page_title: Choral symphony
section_title: Words determining symphonic form
hierarchical_section_title: Choral symphony / Relation of words and music / Words determining symphonic form
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Zentralbild Höhne-Pohl, 10.03.1953 Zum Tode J.W. Stalins 200.000 Dresdner Einwohner marschierten am 9.3.1953 schweigend am Bildnis Stalins am Ehrenmal der Sowjetarmee auf dem Platz der Einheit vorüber. UBz: Angehörige der kasernierten Volkspolizei senken ihre Fahnen. Die KVP Bezirk Dresden verneigt ihre Fahnen vor dem Bildnis des unvergeßlichen Stalin, beim Trauermarsch der 200.000 Dresdner am Nachmittag des Beisetzungstages.
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: Rachmaninoff's choral symphony The Bells reflected the four-part progression from youth to marriage, maturity, and death in Poe's poem. Britten reversed the pattern for his Spring Symphony—the four sections of the symphony represent, in its composer's words, "the progress of Winter to Spring and the reawakening of the earth and life which that means.... It is in the traditional four movement shape of a symphony, but with the movements divided into shorter sections bound together by a similar mood or point of view."
  The gestation of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, was only slightly less straightforward. He set the poem Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko almost immediately upon reading it, initially considering it a single-movement composition. Discovering three other Yevtushenko poems in the poet's collection Vzmakh ruki (A Wave of the Hand) prompted him to proceed to a full-length choral symphony, with "A Career" as the closing movement. Musicologist Francis Maes comments that Shostakovich did so by complementing Babi Yar's theme of Jewish suffering with Yevtushenko's verses about other Soviet abuses: "'At the Store' is a tribute to the women who have to stand in line for hours to buy the most basic foods,... 'Fears' evokes the terror under Stalin. 'A Career' is an attack on bureaucrats and a tribute to genuine creativity". Music historian Boris Schwarz adds that the poems, in the order Shostakovich places them, form a strongly dramatic opening movement, a scherzo, two slow movements and a finale.
  In other cases, the choice of text has led the composer to different symphonic structures. Havergal Brian allowed the form of his Fourth Symphony, subtitled "Das Siegeslied" (Psalm of Victory), to be dictated by the three-part structure of his text, Psalm 68; the setting of Verses 13–18 for soprano solo and orchestra forms a quiet interlude between two wilder, highly chromatic martial ones set for massive choral and orchestral forces. Likewise, Szymanowski allowed the text by 13th-century Persian poet Rumi to dictate what Dr. Jim Samson calls the "single tripartite movement" and "overall arch structure" of his Third Symphony, subtitled "Song of the Night".
caption: Yevtushenko's poems about the terror under Stalin (pictured) and other Soviet abuses inspired Shostakovich to write his Thirteenth Symphony
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