The Symphony in the Twentieth Century

Although the roots of the symphony go back to 18^th century Italian opera, today we think of it

as largely the product of composers in the German-speaking world. This will hardly come as news to those for whom the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven & Co. form the center of the musical universe, together with some well-loved 19^th century works by Russian and Czech composers, plus a few stray examples written in France. It is hard to imagine that by the end of the 19^th century, especially in Central Europe, the symphony was thought to have run its course, becoming obsolete, and of interest only to rather academic composers----which, for some, included Johannes Brahms! The tone poems of Richard Strauss were taken as a portent for the future, causing some to wonder why Gustav Mahler insisted upon ploughing exhausted soil.

By the early twentieth century the symphony was indeed a problematic matter. Mahler’s symphonies were hotly controversial, not winning a firm place in the repertoire until fifty years after his death, just as the composer had predicted. Younger composers seemed to be attracted to other musical tasks----Bela Bartok, for one, never composed a symphony. What could not have been expected was the remarkable flood of symphonies which soon took place in countries lying OUTSIDE the central European tradition: Denmark [Carl Nielsen], Sweden [Allan Pettersson], USSR [Prokofiev, Shostakovich---15! Miaskovsky---27!], Czechoslovakia [Martinu], France [Honegger, Milhaud, Dutilleux], England [Vaughan Williams, Bax, Maxwell Davies], America [Ives, Copland, Harris, Barber, Piston, Hanson, Diamond, Schuman]…. Even Stravinsky himself got around to writing a few examples of the form. The symphony, far from extinct, seemed to be a supreme challenge to composers in defining themselves, their age, their cultures.

Of course, how to DEFINE the symphony in the 20^th century has been a perennial topic of discussion. As it happens, Mahler and Sibelius, who were acquaintances, once debated the nature of the symphony in a Viennese café, nicely summing up their quite individual approach to the form. Sibelius viewed the symphony as a process of germination, small kernels expanding into a grand organism---while Mahler made his celebrated declaration that “the symphony must embrace the world!” (Mahler later said about Sibelius that “I admired [his] style and severity of form, and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs.”)