page_title: Choral symphony
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Choral symphony / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki
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: The symphony had established itself by the end of the 18th century as the most prestigious of instrumental genres. While the genre had been developed with considerable intensity throughout that century and appeared in a wide range of occasions, it was generally used as an opening or closing work; in between would be works that included vocal and instrumental soloists. Because of its lack of written text for focus, it was seen as a vehicle for entertainment rather than for social, moral or intellectual ideas. As the symphony grew in size and artistic significance, thanks in part to efforts in the form by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, it also amassed greater prestige. A concurrent change in attitude toward instrumental music in general also took place, and the lack of text, once seen as a handicap, became considered a virtue.
  In 1824, Beethoven redefined the symphony genre in his Ninth by introducing text and voice into a previously instrumental genre. His doing so sparked a debate on the future of the symphony itself. Beethoven's use of words, according to Richard Wagner, had shown "the limits of purely instrumental music" and marked "the end of the symphony as a vital genre". Others were not sure how to proceed—whether to emulate the Ninth by writing symphonies with choral finales, or to develop the symphony genre in a purely instrumental fashion. Eventually, musicologist Mark Evan Bonds writes, the symphony was seen "as an all-embracing, cosmic drama that transcended the realm of sound alone".
  Some composers both emulated and expanded upon Beethoven's model. Berlioz showed in his choral symphony Roméo et Juliette a fresh approach to the epic nature of the symphony as he used voices to blend music and narrative but saved crucial moments of that narrative for the orchestra alone. In doing so, Bonds writes, Berlioz illustrates for subsequent composers "new approaches for addressing the metaphysical in the realm of the symphony". Mendelssohn wrote his Lobgesang as a work for chorus, soloists and orchestra. Labeling the work a "symphony-cantata", he expanded the choral finale to nine movements by including sections for vocal soloists, recitatives and sections for chorus; this made the vocal part longer than the three purely orchestral sections that preceded it. Liszt wrote two choral symphonies, following in these multi-movement forms the same compositional practices and programmatic goals he had established in his symphonic poems.
  After Liszt, Mahler took on the legacy of Beethoven in his early symphonies, in what Bonds terms "their striving for a utopian finale". Towards this end Mahler used a chorus and soloists in the finale of his Second Symphony, the "Resurrection". In his Third, he wrote a purely instrumental finale following two vocal movements, and in his Fourth a vocal finale is sung by a solo soprano. After writing his Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies as purely instrumental works, Mahler returned to the vein of "festival-symphonic ceremonial" in his Eighth Symphony, which integrates text throughout the body of the work. After Mahler, the choral symphony became a more common genre, taking a number of compositional turns in the process. Some composers, such as Britten, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, followed symphonic form strictly. Others, such as Havergal Brian, Alfred Schnittke and Karol Szymanowski, chose either to expand symphonic form or to use different symphonic structures altogether.
  Throughout the history of the choral symphony, works have been composed for special occasions. One of the earliest was Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, commissioned by the city of Leipzig in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. More than a century later, Henryk Górecki's Second Symphony, subtitled "Copernican", was commissioned in 1973 by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. In between these two works, in 1930, conductor Serge Koussevitzky asked Stravinsky to write the Symphony of Psalms f
caption: Krzysztof Penderecki wrote his Seventh Symphony to celebrate the third millennium of the city of Jerusalem.
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