Category: Symphony

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…

Mahler had four movements of a symphony but no finale. Then, at the funeral of a fellow conductor, he heard a choir sing an ode on resurrection and knew he had his ending. The result is an eighty-minute journey from…

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.