Schubert 9 and all the repeats

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm all for the repeats in the Schubert 9 - except for the exposition repeat in the last movement. It sounds contrived and unconvincing, not a natural repeat at all, and as a result the movement can just outstay its welcome. The VPO/Solti and Orchestra Mozart/Abbado are both very fine but they would be even finer without that finale repeat.

In my view, its inclusion is a mistake.

I would go further and say that any development + recapitulation repeat is a bad idea, being structurally unsound.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

any development + recapitulation repeat is a bad idea, being structurally unsound.

Remarkable, then, that Movements by Mozart and Haydn that use this "structurally unsound" device sound structurally better when the performers play them.

[jayne lee wilson]

I would go further and say that any development + recapitulation repeat is a bad idea, being structurally unsound.

I've come across this second-half, 1st movement repeat more often in the recent Haydn Symphony series from Thomas Fey and Antonini's Haydn 2032...
(In)famously or not, depending on your response to the readings themselves, they result in most of the first movements of Harnoncourt's 2005 VCM set of Haydn's Paris Symphonies extending to over 12 minutes! (Average elsewhere: 6'-8')
IIRC, Trevor Pinnock observed many of them in his Mozart Symphony recordings too.

They certainly give a usefully defamiliarising jolt to your attention first time round, whizzed back instantly to the start of the development just as you expected a boisterous coda or conclusion. But on repeated listening.... hmm. Moments of excitement or surprise (lead-back, recap, coda) tend to be...overfamiliarised.
So I can't decide if I like it or not. You may get really caught up in it as the musical satellites swing around the orbit of the sonata once more; but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, even if - or especially if - you enjoy the given recording.

[cloughie]

Remarkable, then, that Movements by Mozart and Haydn that use this "structurally unsound" device sound structurally better when the performers play them.

I do like my late Mozart symphonies long and I can take them big band, chamber orch or hipp band. Just do them!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I do like my late Mozart symphonies long and I can take them big band, chamber orch or hipp band. Just do them!

- and it was iconic HIPPster Leonard Bernstein, with Period Ensemble the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, who first revealed for me the whoop-of-joy thrill of trusting Mozart's judgement in writing the Development/Recap repeat in his last Symphonies. I feel very short-changed these days if performers think that they know better.

[EdgeleyRob]

If a composer indicates that passages are to be repeated why isn't that instruction adhered to without question ?

[pastoralguy]

If a composer indicates that passages are to be repeated why isn't that instruction adhered to without question ?

I suppose one reason could be the length of concerts. Doing ALL the repeats could run into overtime. I suspect the habit of not taking repeats on recordings could make Symphonies spill over to two Lps. (Or CDs).

Mutiny amongst musicians in a work such as Schubert 9!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If a composer indicates that passages are to be repeated why isn't that instruction adhered to without question ?

Some conductors (and they include many of my - otherwise - favourites) covered up their casual disregard for the score by pretending that the composers were "simply following outdated habits" or somesuch feeble excuses. Yer - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - so typical of them to "simply follow outdated habits": there y'go Ludwig - completely overturn so many traditional procedures in the Eroica, but ... ooops! ... he's gorn and put those repeat dots in out of careless habit: must've had too much ink left on the quill and didn't want it to go waste.

[Bryn]

Some conductors (and they include many of my - otherwise - favourites) covered up their casual disregard for the score by pretending that the composers were "simply following outdated habits" or somesuch feeble excuses. Yer - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - so typical of them to "simply follow outdated habits": there y'go Ludwig - completely overturn so many traditional procedures in the Eroica, but ... ooops! ... he's gorn and put those repeat dots in out of careless habit: must've had too much ink left on the quill and didn't want it to go waste.

I think the standard argument goes, "Today we have recordings galore, but in the classical era one only got the hear a work once, or if very lucky, twice, so the repeats helped to get the musical narrative across. No need for such devices any more".

[Pabmusic]

If a composer indicates that passages are to be repeated why isn't that instruction adhered to without question ?

Several reasons, ER. In general, if it's there, play it. But:

There really were composers who didn't think it through, and wrote repeats from convention. I'm not so sure we should treat those as sacrosanct, if there are good reasons not to play them. The last mvt of Beethoven 5 begins with a blaze of C major after the long mysterious build-up, and LvB introdces unexpected instruments: contrabassoon, piccolo & troms. And then we're supposed to hear that surprise again a few minutes later? It's an anticlimax the second time.

There are examples the opposite way round. Dvorak wrote no exposition repeats in the 7th & 8th syphonies, but has one in the 9th. That says he thought about it carefully, and it should never be omitted. Likewise, omit the exposition repeat in the Mendelssohn Italian and you lose 30-or-so bars of music that occur nowhere else.

On the other hand, Mozart cut out the repeats he'd written in (?) the Haffner symphony, yet they are sometimes restored today!

And what did the composer write anyway? Perhaps we don't have the original score. There are examples of early publishers adding or omitting repeats. Does that suggest the compser had second thoughts? Or was the publisher high-handed? And what if it's an edition edited by - say - Brahms (not over- fond of symphonic repeats)? That is the situation with the Breitkopf Schubert, of course.

I could waffle on for ages about repeats, but I agree rhat the starting point is that you play what's written.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The composer writes the recipe. The conductor makes the meal. On the face of it, if the composer says "repeat this section", then the conductor should do so. But it may not be as simple as that. The question is "Why did the composer insert these repeat makings?"

Tracing the development of sonata form movements, leads us back to binary form dances, including the minuet. Each of the two sections in a minuet is repeated, with second section generally consisting of a few bars of something slightly different, before a return to the feeling (if not the exact material) of the opening. Later minuets became more ternary than binary in structure, and this hints at a development section and recapitulation. In the mid-18th century, as sonata form developed, the repeats generally remained. Sometimes composers dropped the second half repeat, and occasionally dropped the exposition repeat too. The decision often seems fairly random, which suggests to me that composers may possibly have taken into account the amount of time that was needed to fill a programme.

The effect of repeats in sonata form movements can be quite jarring.
1st subject in tonic key - carefully constructed transition passage to move subtly to a nearly related key for the second subject; second subject key consolidated by short codetta.
Suddenly, the deja-vu button is pressed and all the careful work of that transition passage is negated by a couple of 2vertical lines and 2 small dots. It's a far bigger wake-up call than that loud chord in Haydn 94. And we go through the process all over again.
But on arrival pf the development section, there is no jarring. Modulations are carefully thought out (as in the exposition's transition).
The end of the development section generally takes us back to the tonic key for the recapitulation, but the transition passage is modified to ensure the second subject is basically in the tonic key too. We have achieved tonal stability.
Well, perhaps not. Right at the end of the movement, we expect a double barline to tell us to stop playing, but, hey, there are two tiny disruptive dots too, acting like grabbing claws, hurling us directly and aggressively into completely the wrong key. Weren't we listening to the development section the first time?

So composers wisely began dropping the second-half repeat, and wrote lead-in passages to minimise the clumsy exposition repeat effect. Over time, the exposition repeat became rarer, so perhaps conductors then picked up on this idea and saw the benefits of not always including them inn longer movements.

[jayne lee wilson]

Some conductors (and they include many of my - otherwise - favourites) covered up their casual disregard for the score by pretending that the composers were "simply following outdated habits" or somesuch feeble excuses. Yer - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - so typical of them to "simply follow outdated habits": there y'go Ludwig - completely overturn so many traditional procedures in the Eroica, but ... ooops! ... he's gorn and put those repeat dots in out of careless habit: must've had too much ink left on the quill and didn't want it to go waste.

Here's Bernard Shore, the BBCSO's principal violist at the time, on Toscanini rehearsing the Beethoven 6th for a 1937 concert: "For once, Toscanini is undecided: "I don't know, I have always da capo until now, but I think I may be wrong. For the balance of the movement perhaps it is best that we make it. Yes, we will go back!" "

I've been listening intensively to Toscanini's various live Beethoven performances; in the marvellous 1939 NBC live cycle he observes exposition repeats in all but the 3rd and the 7th. In other performances, sometimes he observes the exposition repeat, sometimes not; evidently on the intuitive artistic basis of what felt right - in that hall, with that orchestra, on that occasion, at the time. To imagine that the remarkably inspired, so precise and impassioned, faithful-to-the-spirit musical results evidenced by these recordings were down to any kind of "casual disregard" about the score is a travesty, a misrepresentation. The same would also go for Willem Mengelberg, whose very different Beethoven interpretations again sometimes observe exposition repeats, sometimes not; the warmth and precision within a grandly Romantic approach of say, the Concertgebouw's articulation and phrasing in the live 1940 cycle is certainly nothing to do with casual disregard on the conductor's part.
And I'm intrigued to learn that Bernstein observes second-half repeats in his late Vienna Mozart recordings; he doesn't do this in his 1960s NYPO Haydn Paris set, I would imagine for similarly sound artistic reasons of his own.


So it seems to me that these (and many other ) conductors self-evidently agonised over the issue; probably never came to any final decision about it; and that feels right, to me at least: the most honest conclusion - or rather, vacillation - any given performer could reach: Trust the Force...

Just because we've become used to exposition (and sometimes second-half) repeats being observed in many HIPPs classical recordings and performances doesn't make them intrinsically superior on the level of artistic achievement: the musical and inspirational impact upon the listener comes from what they do, creatively, with the instructions constituting a score, not their fidelity to the letter of it.

**
As this debate has occurred in the context of Schubert's Great C Major, what about that final-chord diminuendo? Should performers always faithfully observe that?

[Richard Barrett]

There really were composers who didn't think it through

The problem as I see it is that if a performer thinks they can improve on a composer's work by cutting out repeats, why stop there? Why think (presumably something like): this composer got everything exactly right - apart from the repeat marks? Of course, performers are free to do anything they want. But if a performer is at odds with what a composer wrote (assuming it's known what that is) they might perhaps play something else instead.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Worth a read.

http://www.dersnah-fee.com/Essays%20and%20Educational%20Material/GF%20Repeat%20Signs.pdf

[Bryn]

Even(?) among HIPPsters there are leading lights who show themselves equivocal re. this matter. Check out the different approaches to repeats in Beethoven symphonies between La Chambre Philharmonique/Krivine's YouTube and CD recordings (the latter compiled from performances in various venues, as many as three in the case of the 9th).