page_title: Choral symphony
section_title: Words expanding symphonic form
hierarchical_section_title: Choral symphony / Relation of words and music / Words expanding symphonic form
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gustav Mahler
context_page_description: A choral symphony is a musical composition for orchestra, choir, and sometimes solo vocalists that, in its internal workings and overall musical architecture, adheres broadly to symphonic musical form. The term "choral symphony" in this context was coined by Hector Berlioz when he described his Roméo et Juliette as such in his five-paragraph introduction to that work. The direct antecedent for the choral symphony is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beethoven's Ninth incorporates part of the Ode an die Freude, a poem by Friedrich Schiller, with text sung by soloists and chorus in the last movement. It is the first example of a major composer's use of the human voice on the same level as instruments in a symphony.
  A few 19th-century composers, notably Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, followed Beethoven in producing choral symphonic works. Notable works in the genre were produced in the 20th century by Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, among others.
context_section_description: A composer may also respond to a text by expanding a choral symphony beyond the normal bounds of the symphonic genre. This is evident in the unusual orchestration and stage directions Berlioz prepared for his Roméo et Juliette. This piece is actually in seven movements, and calls for an intermission after the fourth movement – the "Queen Mab Scherzo" – to remove the harps from the stage and bring on the chorus of Capulets for the funeral march that follows. Berlioz biographer D. Kern Holoman observed that, "as Berlioz saw it, the work is simply Beethovenian in design, with the narrative elements overlain. Its core approaches a five-movement symphony with the choral finale and, as in the [Symphonie] Fantastique, both a scherzo and a march.... The 'extra' movements are thus the introduction with its potpourri of subsections and the descriptive tomb scene [at the end of the work]."
  Mahler expanded the Beethovenian model for programmatic as well as symphonic reasons in his Second Symphony, the "Resurrection", the vocal fourth movement, "Urlicht", bridging the childlike faith of the third movement with the ideological tension Mahler seeks to resolve in the finale. He then abandoned this pattern for his Third Symphony, as two movements for voices and orchestra follow three purely instrumental ones before the finale returns to instruments alone. Like Mahler, Havergal Brian expanded the Beethovenian model, but on a much larger scale and with far larger orchestral and choral forces, in his Symphony No. 1 "The Gothic". Written between 1919 and 1927, the symphony was inspired by Goethe's Faust and Gothic cathedral architecture. The Brian First is in two parts. The first consists of three instrumental movements; the second, also in three movements and over an hour in length, is a Latin setting of the Te Deum.
caption: Mahler first expanded the model set by Beethoven's Ninth, then abandoned it.
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