Musicon / Beethoven / Musical education / Appearance of the Symphony
-Appearance of the Symphony
I have known a professional writer on musical subjects to express the opinion that a symphony was nothing else than four unrelated compositions for orchestra arranged in a certain sequence for the sake of an agreeable contrast of moods and tempos. It is scarcely necessary to say that the writer in question had a very poor opinion of the Symphony as an Art-form, and believed that it had outlived its usefulness and should be relegated to the limbo of Archaic Things. If he, however, trained in musical history and familiar with musical literature, could see only four unrelated pieces of music in a symphony by Beethoven, we need not marvel that hazy notions touching the nature of the form are prevalent among the untaught public, and that people can be met in concert-rooms to whom such words as “Symphony in C minor,” and the printed designations of the different portions of the work–the “movements,” as musicians call them–are utterly bewildering.
The word symphony has itself a singularly variegated history. Like many another term in music it was borrowed by the modern world from the ancient Greek. To those who coined it, however, it had a much narrower meaning than to us who use it, with only a conventional change in transliteration, now. By [Greek: symphonia] the Greeks simply expressed the concept of agreement, or consonance. Applied to music it meant first such intervals as unisons; then the notion was extended to include consonant harmonies, such as the fifth, fourth, and octave. The study of the ancient theoreticians led the musicians of the Middle Ages to apply the word to harmony in general. Then in some inexplicable fashion it came to stand as a generic term for instrumental compositions such as toccatas, sonatas, etc. Its name was given to one of the precursors of the pianoforte, and in Germany in the sixteenth century the word Symphoney came to mean a town band.
In the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th the term was used to designate an instrumental introduction to a composition for voices, such as a song or chorus, as also an instrumental piece introduced in a choral work. The form, that is the extent and structure of the composition, had nothing to do with the designation, as we see from the Italian shepherds’ tune which Handel set for strings in “The Messiah;” he called it simply pifa, but his publishers called it a “Pastoral symphony,” and as such we still know it. It was about the middle of the eighteenth century that the present signification became crystallized in the word.
From: H. Krehbiel’s, How to Listen to Music; excerpts, edited by Musicon
Celibidache and his orchestra working on Beethoven’s 9th: