Eight Is Enough
Last summer, the Cabrillo Festival gave the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 8. Glass has been famous since the mid-1970s, but he didn’t write his first symphony until 1992. His symphony project moved along fairly quickly after that, and by 2005, he’d reached number eight. (See SFCV’s review.)
Philip Glass
After the Cabrillo concert, I thought it might tickle the ear to celebrate the variety and quality of music that exists under the name Symphony No. 8. I searched through my collection of recordings on CD and LP, and found 24 works with that title, including Glass’ own. Here they are, in chronological order. How many have you heard?
- The mid-18th century English composer William Boyce took eight of his three-part overtures and published them under the title of Symphonies. Number 8 (1758) is the only one in a minor key. It begins pompously and contrapuntally, and ends with one of Boyce’s trademark catchy gavottes.
- Joseph Haydn didn’t number his own symphonies; a later scholar did that. But when he landed his job of a lifetime at the Esterházy court at age 29, he began impressively by writing a trilogy of symphonies he titled Morning, Noon, and Night. Night (1761) wound up as No. 8. All three are full of late-Baroque solo passages designed to show off to Prince Esterházy the talents of his orchestra. Of the three, Night is the fastest and busiest, sounding at times remarkably like something from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, particularly in Haydn’s storm-allegory finale.
- Since W.A. Mozart’s symphony numbers are unreliable (assigned by a publisher who wasn’t paying much attention), his No. 8 (1768) is better known by its work number in Köchel’s definitive Mozart catalog, K. 48. He wrote it when he was 12, but from Mozart such precocity is no surprise. It’s not at all a mature work, but it’s well-crafted, with a little of the dramatic excitement so common in Haydn’s, and others’, music of the late 1760s.
- Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eighth (1812) is a powerful, aggressive little monster packed into a small space, a more vehement work than any of Beethoven’s other “lesser” symphonies. And for 12 years, it was his last. Think of how differently we’d view Beethoven had he never been able to write the Ninth. Interestingly, the Eighth has no slow movement, the only Beethoven symphony to lack one. Instead it has a tick-tock intermezzo supposedly inspired by the metronome. (But as it’s Beethoven’s unreliable factotum Anton Schindler who says this, it probably isn’t true.)
- Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony (1822) is No. 8 by the usual numbering. (Schubert didn’t assign his own numbers either.) His earlier, finished symphonies are superb works, but they’re small-scale, light, Haydnesque. In the “Unfinished,” nearly 20 years after Beethoven’s “Eroica,” Schubert has finally absorbed the lessons of it and its successors. This is a huge, dark, brooding work, without any of the bounciness of the “Great C Major” Symphony, composed next. Why Schubert fully scored two movements and then stopped, no one knows. Surely he didn’t think he was done.
- Felix Mendelssohn shows up with No. 8 (1822) from his 12 “early” symphonies; his adult canonical list only has five. No mere trifle, this is a full-length work for strings in a relaxed post-Classical style, with a delightfully stealthy Baroque-homage slow movement.
- Niels Gade’s Eighth (1871) is in B minor, the same key as Schubert’s brooding “Unfinished” and Tchaikovsky’s catastrophically depressed “Pathétique,” but it’s nothing like them. This is calm, serene, very Scandinavian music (Gade was Danish). Probably that lack of passion is why he’s less famous now than in his lifetime, but his work really sticks with me. I especially like the opening movement of this one. Why should distraught composers get all the press? Think halfway between Mendelssohn and Dvořák, and you’ll find Gade, quite satisfied to be there.
- Anton Bruckner’s Eighth (1887) is his last completed symphony (the Ninth is unfinished), and as such it’s his longest, at about 80 minutes. By this time Bruckner’s huge scale has grown to a truly massive size. When I was looking for a characteristic Bruckner movement to play on CD for friends, I picked the scherzo of the Eighth (16 minutes, only a blip on the scale in Bruckner time), and was quite startled to learn that this was the first exposure to Bruckner for some of my listeners. But it was a good choice, for the way it tumbles over its motifs, abruptly shifts keys, and tumbles over them again.
- Antonin Dvořák didn’t call his Eighth (1889) his Eighth. He left out four early unpublished symphonies (wisely, I think) and called it his Fourth. But nowadays the missing four are counted, so this one is always called the Eighth. It’s his grandest symphonic essay on long-spinning Czech rhapsody. Constantly moving between soft but active beauty and passages of dramatic excitement, today — apart from the “New World” — it’s Dvořák’s most-played symphony. No wonder: I put on a recording of the finale for a moment just to jog my memory of a work I know well, but I couldn’t bear to turn it off.
- Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth (1943) is huge and dark, supposedly inspired by Stalingrad. That battle was no fun for anyone, and that’s what the music says. After a beginning that sounds like a chromatic takeoff on Lalo Schifrin, it wends its way through various impassioned agonies to a close more than an hour later. As with many of his works of this period, there’s one totally weird episode that, once heard, will never be forgotten. In this case it’s the “machine gun” scherzo: Strings, as staccato and dryly as possible, play a ruthlessly fast ostinato, while the winds drop incendiary bombs from overhead (piercing long-held notes that suddenly plunge and cut out). Suddenly the ostinato mutates into an oom-pah backing for a jaunty trumpet tune (say what?), then returns to the war.
- Kurt Atterberg is my favorite of the many great modern Swedes, a restlessly intelligent composer of modern tonalism just the way I like it. His Eighth (1944) is a big, broad, lively work, based on folk tunes but more developed and less rhapsodic than most such works. Atterberg tends to have particularly light, bouncy finales, but this one has more weight than some.
- Havergal Brian’s Eighth (1949) came at the height of his powers. Not overblown like some of his early work, nor cramped and crabbed like some of its successors, and never overloud like Brian of all periods, it has just the right scope for what it wants to say. The symphony opens with a typically Brianesque military rhythm that reappears a few times, and later goes into some creepy slow harp scales. The musical language is different, but its querulous variety has the same effect as Malcolm Arnold, to come later.
- Vagn Holmboe wrote post-tonal high modernism in the deracinated internationalist manner, a style of music I don’t much care for. But at least he was good at it. His Eighth (1952) is constantly varied, consistently interesting, and at moments here and there, even appealing. The climax of the second movement has some of the most dramatically arresting musical sneezing I’ve ever heard.
- Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Eighth (1955) is by far the shortest, lightest, and quirkiest symphony he ever wrote. Everything except the slow movement (for strings only) sounds like a step on from the scherzo episodes of his Second and Seventh. This one’s scherzo is all-staccato for winds only; the finale is full of xylophone and other percussion. Just chipper and cute all around, if a big bluff Englishman can ever be cute.
- Janis Ivanovs was a Latvian composer of the Soviet era who wrote 20 symphonies, putting him not far below Brian’s 32 on the prolific scale. I don’t know what to make of his Eighth (1956): It’s fairly tonal, but veers wildly between profound, effective moments and vapid note-spinning. There’s some good music in here trying to get out.
- Darius Milhaud’s Eighth (1957) has a local connection. Milhaud, a French Jew, came to Mills College during the war and kept teaching there part-time for years afterward — my own harmony instructor was a student of his. He wrote this symphony on commission from UC Berkeley to open a new concert hall; judging by the date this must have been Hertz Hall, where I spent many an undergraduate hour two decades later. But that’s about all I have to say for this work, which is raucous and noisy, except for the Messianesque opening. Despite my instructional ancestry I’m not a Milhaud fan.
- George Lloyd, an obscure Cornishman, was puffed up in some quarters in the 1980s as if he were the greatest living symphonist. (Whether he was is now a moot point, as he died in 1998.) I bought LPs of some of his works, including his Eighth (1961). They’re what used to be called Cheltenham symphonies, for an English music festival at which works like this were popular in those days: thoroughly tonal compositions with a wide, sweeping air to them, inevitably featuring the Big Tune, a catchy melody that would get played often in a broad, commanding way, but not get developed much. Don’t mistake me: I like Cheltenham symphonies. They’re the antidote to sterile modernism. But I have recordings of a lot of them.
- Roy Harris, an American composer who made a big splash in the 1930s with terse, muscular music, kind of faded away over the years. Too bad. His Eighth (1962) is surprisingly (for him) luminous chromatic music with a solo piano part, crisp and precise, a little like Bohuslav Martinu but heavier, feet firmly on the ground. It’s another work with a local connection: Inspired by St. Francis, it was written for the San Francisco Symphony and premiered under the music director everyone would like to forget about, Enrique Jordá. Unfortunately, it’s not been played much since.
- Walter Piston was another high modernist, drier than most. His Eighth (1965), even more than some of his other works, is the Great American Academic Symphony. Full of intricately composed stuff that ought to sound interesting, it’s all construction and no emotion, relentlessly nontonal, and just feels as if it’s gesticulating intently in some language I don’t speak.
- Edmund Rubbra could write thick, clotted work, but much of his later music has a clear, airy feel to it. This comes in handy in his Eighth (1968), an homage to Teilhard de Chardin. A touch of the glockenspiel, for instance, sounds just right. But this symphony is not a pastiche of French mysticism: There’s much more typically English heartiness than a French composer would bring to such a subject or indeed any subject. It’s a well-argued, fairly tonal work.
- Allan Pettersson was the Swedish equivalent of Havergal Brian, a composer of lower-class origin with a grudge against the musical establishment that ignored his huge, ambitious works. He transcends a tendency toward Mahlerian angst in his Seventh Symphony, an incisive work that rather reminds me of Nielsen’s Fifth, and which impressed me, as it has others. But I never found another Pettersson symphony to match it, not that I looked that hard. His Eighth (1969) is slack and overlong, but on relistening I find more to remind me of the Seventh than I had remembered. So you never know.
- Daniel Jones’ Eighth (1972) sounds a little odd here and there. Marimba and vibraphone, in Welsh music? Actually both Jones and William Mathias, the other best-known Welsh symphonist, wrote in the international modernist style, as Vagn Holmboe did, but not as interestingly. This is a pretty run-of-the-mill symphony.
- Malcolm Arnold was best-known for his lighter compositions and film music. In his symphonies he liked to take catchy tunes, even lounge music, and interrupt them with serious music that still bears the Arnold stylistic fingerprints. The effect is almost the inverse of the Cheltenham “Big Tune” (though Arnold wrote some of those, too), and not at all like a Schnittkean collage: It’s more as if he were taking a pop-art print and drawing huge black question marks all over it. His Fifth is the masterpiece of this kind, but also up there is the first movement of his Eighth (1978), where the innocent victim is a quasi-Irish tune from a film score. The finale, rather cheerier, ventures somewhere into Shostakovich territory.
- And finally, Philip Glass’ Eighth (2005). Some people will tell you that Glass writes mindlessly noodling, endlessly repetitive music, but they haven’t been paying much attention. He got that phase out of his system over 30 years ago, and added harmonic progressions and shifts in perspective to his discoveries in repetition. His music today has both large- and small-scale movement: It goes somewhere, and does it interestingly. Glass is a good classical composer for rock fans. When he builds up a climax from a repetitive motif, it sounds a lot like a rock song with a catchy riff. He’s written two other symphonies (the “Low,” No. 1, and “Heroes,” No. 4) based on David Bowie/Brian Eno albums, and in the 1980s put out a song album, Songs From Liquid Days, with lyrics by Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson, with vocals by Linda Ronstadt and the Roches. And now he’s up to his Symphony No. 8 for orchestra — it’s big (39 minutes), kaleidoscopic, and colorful, with dark strings and piping winds, fast and churning in its first half, quiet and stealthy afterward.
William Boyce
Franz Schubert
Felix Mendelssohn
Antonin Dvořák
Vagn Holmboe
Darius Milhaud
Roy Harris
Walter Piston
There are of course many other Eighth Symphonies. The best-known of those not listed here is Gustav Mahler’s monumental “Symphony of a Thousand,” as it’s known for the (only somewhat exaggerated) size of the forces it requires to perform. And despite rumors of the death of the symphony, many estimable contemporary composers continue to write them, even composers more highly rated by those critics who look down their noses at Philip Glass. Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Werner Henze, Aulis Sallinen, and Charles Wuorinen have all had Symphonies No. 8 performed in the U.S. in recent years — Maxwell Davies’ Eighth, titled “Antarctic,” was played by the San Francisco Symphony in March 2002.
If you wish to hear a Symphony No. 8 live this season, there’s an unusual treat in store at Davies Symphony Hall on Feb. 14. The Russian National Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowsky will be performing a finished version of Schubert’s “Unfinished,” completed by Anton Safranov.
The Symphony No. 8 that I do not have a recording of and have never heard, but would most like to have, is the one by Jean Sibelius (1929?). I doubt there are many classical-lovers who would say otherwise. In the mid-1920s Sibelius was at the height of his popularity, and when he announced that he was working on an Eighth Symphony to add to his magnificent previous seven, the music world was excited. Great things were predicted. But the years went on and Sibelius began changing the subject when people asked about the Eighth. Some years later his wife saw him burning a huge pile of papers, and when he died there was no trace of the Eighth. Scholars believe he composed it, but that all the critical hoopla raised his sense of self-doubt, leading him to destroy it. A shame and a great loss to music.
David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.
©2007 By David Bratman, all rights reserved.
While you might not like the Piston, my guess is that if you could hear the Leinsdorf performances you might reconsider your position. You call it the “Great” American 8th, but then you dismiss the work in the next sentence by calling it all construction. It would seem to me that you are contradicting yourself.
As for your list, it would appear that you might want to consider enlarging your collection of recordings. Might I suggest that you start with what for me is the most significant 8th by an American, the one by William Schuman. Also missing from your list, works by Mennin, Diamond, Persichetti, Miaskovsky, Hartmann, Malipiero, Villa Lobos, Panufnik, Raff, Spohr, Simpson, the Manheim Symphonists, etc.
Sadly, there are monumental 8ths, that remain unrecorded, the one by Niels Viggo Bentzon in particular.
As for Mr. Glass, I realize we are all entitled to our opinions…
Posted by Karl Miller on November 8, 2007 at 8:18 am