Talk:Symphony No. 9 (Schubert)

Nickname

Please could you elaborate on the how the meaning of the nickname has changed? An encyclopedia is no place for cute riddles.

I'm unable to help you directly, but if anyone can answer a little question of my own (any professional orchestral violinists will be able to help here) then this may serve to answer your own query.

I heard a snippet of commentary on Classic FM (the UK commercial classical music radio station) mentioning that a given symphony was micknamed "The 'C' Monster" by violinists because of the sheer physical effort involved in playing it. Unfortunately my attention was diverted before I could learn the identity of the composer and which of that composer's works had thus been nicknamed. However, given the sheer size of Schubert's No. 9 (the Coda alone is an immense 180 bars - more information here) and Robert Schumann's exclamation in a letter to his wife that he had found "a symphony of heavenly length" among Schubert's papers, this leads to the possibility that this work was originally nicknamed "The Great" upon account of the fact that it is a colossal piece of music, but "The Great" now refers to the fact that it is regarded as Schubert's crowning glory among his symphonies. In the meantime, could any violinists please tell me if this piece is indeed the one nicknamed "The 'C' Monster"? The size of this work would fit it nothing else, plus it is described in the web page link I gave earlier as containing passages for staccato violins, and I can imagine that maintaining continuous staccato violin playing for many bars would indeed require considerable physical effort! Calilasseia 05:37, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The name 'Great C major' is nothing more than a way of contrasting Schubert's 9th Symphony (in the modern numbering) from his 6th Symphony in the same key, which could then be referred to as the 'Little C Major'. The issue, then, is the fact that both works have the same home-key, NOT that the later symphony is 'long', 'colossal', 'a glorious masterwork', or exhausting to play.

Pf.

I am very late to this conversation, but I can confirm that this symphony is the one nicknamed "The 'C' Monster'". I am not a professional musician, but I am an amateur double bassist. Relatively early in my playing "career", one of my teachers gave me an excerpt from this symphony as an exercise on dotted rhythms - this symphony is full of 'em. She always referred to the symphony as the "great C monster."

As an additional reference, I give you this quote from a review of a concert featuring this symphony: "Not for nothing is Schubert’s Ninth Symphony sometimes nicknamed the Great C Monster. It is a huge work which does make life hard for its players by the sheer number of notes and its repeated figurations." Source: http://www.perthshireadvertiser.co.uk/lifestyle/arts-perthshire/2010/03/30/dundee-symphony-orchestra-at-caird-hall-73103-26132984/ Holy Tova (talk) 10:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Bernard Shore in "Sixteen Symphonies" refers to the huge demands made on the orchestra and particularly on the strings (being lead viola in the BBC SO, he was in a position to know). He actually said "this symphony should have a concert practically to itself and should certainly never be played at a Promenade concert, or in any circumstances precluding adequate rehearsal ... otherwise the last movement will inevitably fail through the sheer exhaustion of the orchestra, if the rest of the programme has made serious demands." This dates from a time (1950) when Promenade concerts were significantly longer and the BBC SO performed all of them, night after night continuously. Circumstances are now less onerous in this respect and of course the symphony has appeared regularly at the Proms for many years. Hyperman 42 (talk) 08:40, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Trombones in a Symphony

Beethoven most certainly can not be credited as the first composer to use trombones in a symphony. Just to cite one example I have in my own recording collection: Joachim Eggert's Symphony #3 in E-Flat, which predates Beethoven's first use of trombones in a symphony. Eggert's Symphony was also not the first to do so, it's just one moderately well-known example that easily dismisses this repeated false statement; it's also often cited because the trombones have a much more expanded role than they do in Beethoven's 5th Symphony, so not only were they used in a symphony prior to Beethoven's 5th, they were used more widely in a symphony before Beethoven's 5th. For the life of me, I absolutely cannot imagine why this tired old legend of Beethoven being the first to use trombones is repeated again and again. When will this die? He wasn't first to do this, he wasn't even close. I'm removing this false granting of credit; at least, it added nothing to the article and so should not be missed. But false statements have no place here. Of all the musical "urban legends", this one is the most baffling with regards to its unending refusal to die.

Broken links

In the References, the first three links are dead! If no one can fix them, I will remove them.66.67.24.71 (talk) 10:45, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

time signature of slow introduction

Despite what most scores show, Schubert's autograph has cut time, not common time. Double sharp (talk) 09:11, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

(P.S. Peters gets it right.) Double sharp (talk) 09:12, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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References for date, Gastein, etc

It would be useful to have some primary references for the broadly accepted view that this Symphony was composed in 1825 and can be identified with the "Gastein" symphony, as noted in the text. Existing references simply refer to "modern scholarship states", without sourcing that scholarship; they are brief articles or programme notes, and one link is broken. It seems likely that suitable material would be found in Newbould's book, for instance, given the details included in ref 7. Hyperman 42 (talk) 08:29, 23 May 2020 (UTC)