Late conversions

[Ilja]

Hi all,

I was listening to Tomás Breton's Salamanca overture (1916) the other day, and struck by how different it was from his earlier work, particularly two of his symphonies that I'd heard (from the 1880s and 1890s). It reminded me of Gernsheim, whose Zu einem Drama (1915) is very different from his 19th-C symphonies: near-Straussian in form, albeit very individual in idiom. A comparable case from a different period is Joly Braga Santos who, after composing four very successful post-romantic but innovative symphonies, turned to a rather nasty form of post-modernist chromaticism. I wondered whether you could name more examples of successful composers who nonetheless decided to give a new twist to their output.

[albion]

A case in point is Frank Bridge (1879-1941) -



Following the success of works such as The Sea (1910-11) and Summer (1914-15), the traumatic experience of war and the disillusion of the 1920s brought about an abrupt shift in his style around the middle of the decade. Other composers found that jazz or neo-classicism gave them a new direction, but Bridge's outlook and language turned rather abruptly down a darker, more chromatic path.

There is very little hint of this in the Rhapsody Enter Spring (1926-27), but it is the String Quartet No.3 (1925-26) that really marks a sea-change in his music, from an essentially out-going impressionism to an introverted expressionism which embraced the Second Viennese School. Although his adoption of this new idiom sealed his unpopularity with the public, he produced at least two true masterpieces - Oration for Cello and Orchestra (1929-30) and Phantasm (1931) for Piano and Orchestra.

[eschiss1]

you don't find Bridge's 4th quartet (say) to be quite different from his 3rd in turn? you may have a point about the effect of trauma on Bridge's compositional output, and it is often emphasized how shaken to say the least he was as a pacifist and through the death and decimation of his friends by the Great War, even if I usually think it better to be very careful about psychologizing (overmuch...) composers' reasons for - this or that... it is true that there are the piano sonata (1925) (dedicated to the memory of Ernest Bristow Farrar (1885-1918)) and the Lament dedicated to a young girl who died on the Lusitania, for instance! (And ''There Grows A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook''...)

[dafrieze]

Krzysztof Penderecki's style underwent a fairly drastic change in the 1970's, in the reverse direction from what one might have expected.  Most of his works up until his first violin concerto were highly experimental; everything thereafter has been quite romantic in style (and usually pretty gloomy, I have to admit).

The American composer George Rochberg underwent a similar style change around the same period, triggered to some extent by the premature death of his son. 

[chill319]

Draeseke's Symphony 4 certainly inhabits a sound world different from much of his earlier work. Vaughan Williams' Symphony 4 likewise represents a remarkable stylistic evolution (not break!) for a 50-year-old. Then there are the many composers who adopted one form or another of serialism after WW2. I wonder if others think Janacek fits this pattern or not?