Introducing vioce into the 9th Symphony

[Megan]

Was Beethoven the only composer to introduce the voice into the symphony?

sorry, I am unable to correct the typo in the heading.

[Michael]

He is usually credited with being the first composer to bring the human voice into a symphony, but he probably was not. I think it was HC Robbins Landon who has estimated that there were at least ten thousand symphonies written before Beethoven's first appeared (over-symbolically, as someone once described it) in 1800.
Maybe Roehre has some information on this?

(I just noticed that your question is worded "the only composer", Megan. Well, after Beethoven there were nearly all jumping on the voicewagon.)

[Preston]

10,000! Was the symphony not a somewhat newer genre and before that concerti grosso? That number just doesn't sound right.

[Hofrat]

10,000 symphonies before Beethoven's 1st?! That seems very high. I do not think there were 10,000 symphonies in the whole history of music.

[Peter]

10,000 symphonies before Beethoven's 1st?! That seems very high. I do not think there were 10,000 symphonies in the whole history of music.

Not that impossible - Dittersdorf wrote 120 with another possible 90, Haydn around 108, Mozart has I think 56 now possibly attributed - just 3 composers. Then take a look at this list of 18th century composers (though not all wrote symphonies, many did) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._era_composers

[Peter]

Was Beethoven the only composer to introduce the voice into the symphony?

sorry, I am unable to correct the typo in the heading.

Mendelssohn, Liszt, Berlioz, Mahler, Vaughan-Williams, Holst, Britten, Shostakovich have all written choral 'symphonic' style works.

[Hofrat]

Molte wrote over 300 symphonies; Pleyel over 40; Beck over 30. Add these to those mentioned by Peter and you do not reach 800. There are many composers who wrote symphonies that you can count on the fingers of one hand. I find it hard to believe that we can reach 10,000.

Could it be that Landon included in his estimate his reckoning of the number symphonies whose MS's lay in various unknown archives across Europe or unattributed symphonies in know archives? Still, 10,000 is a mighty high number.

[Roehre]

In my opinion the number of 10.000 might be a conservative estimate, given the fact that only in the monasteries of the (former) German speaking countries alone some 100.000 scores are awaiting thorough examination.

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The question however whether Beethoven is the first to introduce voices in a symphonic work, has most likely to be answered with "NO".

Two-movement overture-sinfonias for which an opera's opening chorus or aria-ritornello did double duty as finale, were not uncommon, but here we then are confronted with 2 movement works (a similar situation e.g see the opening of Bach's Easter Oratorium)

But: Apart from the gigantic amount of unchecked and therefore not edited scores we do have an example of a well known composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I quote a letter by Leopold Mozart, dated September 13th 1771:
"[in] the last allegro of the symphony a chorus of 32 voices, 8 sopranos, 8 contraltos, 8 tenors and 8 basses" (see Emily Anderson The Letters of Mozart , 2nd edition (1966) vol.I p.196.)

This is a passage regarding the Symphony in D K111+120 (=K6 111a, Ascanio in Alba), for a description of which I point to Neal Zaslaw . Mozart's Symphonies. Context, performance Practice, Reception (Oxford,1989) p.188-189 (This book is an off-shoot of the AAM-Hogwood Mozart recordings of all the Symphonies for L'Oiseau Lyre/Decca).

Interestingly Mozart did replace the finale of the Symphony in D K45 La finta semplice which originally ended with a chorus by a completely instrumental one in the Symphony in D K51 (=K6 46a La finta semplice), a reworking of the original piece, implying that choral or vocal finales were not the norm at that time either. See again Zaslaw, p.114-117.

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Thus, though Beethoven was most likely the first to introduce voices in a well extended symphony -here defined as the independent musical form created by Haydn-, there exist symphonies -half way opera overture and that independent musical form- which do include voices of some kind.

[Michael]

10,000 does seem a large figure and I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamed it up, so I did some digging.
The figure is quoted in the notes to Volume One of the DGG Complete Beethoven Edition and it's in a short essay called "Beethoven and the Symphony" by H C Robbins Landon (who coincidentally died a few days ago.)
Here is the exact quote:
After Haydn's success in London ....
....."suddenly the symphony was the most popular form of music in Europe. It has been estimated that 10,000 were composed before 1800. In that year, Ludwig van Beethoven entered the scene , to offer the Viennese public the first of the nine symphonies which would change the face of music".

If it had been anybody else but Robbins Landon who came up with this figure, I would doubt it very much.

[Hofrat]

Roehre;

Overtures to early (18th century) operas were also 3-movement pieces in a fast-slow-fast format. Often these overtures were detached from their respective operas and performed as stand-alone pieces in concerts. It was such a big hit that composers wrote 3-movement overtures as independent works without writing an "attached" opera. These were later called sinfonias and symphonies.

[Roehre]

Roehre;

Overtures to early (18th century) operas were also 3-movement pieces in a fast-slow-fast format. Often these overtures were detached from their respective operas and performed as stand-alone pieces in concerts. It was such a big hit that composers wrote 3-movement overtures as independent works without writing an "attached" opera. These were later called sinfonias and symphonies.

Thanks Hofrat.
For those interested in the development of the symphony: DGG presented for its 75th "birthday" an edition of 12 multi-LP-sets called "The symphony"/"Die Welt der Symphonie", the 12 represented composers being Haydn (London symphonies only), Mozart (Böhm's 46), Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Sibelius (all their numbered symphonies). [in 1973 Shostakovich was still alive, and other composers after Mahler, such as Nielsen or Prokofjev, let alone Vaughan Williams, were hardly if at all in fashion]

The published a lavishly illustrated large format book, similarly shaped and illustrated as the book for the 1970 (and 1977) Beethoven Edition, which tells us the story of the symphony.
Anyone interested should IMO try to get a copy, as it e.g. presents some handy schemes, but more importantly, pictures which are otherwise difficult to get, as the finale of Bruckner 9, the scherzo from Schubert's Unfinished, or the opening of Elgar 3, all photographs of the full score .

The Beethoven chapter is very informative, and places his work into the framework of the development of the symphony, including the place of the finale in it.