1 - Tradition and renewal

Summary

The death of the symphony?

In 1888, the year Nielsen embarked on his first attempt at a symphony, George Bernard Shaw announced that the symphony as a musical form was ‘stone dead’. In 1940, fifteen years after Nielsen's sixth and last symphony, the Danish composer Knudåge Riisager published an article entitled ‘The Symphony is Dead: Long Live Music!’

It would be easy to scoff: to rub Shaw's nose in the symphonic masterpieces of Nielsen, Sibelius, Elgar and Mahler; to confront Riisager with Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Vaughan Williams; to cite Maxwell Davies, Henze, Górecki, Holmboe, Kancheli, Lutoslawski, Sallinen, Schnittke, Silvestrov, Simpson and Tippett as evidence that rumours of the symphony's death have been exaggerated.

Even today, however, there are those who would consider that the rumours were not exaggerated at all, or at least that some of the symphonists just named have failed to shoulder the full responsibilities of the genre. Perhaps there is indeed such a thing as symphonism by default; perhaps the ‘Breath of Symphonists’, which Schoenberg claimed to perceive in Shostakovich and Sibelius, is actually an illusion in the twentieth century, the reality being a necrophiliac artificial respiration.

The symphony's premature obituarists have had their reasons, and it may be worth playing devil's advocate a little longer. For it can scarcely be denied that individual composers, even whole generations, have experienced symphonic ‘crises’.