Choral Symphony - Relation of Words and Music - Words Determining Symphonic Form

Words Determining Symphonic Form

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 representing, 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".