahler.
Mahler originally designed titles for each movement, with the first movement representing a funeral and asking questions such as "Is there life after death?" Questions like that; the second movement represents recalling the happy times before death; the third movement represents life as meaningless activity; the fourth movement, hope, free from meaningless life; the last movement, returning to the inquiry of the first and third movements, and finally transcending and being reborn in eager hope—of course, these titles are shared only among his friends, and Mahler did not let them be released.
4th place: Mahler's Ninth Symphony
The Ninth Symphony was Mahler's last complete symphony—it was Mahler's Tenth Symphony, to be precise— because Mahler did not assign a regular "symphony" title to his previous symphonic suite, Song of the Earth, nor did he number it. By the time The Ninth Symphony premiered in June 1912, Mahler had been dead for more than a year and had never heard the work.
Few musical works, like Mahler's Ninth Symphony, are considered composers' autobiographies. Of course, his expressiveness is also a rare exception. Mahler's individual temperament and the state of mind at the time of writing this work make people can't help but use this work to establish a vague connection with Mahler himself. Bernstein, for example, boldly "imagined" that the rhythm of the musical march and the "stumbling" of the cello part at the beginning of the piece was Mahler's irregular heartbeat, and Bruno Walter, who directed the premiere of the work, said shortly after Mahler's death that he recognized Mahler's walking gait from the hesitant rhythms of the climax of the first movement. Others believe that the work is a harbinger of Mahler's death, such as Alban Berger's belief that the most gentle passage is attached to the work's huge volcanic-like musical climax. Shortly after the work was completed, Mahler died of a heart attack, giving these interpretations a certain fatalistic overtones.
Putting aside these interpretations, objectively speaking, this work does have its own special features in creation. Following the "traditional" model, Mahler wrote four movements "in a regular" manner, but he broke the structure between the four movements of the traditional symphony— the first work to feature slow plates as the first movement since Haydn founded the symphony genre. However, this "slowness" is a "new" "slowness", which is still full of urgency, full of power, full of complex musical material and dramatic scenes - in addition to speed, it has exactly the characteristics of the first movement "as it should".
The last movement is the slow plate, a design that is also very rare in the symphony genre (similar to Mahler's Third Symphony), and the composer notes the speed as "very slow and reserved". Critics have noted that the musical theme of the string beginning is particularly similar to that of a hymn "Abide with Me", thus giving the work a strong religious connotation.
The last dozens of bars of the work lasted more than six minutes, mahler used a few loose notes for an unprecedented long time, and above the last note of the whole piece, Mahler marked an emoticon term "fading away," the researchers explained, as he was seriously saying goodbye to the world.
3rd place: Mozart's Forty-first Symphony
As mentioned earlier, Mozart's last three symphonies, thirty-ninth, fortieth and forty-first, were completed at the same time. However, these three works have completely different emotional characteristics.
The Forty-first Symphony has a nickname called "Jupiter"—of course, someone else, not Mozart himself. Jupiter is the main god of Greek mythology, meaning noble, sensitive and grand, and this work is indeed the longest in Mozart's symphony.
The arrangement of the four movements has the structural characteristics typical of the symphonies of the classical period. The first movement, which begins with a contrasting motive, echoes the band's trio and a more lyrical tone, followed by an extended short piece that unfolds two contrasting themes. The second movement uses a Salabande dance in the French style. The third movement uses a famous Austrian folk dance song.
Mozart
Another remarkable feature of the work is that at the end of the fourth movement, Mozart uses a five-voice fugue (i.e. there are five main themes). Of course, there are also fugue passages running through it, either highlighting a particular theme, or several themes combined together and moving through the woodwind instrument, but in the end, the five themes of this fugue together form the epilogue. Surprisingly, it has been found that the four tones that make up this motive appear briefly in Mozart's First Symphony of 1764 and were later used by him in an early Mass and the Thirty-Third Symphony. Why this is still a mystery, it is more certain that the sadness of the "fortieth" seems to have been solved in the "forty-first".
Some people, after careful research, suggest that Mozart may not have heard the premiere of the work. Of course, there are also people who question this. Unfortunately, it is difficult for us to know the true answer now, but it is still with good wishes that he has heard it - such a wonderful music that as a creator himself has not heard, which is probably one of all the tragic stories in the world. Heaven took the life of this genius prematurely, and we can do nothing about it, the only wish is that he heard the premiere of this work and then closed his eyes forever with satisfaction.
2nd place: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
Beethoven's last symphony, due to the addition of four-voice vocals and choirs to the symphony for the first time, is also known as the "Choral Symphony". It is widely regarded as one of Beethoven's greatest works and even one of the greatest works in Western musical classics.
The music begins with the famous extreme weakness, the first six bars sound to have no definite tone and rhythm, the strings are played with tremolos, as if from darkness into bright light, and like noise suddenly becomes orderly, and then the music leads to that wonderful symphonic theme. The second movement (the harmonic piece) and the third movement (the slow plate) are both broad and grand sound designs, and the third movement is a variation of a series of themes—a structure that Beethoven often used to express his deepest emotions, especially his late works—Beethoven began a new experiment with a quiet piece of music. Previously, the slow plate was generally placed in the second movement, and Beethoven's work was just reversed, which obviously prepared for the glory of the fourth movement.
It is well known that the fourth movement expresses universal fraternity, and the lyrics "Ode to Joy" come from Schiller's poem. In reality, Beethoven, who was grumpy and difficult to communicate, found in this poem a way of communicating with the general public, in Goethe's words, it realized all the possibilities of beauty. The American music scholar Charles Rosen summed up its characteristics as "the symphony within the symphony", because the movement seems to have the same structural pattern as the whole symphony, and also has roughly four parts, each with a different theme, and forms a dramatic unity, of course, it is played in succession.
Needless to say, the exquisite, wonderful, and classic of the "Beix", there are also "critics", such as Master Verdi, who in a letter to a friend in 1878 said that the work had "extraordinary first three movements and a very bad fourth movement." No one can transcend the sublime of the first movement, but it is easy to write a vocal piece as bad as the last." As an opera master, it is unclear whether Verdi had a bit of a "literati light" meaning. Of course, such criticisms do not detract from its reputation for excellence.
The deaf Beethoven gave birth to this symphony from silence to glory with creative musical concepts. Its glow obscured Beethoven's other works for a long time. Its birth seemed to point the way for the rest of the nineteenth century, and it used its existence to encourage a generation of composers to rethink the creation of different symphonies or other types of music.
During the "Cold War", a fragment of the work was played at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics for a joint delegation of divided East and West Germany, and at that moment, perhaps one felt, there was always something beyond politics, as the lyrics sang" as "United as Brothers". Removing melodic fragments of the lyrics and later being used as the "league song" of the European Union, Beethoven's work thus went out of the concert hall and affected people's lives hundreds of years later.
1st prize: Beethoven's Third Symphony
Beethoven's Third Symphony, completed in 1804, produced the title as famous as the work itself. Beethoven first dedicated it to Napoleon, who argued that Napoleon represented democracy and anti-authoritarianism in the French Revolution. But it didn't take long for him to retract the inscription, cutting out the previously written dedication, leaving a hole in the manuscript.
This work is a milestone in the classical style, and at the same time, because it incorporates more emotional qualities than previous works, it has traces of romantic music. The first theme of the first movement falls silent after being played by different instruments. The second theme developed into the unfolding section, which, like several other movements, had a tense harmony and rhythm, and in particular, Beethoven introduced new melodies in the unfolding section, rather than the usual creation, which used only the melodies that had appeared. The second movement is a funeral march, using multiple fugues, and the solemn melody is really appropriate as a funeral march. The third movement, unusually, uses a lot of split rhythms. The fourth movement is a series of variations on a theme that Beethoven used in a piano variation he wrote in 1802, hence the piano piece later known as the Hero Theme Variation.
In 1812, Goethe met Beethoven for the first time, and they walked together through the famous Teplitz street in Vienna and had a good conversation. Encountering a royal queue halfway through, Goethe immediately flashed to the side, took off his top hat and bowed. Beethoven paid no attention to the temple dwellers and continued to walk forward. Many people in China have heard the story, but what happened afterwards is not necessarily known— Goethe wrote when he returned home: "I am amazed by his genius, and unfortunately he is a man who is completely untamed, who is completely absent from the abominable mistakes common to this world." ”
The above story explains why Beethoven tore up the dedication to Napoleon written on the score — independence, bravery, unruliness, intolerance of hypocrisy, and a strong humanist tendency — a personal trait that many listeners have found in Beethoven's music, especially in the Third Symphony.
It is said that Beethoven himself liked this work very much, even more than the Fifth Symphony. Beethoven later suffered a serious ear disease, but he insisted on using music to fight the pain. In fact, he himself is a hero, not only because he strives to resist an irresistible fate, but also because he has been defeating "the abominable mistakes that this world shares." As jonathan Nott, a British conductor who took part in the vote, put it: "This symphony is not about the glory of God, but about man— our struggles, challenges and victories." ”