Symphonic Innovators at the turn of the 19th Century

[John H White]

I used to think that Beethoven was unique, in that he produced all his symphonic innovations like rabbits out of a hat; but of late I've been nursing a growing suspicion that he may have been in some respects picking the brains of other lesser known composers. Some clues include the fully fledged scherzos (still called minuets) found in Haydn's last 2 complete string quartets, Op.77. Also some passages in the choral finale of the 9th symphony are strangely reminiscent of passages from Cherubini's C minor Requiem, that composer being greatly admired by Beethoven. On a previous thread in our earlier forum we were informed that the Scandinavian composer Eggert had anticipated Beethoven in using a full set of trombones in one of his symphonies. I also remember reading somewhere that Beethoven was not the first composer to incorporate human voices into a symphony. Finally, it might be argued that the dramatic style of  the Fifth Symphonic was merely an updated version of that of the Sturm und Drang symphonies written by Haydn and some of his contemporaries back in the 1770s.
   This all leads me to suspect that Europe at the turn of the 19th Century was probably brim full of now forgotten composers with lots of bright ideas that Beethoven may have picked on and appled his master touch to.
  Does anyone have any ideas about who these people were and whether any of their music, symphonic or otherwise, has survived? In particular, I'd like to know if anyone introduced the scherzo into the symphony before Beethoven.

[Alan Howe]

There is no doubt that Beethoven composed against a context in which we can identify all manner of influences upon him, but in the end he was a towering genius who moved the symphony on so far and so quickly that a whole century of symphonic composition can be said to have taken place in the wake of what he wrote. In comparison, other symphonic composers of the same period are really pretty small beer, however interesting. IMHO Beethoven was uniquely significant in his period in a way that the generally accepted later symphonic greats were not - which is why the period, say, 1800-1825 is much less interesting in terms of other symphonists than 1850-1875, i.e. the so-called 'Dahlhaus gap' between Schumann 4 and Brahms 1 in which no symphony of any consequence is supposed to have been written. This has now been disproved as absurd with the rediscovery of Raff, Rufinatscha, Dietrich, etc.

[John H White]

Alan, I certainly wasn't implying that Beethoven wasn't the leading musical genius of his time. All I wanted to know was were there any other symphonic innovators around at the time from which he may have derived certain ideas which he himself went on to perfect in his own works.

[petershott@btinternet.com]

I'm sure John is spot on right in suggesting (what I'll call the 'weak' thesis) that there are family resemblances between Beethoven's early works and those by his predecessors and contemporaries. Yes, Europe around 1800 was certainly an interesting place with a huge amount going on - not only in music, but in art, literature, and politics. And remember Haydn himself was a remarkable innovator. But Alan's 'strong' thesis, that Beethoven was a "towering genius" who brought about utterly astonishing changes in a very short period of time, I think can be best appreciated not by reference to the symphonies but by the chamber music. Consider the three Op 1 Piano Trios of 1794-95 and the three Op 9 String Trios of 1797-98. These are utterly different from anything that had gone before. Even had LSD then been available (what a suggestion!) I simply cannot imagine Haydn on a trip producing anything like these works.

And then when you get to the Op 59 quartets just a very few years later in 1805-06 then, wow, we are in quite a different world. They are radically radically different from even the Op 18 quartets of 1798-1800.

I always think Beethoven is akin to the emergence of life itself. Into the melting pot put dollops of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and allow the sun to shine on them. It is fantastically improbable that anything resembling life will emerge from that primaeval goo. Likewise Beethoven in the history of music. From his immediate predecessors it is surely impossible to predict the emergence of anything like Beethoven's music. He surely stands head and shoulders above any other innovator in music, and delivered a huge shock from which it took several decades to adjust.

General brain-teaser to all: can you think of any other composer who so dramatically changed music in a period of less than 10 years (and Stockhausen doesn't count for he wasn't a composer!)?

Peter

[Mark Thomas]

I'm sure that Alan is correct in ascribing to Beethoven a genius absolutely unmatched in the development of the symphony. That he may have built on ideas which first surfaced in some raw form in the works of other composers, as John wonders, doesn't at all detract from Beethoven's achievement.

Moving on, arguably the only major symphonic innovator of the Beethoven era who springs to mind is John's own Louis Spohr. He was certainly regarded as Beethoven's great rival at the time. His persistent chromaticism was then a major departure and, although that particular idiosyncrasy wasn't as slavishly adopted by the next generation of symphonists, it did bear fruit in the later music of Wagner. Structurally, Spohr was extremely experimental in his symphonies: the two examples which occur straight away are his using two separate orchestras in the programmatic Symphony No.7 and composing a virtual symphonic poem, complete with cyclical themes and heavily programmatic content in his Symphony No.4. He also wrote lesser works for non-standard instrumental combinations, such as the String Quartet Concerto. Of course, because other elements of his style were much more "classical" than Beethoven's he sounds now much more old-fashioned than his contemporary and it's easy to forget just how novel his ideas were felt to be at the time. That most of them lead nowhere also obscures just how radical he was being. Clearly, though, he just wasn't in Beethoven's league.

[John H White]

Gentlemen, I was in no way trying to belittle Beethoven and his towering achievement. All I was asking was who were the lesser known contemporaries of Beethoven that  were working on similar lines and from whom Beethoven might have picked up ideas which he himself went on to perfect. I think this is a valid question for a forum devoted to unsung composers.
  By the way Mark, I think that Spohr's use of two orchestras in his 7th symphony is a throw back to an earlier period ( see John Marsh's Conversation Symphony of 1778). You are quite right about Spohr having no musical heirs but then that other great innovator, Berlioz, was also a one off.

[Josh]

One time, on another message board, someone asked who people thought the greatest symphonist of all time was, and I joked "Beethoven".  As someone heavily sunk into music of the late 18th century, it's always struck my ears that Beethoven's overall orchestration texture (?) in his earlier symphonies sounds very French-1790s.  For example, listen to the opening of Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion of 1784, or Cherubini as mentioned.  Cherubini surely has to be counted as French, at least as a composer.

As for the double orchestra stuff, J.C. Bach composed several double-orchestra symphonies and opera overtures, the most famous of which is probably the Symphony in E-Flat, Op.18#1.

[Alan Howe]

As for other composers who moved music on, I can only really think of Wagner in Tristan und Isolde, Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring and Schönberg in his Five Orchestral Pieces.

[Mark Thomas]

As my ignorance of both John Marsh and Johann Christian Bach is so profound as to be bottomless, I'm very happy to concede that poor old Spohr's Seventh Symphony is not the innovation I had thought it to be. Not that it really works, anyway....

[Gareth Vaughan]

I have heard John Marsh's "Conversation" Symphony, and a very pleasant, engaging piece it is, but it is a relatively small-scale work (a very polite conversation), not really like Spohr's Symphony No. 7. It is doubtful whether Spohr knew this symphony by John Marsh, though he might well have been inspired to employ the double orchestra effect by the J.C. Bach "symphonies" (which are not symphonies in the 19th century understanding of that term, of course), with which it is much more likely he would have been familiar.

[Jonathan]

I'd put in a vote for Liszt, if only for his influence on Wagner and his invention of the symphonic poem.  (Sorry, can't say any more, I have a terrible headache and need to get away from the laptop for a while)
In haste....

[Gareth Vaughan]

Liszt and Wagner are certainly the most significant influences on the development of Western music after Beethoven and before Schonberg.

[John H White]

But Gareth, neither Liszt nor Wagner were around in the opening years of the 19th Century, the period I was asking about.

[Hofrat]

Joachim Eggert was quite inovative in his symphonic composing.  As mentioned before, he scored three trombones in his E-flat symphony 18 months before Beethoven.  But what impressed me most about Eggert was his use of the fugue.  In the E-flat symphony, the whole finale is a fugue.  In the finale of the C-major, Eggert launchs a beautiful fugue from the recapitulation section of the movement, something I have not seen anywhere else.  But it is his C-minor symphony (that has yet to be performed in modern times) that he truly showed his stuff.  In the A-B-A slow movement, the whole B section is a massive fugue.  In the finale, the whole developement section is a fugue based on a snippet of one of the movement's themes

I doubt that Eggert had any influence on the music of continental Europe since he died so young and did not publish anything during his life time.  He was far ahead of his time and it is a pity that his music was not performed until now.           

[Gareth Vaughan]

So you were, John. Apologies. I would imagine that a very significant influence on Beethoven was Haydn, whose music we know he admired. I'm not sufficiently familiar with Haydn's large body of works to be able to point to anything that may have influenced Beethoven, but perhaps others can help here. We should never underestimate Haydn.