The day the symphony died
OrchestrasFrom my monthly essay in the new issue of The Critic magazine:
I remember well the day the symphony died. It was August 1975, and I was sitting in a television newsroom when the teleprinter clattered out a Moscow dateline. “Hold the bulletin,” I cried. “Shostakovich is dead.”
I was met by a wall of blank faces. “The greatest Russian composer since Tchaikovsky?” I tried. They’d heard of Tchaikovsky. “The Leningrad Symphony?” Not a flicker.
My colleagues were world-travelled reporters and editors, well-read in modern history. Yet not one of them went to symphony concerts or took an interest in an art form that had been running about the same length of time as the United States of America.
The USA commanded our constant professional attention. The symphony was peripheral. That day, 50 summers ago, I realised the symphony was dead….
Read on here.
This is a very sad indicative, Norman, thanks for sharing.
The symphony was already dead.
I’ll note that very, very little composed since the death of Prokofiev in 1953 has managed to hold a place in the standard orchestral repertoire.
“But… it takes generations for fine music to be recognized!” you cry?
No.
2Oth Century orchestral works prior to 1953 by Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Stravinsky, Copland, Gershwin, Puccini, Prokofiev, Rodrigo … yes, even Shostakovitch and many others… were able to gain traction in the concert audience’s tastes fairly quickly.
Somehow, after 1953… much has been composed and flogged to us but it’s been mostly once and done.
Look at your orchestra programs… recent works have to be put on the first half so the audience will stay past intermission for the good stuff.
People are still writing symphonies…
Just last weekend I was at the premiere of… a new symphony!
I predict no substantial future for it.
Something has gone wrong with music.
So, the symphony died with Stalin, then.
Coincidence?
Maybe the same day, but there’s no connection. Stalin only liked workers’ songs.
“Gone were the days when families clustered around the living-room wireless, awaiting an oracular seventh symphony by Shostakovich, the fifth of Vaughan Williams, the never-to-be eighth of Jean Sibelius.”
I would like to know if this was in fact the reality
Yes, it was.
Taruskin credits two people for discrediting the work of Volkov: “Simon Karlinsky, writing in The Nation, and Laurel Fay, Shostakovich’s biographer, writing in the Russian Review.” He claims to have simply given Karlinsky’s and Fay’s work more publicity by writing about it in the NY Times.
See a noteworthy post on Slippedisc (!), Richard Taruskin.
https://slippedisc.com/2013/12/why-is-americas-musicology-tsar-cited-26-times-in-a-new-composer-biography/
Norm’s not wrong.
I personally rate Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff higher than Shostakovich.
Each of the three Russian giants made worthy compositional. contributions, but as a symphonist DS certainly created more powerful works: from SP we have a great 5 and a nice 1, from SR his 2 is just barely fine, but from their younger colleague – 1, 5, 7, 10, 14 – are all at least outstanding and at their best they are truly great.
I feel sorry for you who is missing so much beauty
I would argue the greatest Russian composer since Tchaikovsky was Prokofiev, but otherwise you make a good point.
I don’t know why the symphony has died – I liked Corigliano’s, and to be fair, Lutoslawski #3 still gets played a bit, though I can’t say I particularly care for it. But Shostakovich wrote music, as you note, that reflected his time and place, and resonated with people. Nowadays if people do that, they’re called “woke.”
They don’t have the title “Symphony,” but John Adams’ “Harmoneliere” and “Harmonium” are symphony-length works that have legs.
Agree with you about the Adams works. And I like much of Corigliano’s work, which I presented to a community music appreciation group of retirees about 5 years ago. Much of it went over their heads but I believe I secured 2 or 3 converts.
The comment “without new symphonies, orchestras will die” is surely a massive exaggeration. It rather assumes that orchestral programming needs to be stuck in the rut of overture, concerto, symphony. Many of the great symphonists wrote as a result of patronage or commissions. That in most cases meant pleasing those who had put up the cash. In my view, too many of today’s composers have just forgotten that their works have to have appeal to at least some in the general listening public rather than too often to a very narrow cluster within that much larger group.
Philip Glass’s 11th Symphony has had some real traction, getting played at Carnegie and by the Chicago Symphony recently. I think the generation of composers who were coming up in the 1990s also still embraced the format to some extent – Christopher Rouse, Corigliano (as Norman cited), Bolcom, Tan Dun.
As for today, Wynton Marsalis has a Fifth Symphony coming out next year, and Lera Auerbach and Mason Bates have written a few, but most composers, for lack of a better term, prefer “tone poems” or symphonic suites, which fit more easily on the first halves of programs.
. . . Remind me to miss ALL of them. I’d rather hear Jennifer Higdon’s works to the works of those men you listed.
It is difficult to know whether ‘the symphony’ as a musical form has died or not, because of two tendencies; 1) the total splintering of the field of new music without any other consensus than pluralism; 2) classical music being run as a business by managerial staff lacking the musical knowledge to find a way through the jungle of nr 1. And given the complexities of running an orchestra as a business, it is unreasonable to expect musical expertise of people having to deal with orchestral management… it is in the nature of the situation.
Whatever new works are presented by orchestras, they do no longer have any filter system defined by some kind of value framework. So, any decision by programmers is entirely subjective and can be the result of any possible cause. Therefore, even in the case a truly symphonic, high-value work would be chosen and performed, it would merely be one thing among other things, as on the shelves of a large super market, and not be spotted as something with any special value, because there is no consensus about anything like ‘value’.
Your last phrase is apposite. If there’s no agreed hierarchy of values then why pursue excellence? How can it be recognized?
It’s a sad indictment of an ideology which has hoodwinked the people for well over a decade; that dominance hierarchies exist and need to be dismantled. Clue: art forms exist within dominance hierarchies. The strongest and best composers/artists generally survive.
Actions. Consequences.
There are many aspects to this issue. The term “symphony” for many serious composers today probably just evokes the idea of a far too rigid, predictable, formalistic, derivative, straight-jacketed work with the emphasis on high drama and sheer complexity. For many, a highly theatrical, epic utterance is not their natural way of expressing themselves. Delius could say more in eight minutes than some composers in an hour. Brahms could say more with a clarinet quintet than some composers do in twenty years. Does a 50 minute ballet by a master mean less than a symphony by the same? Maybe not. However, the symphony, loosely defined, will still be the ultimate challenge for many composers. They must then contend with the sheer mass of worthy symphonies already out there. Many are not widely known to many listeners, but they surely are to composers. They might ask themselves, what can really be left to add, that would say anything new, or surpass what others have done. It must be a dilema. Add in the demand for novelty and something in personal voice, it must be tempting to write other things, like an oboe or trombone concerto, just to name something random we have very few of. Most listeners are fairly satisfied, if not overwhelmed, by the existing corpus they can hear all day long on radio or websites or their old CDs. They barely can keep up with that. They might love some of the newer, or more obscure, works, but you can’t desire what you don’t hear. It’s a circular situation. Choosing between the overlooked and the new is a false choice. If you want to be a great listener, you should do both. The symphony will have a future, but it must be “reinvented,” as the expression goes.
Whilst the premature death of Shostakovich came as a terrible shock, the suggestion that the symphony is either now dead or (worse still) died with him simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; that the symphony no longer has the traction that one is had is arguably undeniable, but had it actually reached its demise, many hundreds of works entitled “symphony” or “symphony no. ×” would quite simply not have been composed. The symphony dead? Don’t anyone tell David Matthews, for one!…
Malcolm Arnold kept going, and Segerstam.
Alastair’s point is surely half hearted. How many of Segerstam’s vast output is actually performed worldwide? Virtually none.
They manage to sound AI generated without having been AI generated.
I don’t know what concert audiences are where you live, but I guarantee that any orchestra that would “refresh” the repertoire with the symphonies of Henze’s, Penderecki’s, Maxwell Davies, Rautavaara or Schnittke would just hasten their doom. Audiences, and frankly performers, would far rather hear, again and again, the masterful symphonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and a few others.
If they want to refresh the repertoire why not resurrect some excellent but neglected symphonies that were written in an audience-friendly idiom? Like Raff 3 & 5, Dvorak 1-6, Schmidt 1-4. Why don’t we hear the beautiful symphonies by Parry, Stanford, Sullivan, Beach, and Chadwick? The symphonies of Rubbra, Tippett, and Holmboe aren’t exactly well-known.
Correct. The point is; what is an accessible musical language.
“Accessible” was the term my composition professors (who wouldn’t have been able to write a girl scout campfire song if their tenure depended upon it) used when they wanted to be supremely damning about someone’s work.
It suggests catering to a naive audience of simpletons.
I propose that music should be compelling… it should hold your attention… you should want to hear it… it should be worth the time taken to hear it.
For the audience, a fair test of any new music is… Would I want to hear that again? Would i be curious to hear more of that composer’s music?
For the player, a fair question is… is the musical result of a piece worth the effort of playing it?
Most new music fails all three tests.
‘Accessible’ in the sense of: the language offers the possibility of hearing what is really going-on in the music.
Never listen to what professors say, but look into the opposite direction.
Why don’t we hear the beautiful symphonies by Parry, Stanford, Sullivan, Beach, and Chadwick?
(I can live without them…)
Many symphonies were written & are written in Iceland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Argentina, Ireland, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, USA, China, Ukraine, Switzerland….nobody cares.
“because there is no consensus about anything like ‘value’.
Or perhaps for a refresh, major orchestras could occasionally play just one of maybe 90 or so Haydn or 30 Mozart symphonies forever neglected, rather than the handful of those composers’ works in regular rotation. That would qualify as new music in the vast majority of concert halls worldwide. Or maybe on occasion the Bach Christmas Oratorio rather than four more performances of the Messiah EVERY DAMN DECEMBER.
I totally agree with Bigfoot. Some of Haydn’s earlyish symphonies are quite stunning. They should definitely be in the repertoire of every orchestra. But I can hear some managements vetoing the suggestion because half the orchestra would be being paid for no work during part of those concerts. I have heard that argument several times!
There is a mountain of wonderful-but-rarely played music from the 18th and 19th Centuries waiting to be mined.
Well, lots of Penderecki’s music is actually palatable, if not necessarily easy. I am not familiar with all his symphonies, but the ones that I know would make a good change if programmed.
OK, so the 2nd symphony is the most depressing Christmas piece that I know. But the 3rd is no less accessible than Shostakovich’s 8th or 10th symphony.
I’m puzzled by your suggestion that Rautavaara is somehow audience-unfriendly. The first recording of his Symphony No. 7 “Angel of Light” was one of the major classical sales successes of the 1990s alongside the Nonesuch recording of Gorecki’s Third. Late Rautavaara is surely an easier sell than Holmboe in almost any market (and I say that as a massive Holmboe fan).
The symphony will live as long as man has ears, just as the visual arts will live as long as we have eyes.
There’s no question intelligent, talented people are still drawn to composition, and are sometimes producing scores that reward the attention of performers and listeners attuned to their idiom. But the time is long, long gone when composers, performers, and audiences had enough shared affinities and passions to generate a significant public repertory. History has its twists and turns; it’s a mistake to panic over them, or to say that our preferred path X (which may be unattainable) is the only hope for the future. We musicians would also do well to remember: Schubert may be “old” in our lives, but he’s always just as new for someone as he once was for us.
I remember that day as well. Second year of music school. Felt as though someone I knew had died. First classical record I ever bought: Shostakovich 5th at 13 years old. Played it at least 100 times . The second album was the 10th.
Allan Pettersson would have a comment to make about that
I tried to disagree…but what about…or this…or him…or her. No dice. You are correct.
Useful as they are to aspiring orchestra players, the publication of books of ‘orchestral excerpts’ in the decades before and after Shostakovich’s death and their continuing use has contributed to the idea that there is an established repertoire set in stone. Anything written since will have to fight for a place.
A more recent addition to the violin audition repertoire is John Williams’ ‘Hedwig’s Theme’ from Harry Potter.
Oh dear…..
Why the pearl-clutching? What’s wrong with it as tune?
That is why an answer is impossible.
I do love Shostakovich’s music, but, frankly, prefer Prokoviev. Harmonically, he was bolder. His melodies more sweeping and pathos-filled. His orchestration more powerful.. “Alexander Nevsky” is jubilant at times and desolate and heartbreaking at times. Lt. Kije full of humor. And his 5th Symphony is one of the great works of the 20th Century. This is not meant to diminish Shostakovich’s estimable accomplishments. It’s just that Prokoviev appeals to my sensibilities more.
Perhaps a new form has to be conjured. Has the symphonic formula (ie. the sonata form) evolved to its apotheosis?
There does not exist something like ‘the sonata form’. That is an academic misconception, born in the 19th century when music theory as an academic discipline got part of university curricula.
Charles Rosen has written extensively about the history of the sonata.
There exists the ‘sonata idea’: different material brought together, then developed in whatever way, and eventually brought together again. The freedom of this idea, that can generate endless variation and expansion, means that it is open to continuous varied forms and solutions.
Really like the picture with Svetlanov…the Volga ogre only touched a few symphony but his accounts of 5, 6, 7 count in the discography. The master of crescendos is particularly fit for Leningrad…if you can find movie of 6th in 70s or end of 60’s, the finale leaves us breathless and the timpanist disheveled, exactly as every performance should be …
I was between junior and senior year as a music major at Harvard, upstairs in my summer sublet, waiting for my local band, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to perform Shostakovich 5 live from Tanglewood over the radio. But before they started Seiji Ozawa took the mike and and announced Shostakovich’s death that day. The shocked reaction of the audience matched my own. I will never forget that moment.
To a large extent, this is a numerical problem: the international musical canon includes about 25 composers who created fewer than 300 symphonies, of which less than half are played on a regular basis. The local musical canon is a bit different – in Russia, France, England, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, there are strong musical institutions that manage to preserve the musical output of composers who never managed to break through to the international consciousness. There lies the music that is the best candidate for “expanding the world canon” – music by unknown composers that have stood the test of time in their own countries, or forgotten music by famous composers.
On a deeper level, the problem seems truly insoluble: most symphonic music was the product of a particular culture and was created by and for particular people mainly in central Europe. Two world wars, opression, genocide and uprootings destroyed the demographic base of this culture and impoverished the cultural soil from which it grew. Other people in other places have their own musical expressions – and symphonic music is immigrant in their countries. Respectable, but quite foreign.
Spring 2026, mark the date. A real symphony will be born.
Here’s to hoping!
One can wonder if Shostakovich worked in the classical idiom (certainly his 14th defies this) against a backdrop of a draconian Russian formalism. Regardless, he was a great symphonist with a good sense of where he fit into the pantheon and symphonic tradition.
It’s unfair to drop the decline of the symphony and orchestra at his doorstep.
Yes. And I attend the symphony concerts more since The Atlanta Symphony asked and listened to their audiences and learned from the interviews, just what you said. They realized the kind of music they play is important in whether they can sell a lot of tickets or not.
K.McCall
I remember leafing through a “Sports Illustrated” magazine (remember magazines?) while waiting for a medical appointment, maybe 25 years ago. There was a little feature asking three prominent young athletes various things, such as their favorite food or TV show. Out of left field was the question “Who is your favorite classical musician?” One guy said “Nobody”, which was actually the best answer. The other two choices were Otis Redding and Frank Sinatra.
The basic problem is that when it comes to new music, orchestras subject their audience to bad music. Since the death of Shostakovich, how many new works have received general audience acceptance? (Ans: closer to zero than 10). Orchestras have transformed new music into a duty where the audience sits through 10 minutes of artsy-fartsy noise and then dutifully applauds while the group of six guys orchestra left gives a standing ovation. Orchestras could not get away with performing a 30-45 minute symphony in the new music mode. The only time I have heard an audience boo was for the world premier of Xanakis Kreqrops. The NY Phil. could have gotten away with 5-10 minutes of what the WSJ decribed as the sound of a surgical ward before anesthesia. At 17 minutes, they exceeded the audience’s tolerance for being insulted.
A problem another commentator pointed out on this board is the lack of melody. Norman recently posted a link to a new symphony that was listenable but was unmemorable due to a lack of melody. With few exceptions, the audience needs to be humming it when they come out of of the hall for a piece to be successful.
“Melody” — now there’s a word that’s sure to cause accusation of all kinds. I had a professor (yes, and I am one too) who correctly, I would suggest, answered this broader question with his own pretty simple one: Can the composer carry a tune? Thus endeth the lesson.
“Without it [the symphony], though, the concert is doomed.”
— what about tone poems?
Gotta love it when NL connects with the common man.
Not normally a fan of yours Norman but can’t really disagree with this. Probably the String Quartet also died.
I would count Rautavarra and Penderecki as being pretty good, more contemporary symphonists.
There are people who do write great music surprisingly… just look up Musescore and composers such as Holland Albright, Conner Cowart and Thad Bailey-Mai for example on YouTube. sadly at The Proms they are only interested in anything new as commissioned works unless it’s tuneless contemporary mess and very annoyingly this is done every year making one think no good music with beauty harmony and melody is ever composed. BBC should be ashamed !!