Category: Symphony

For his final symphony, Brahms built the finale on a passacaglia: thirty variations over a repeating bassline borrowed from a Bach cantata. It was a Baroque form no one had used in a symphony before, a gesture of deep historical…

On August 9, 1942, the Leningrad Radio Orchestra performed the Seventh Symphony inside the besieged city. Many musicians were dead from starvation; replacements were pulled from military units. Loudspeakers carried the performance to the German lines, a definitive act of…

In 1822, Schubert wrote two sublime movements of a symphony, gave the manuscript to a friend, and never mentioned it again. When it finally premiered decades later, the audience heard something unprecedented: a symphony that felt complete in its incompleteness,…

Brahms started his First Symphony at twenty-two and didn't finish it until he was forty-three. For two decades, the weight of Beethoven's Ninth paralyzed him. When the work finally premiered, a critic called it 'Beethoven's Tenth.' Brahms was furious, but…

Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, then furiously scratched out the dedication when his hero crowned himself Emperor. What survived the rage was a symphony twice the length of any before it, with a funeral march at its center…

Most symphonies end in triumph. The Pathétique ends in a slow fade to silence as the strings and bassoons dissolve into nothing. Nine days after conducting its premiere, Tchaikovsky was dead. Whether the symphony is a suicide note or simply…

Berlioz saw the actress Harriet Smithson onstage and became obsessed. He wrote a symphony depicting an artist who, in an opium-fueled haze, murders his beloved, is executed by guillotine, and watches her dance at a witches' sabbath. She was in…

Bruckner rarely explained his music; for this symphony he made an exception. A medieval town at dawn, a knight riding out, birdsong, a hunt—he sketched the program himself. It's the only symphony he named 'Romantic,' and the most natural entry…

In 1969, Neil Armstrong carried a cassette tape to the Moon. In 2008, the New York Philharmonic played it in Pyongyang. It all started when a Czech composer came to New York and listened to the songs of a nation…

At 28, Mahler premiered a symphony so strange that critics called it noise. A funeral march on a nursery tune, nature sounds, and a finale that shakes the hall.