Music
The work has five movements, the last three played without interruption:
- Allegro
- Moderato
- Presto
- Largo
- Allegretto - Allegro
A typical performance lasts for around 26 minutes, which makes this symphony one of the shortest by Shostakovich. (Only his Second is shorter.)
The symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine and strings.
The symphony is a playful and vivid musical work, with a neo-classical air that has led to comparisons to Haydn's symphonies and to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony. Shostakovich himself considered it "a joyful little piece".
Read more about this topic: Symphony No. 9 (Shostakovich)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—that were a bath and a medicine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the “moral significance of existence.” But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)