and finally...

[Richard Barrett]

I just mentioned on the Strauss Horn Concerto thread that I found this piece (and its partner on the Karajan LP, the Oboe Concerto) was somewhat let down by its finale, and then started thinking that this was actually true to a greater or lesser degree of many multi-movement works. If not most? Compositions whose final movements do in my view take the work to a different and deeper level might include Mozart 41, Beethoven 5, Bruckner 5, Mahler 9, Shostakovich 4, Martinu 3, RVW 6, probably not so many concertos. What do you think?

[Dave2002]

in my view take the work to a different and deeper level might include Mozart 41, Beethoven 5, Bruckner 5, Mahler 9, Shostakovich 4, Martinu 3, RVW 6, probably not so many concertos. What do you think?

I think that is quite a common complaint by some people.

Works which I think have a worthwhile finale (for various reasons) include:

Elgar: Symphony 1, Mozart 40 (to add to your 41), Tchaikovsky 6, and probably Brahms 4 - though actually I like the final movements of all the Brahms symphonies, Mahler 1 and 2, and the very end of Mahler 8, and maybe Sibelius 2 and Rachmaninov 2. There's also Das Lied von der Erde if you count that.

Depends how one is judging these I expect.

[Serial_Apologist]

To be quite honest I don't know. Personally I find that while multiple movement works that move me most are those in which the finale does most satisfactorily round the work off, I can think of few that I have to finish my listening before the ending. Admittedly the conclusion of one of my favourite composer's symphonies, that of Honegger 5, always leaves me feeling deflated, with all its positivity suddenly deflating like a punctured balloon following that preceding wonderful life-enhancing build-up. Walton always admitted experiencing the greatest difficulty in knowing how to conclude a symphony, and to my ears this holds true in both of his.

[jayne lee wilson]

I just mentioned on the Strauss Horn Concerto thread that I found this piece (and its partner on the Karajan LP, the Oboe Concerto) was somewhat let down by its finale, and then started thinking that this was actually true to a greater or lesser degree of many multi-movement works. If not most? Compositions whose final movements do in my view take the work to a different and deeper level might include Mozart 41, Beethoven 5, Bruckner 5, Mahler 9, Shostakovich 4, Martinu 3, RVW 6, probably not so many concertos. What do you think?

Ah, "The Finale Problem"........a few brief thoughts....
First: listen to Haydn for a lesson on how to make the finale (almost always) make fresh, inventive and perfectly apt sense. Often, they do not so much add or deepen as resolve or release.

Huge and complex question but to take Bruckner, I find the finales of 1,2,5,6 and 7 perfectly achieved and complementary to the foregoing. Sometimes fiercer, sometimes lighter, often more compact, they all offer unique and tautly structured conclusions to the build up of emotional energy and varying moods that went before.
In 3, 4 and 8, he was attempting larger and more complex multi-themed structures, based on tonal plateaux, challenges of one key or tonal centre to another, that in a questing spirit of exploration were perhaps never quite "finished".....

But that doesn't mean you could do without them. Perhaps especially if you feel them to be "open-ended", that is a far more worthwhile, mind stretching experience than something neater or rounded-off into an aftertaste of emotional complacency.
The Beethoven 9th finale has often led to fierce disagreement. Why? Probably because it asks so much, breaks startling and ferocious new ground after the already epic challenges, structural and emotional, of the preceding. It's all too much!

Maybe great works should leave us with a few unanswered questions... Why not?

Classical Finales, from Haydn to Shostakovich are often either lighter, or a fierce release of that nervous energy built up from earlier, more intense exploration and expression. But they often undercut that sense of release with complexity, darker feelings either just below the surface or explicit. Mahler 7 is a great example of how a vast and fantastical complexity, musical and emotional, is resolved into an exhilarating and cathartic letting-go - in the simpler rondo form. The brightly illuminated party after the nightmares and the ghosts and dreams of love...
Ask yourself - why did it often come in for such critical faultfinding and insult?

A Classical finale often feels to me like this: well, we had a go, we did the hard work, but to hell with it! Let it go! Let's enjoy ourselves and live to fight another day!
But if it undercuts or undermines this.... no wonder it can seem more challenging and possibly more memorable. "Different and deeper", yes but - against that background of expectation.

Return to Start: consider how the classical symphonic form evolved into those three or four movements (why 3 in a concerto, 4 in a symphony?), and what that balance of mood and structure was "about"....see Haydn again, Godfather of all Classical Questions (and many answers..)

[kernelbogey]

What an interesting topic: thank you Richard.

Off the top of my head after about two minutes' reflection, the following satisfy:

LvB 3 (always reminds me of playing it in my head walking over Bodmin Moor on a school trip, aged about 16!)
Schubert 9 - that theme coming back!!
Bruckner 7 & 8
Sibeliius 2
Tchaikowsky 4 & 5
I'm suddenly also remembering one of Antony Hopkins's Talking about Music programmes on Dvorak 9; he says that what follows the introduction to iv doesn't fit, and on the piano he offers a jolly polka-like romp!

[cloughie]

Walton 1
Borodin 2
Tchaik Manfred
Schumann 2
Mendelssohn 3

[Dave2002]

I'm suddenly also remembering one of Antony Hopkins's Talking about Music programmes on Dvorak 9; he says that what follows the introduction to iv doesn't fit, and on the piano he offers a jolly polka-like romp!

I missed that one - I think the final ending of Dvorak 9, like Bruckner 7, is splendid, though in the case of the Dvorak piece there is some less serious stuff before the end.

[Nick Armstrong]

Walton 1

Yes, wasn’t the final movement a bit of an afterthought? I seem to remember it was premièred with just the first three movements, as WW was having trouble finishing it. I love the last movement though!

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes, wasn’t the final movement a bit of an afterthought? I seem to remember it was premièred with just the first three movements, as WW was having trouble finishing it. I love the last movement though!

[rauschwerk]

The finale of Stanford's violin Concerto doesn't really fulfil the promise of the first two superb movements. Stanford follows Brahms in writing a piece with folk influenced themes but perhaps they are not strong enough to make a convincing conclusion. Even so, this is a very fine concerto.

[Pulcinella]

There's quite a tale about the finale of Barber's Violin concerto, with the (somewhat conflicting) details here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Barber)

[Richard Barrett]

if you feel them to be "open-ended", that is a far more worthwhile, mind stretching experience than something neater or rounded-off into an aftertaste of emotional complacency.
The Beethoven 9th finale has often led to fierce disagreement. Why? Probably because it asks so much, breaks startling and ferocious new ground after the already epic challenges, structural and emotional, of the preceding. It's all too much!

Maybe great works should leave us with a few unanswered questions... Why not?

Leaving unanswered questions is indeed one example of "taking the work to a different and deeper level" as per the opening post. As for the problematical nature of Beethoven 9, for me it's not problematic in having a huge finale that adds a choir and vocal soloists, but in the cheesy text it uses. I can imagine that this might be explained in terms of transcending some indifferent material, as in Diabelli's theme, but it's never convinced me really.

Of course Haydn subverted expectations in all kinds of ways in his final movements: all the fugues in op.20, the false endings in op.33/2 and Symphony no.60, not to mention the industrial action at the end of no.45. I think the "finale problem" has to do with a certain glibness in cancelling out whatever psychological depths previous movements might have reached. Schubert is aware of this but expresses it more clearly in piano sonatas and String Quintet than in his symphonies. I singled out Bruckner 5 as one in which the finale reaches out into areas beyond those explored by previous movements, but indeed every Bruckner finale does this to a greater or lesser extent (including, one might say, in the non-existence (impossibility?) of the 9th's finale - how transcendent is that?), and so do all of Mahler's, even no.7 as far as I'm concerned.

[jayne lee wilson]

I think Schubert was very aware of charging a symphonic finale with meaning, most obviously in the 4th, which takes up the intensity of the 1st Movement as if it were an extended variation upon it, then flips everything over into the major for the coda! (Cf Mozart k420 Piano Concerto).
Extraordinary. But there’s also the eruption of darker energies in the central episode of the 2nd, and those strange diminuendi at the end of 3 and 9…

If, as I do, you accept a 4-movement 8th consider the finale there (the Rosamunde entr’acte): once again, dark and intense, constantly turning in and back on itself like a recurring dream. Necessarily simpler structurally than first movement, but an almost shocking ending to a very original work. Not easy for many listeners to accept.

This is why I described Schubert’s music as cyclothymic recently; so often an inescapable restlessness about it… a tonal bipolarity.
Yet if you take a largely tragic work like D894, would it really be a better work with a finale which "went deeper" into musical and emotional complexity? Isn't the contrast a very necessary one, the essential "Classical Balance" without which such works may become too relentless and exhausting, defeating the mind's attempt to grasp the larger picture? Those lighter, shorter, quicker sections offer a release from and a frame for the earlier explorations, a clearer overview of what we came through; throwing meanings into relief.

So I think it inevitable that the more complex and exploratory finales are always going to be exceptions.

[Richard Barrett]

If, as I do, you accept a 4-movement 8th consider the finale there (the Rosamunde entr’acte)

Yes I do and that's a good example, from a symphony which is exceptional in many ways, even just the two canonical movements. Elsewhere Schubert was of course very concerned with a concept of "classical balance" which is one of the formal/expressive areas in which he didn't go as far as Beethoven, particularly in terms of the latter breaking out of received forms in many of his late quartets and sonatas, op.130/133 or op.111 being obvious examples. Schubert might have got there eventually if he had lived long enough.

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes I do and that's a good example, from a symphony which is exceptional in many ways, even just the two canonical movements. Elsewhere Schubert was of course very concerned with a concept of "classical balance" which is one of the formal/expressive areas in which he didn't go as far as Beethoven, particularly in terms of the latter breaking out of received forms in many of his late quartets and sonatas, op.130/133 or op.111 being obvious examples. Schubert might have got there eventually if he had lived long enough.

Opus 130 is very interesting. In a lengthy series of talks on it, I recall Hans Keller suggesting that Beethoven may have found the Grosse Fuge too shockingly, too obviously, a contrast to the gentler, more tender and exhilarating earlier movements; so wrote, or agreed to write, the alternative allegro, a much lighter dance which still, for me feels right: a string quartet against the background of the Baroque Dance Suite. But with the fugue....watch out, it's coming to get you! A monster of a piece "contemporary for ever" as Stravinsky put it, but..... I find the work coheres better with the shorter dance-finale; it just seems to belong there.

We're lucky to have both. But the finale question is encapsulated in this single example.
Robert Simpson** said we should play all 7 movements....! But in which order, d'you think?

(**Didn't he contribute an essay on "the finale problem" to an early Penguin or Pelican Guide to The Symphony? At least, I recall someone doing so......)