The 4th takes up only 16 pages. He made the point that it was actually very demanding on the audience. After a full hour of concentrated attention, the final movement presented a slowly moving, but richly textured hymn, heard from the many different voices of the orchestra. It would continue for the final 30 mins of the piece. All instruments but the strings fall silent.
Cellos sing a phrase which they can scarcely bear to let go.
More and more, the music recedes, a kind of polyphony to the last, the cellos and second violins gently firm, the first violins and violas softly afloat. Grief gives way to peace, music and silence become one. The lecturer ended by saying that as the various instruments gradually drop out, we would come to experience the most wonderful silence in the end. My thought at the time was that it would be a very short-lived silence indeed, as the applause of the audience would surely come crashing in upon it, as it always does. In some cases, I have found it annoying that between movements of a work, the audience seems to go into fits of coughing and shuffling, as though they were children in church finally released from the warning glares of their parents.