BBC Four - Symphony Episode 3

I watched the third episode of this series on Friday evening, although I had seen the full series when it was originally aired. The third episode, "New Worlds and New Nations", looks at the draw of Vienna for composers, the works of Brahms, Wagner and Bruckner, as well as the nationalist composers of the late Romantic era, such as Dvorak, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky.

They look at Dvorak's 6th and 9th symphonies and how he utilised the musical cultures of the Czech Republic in the former and America in the latter. They particularly focused on the 3rd movement of the 6th symphony, where Dvorak uses a style of a Furiant (a Bohemian dance), and the 2nd movement of the 9th symphony where the melodic theme has been linked with Negro spirituals. I found this interesting to see how the composers got the inspirations for their large scale works. 

There was an interesting moment, whilst looking at Sibelius and his Finnish influences, where they mentioned the encounters between him and Gustav Mahler; how they would talk about symphonic form, but each composer had a different view of what it meant to them. Sibelius said he admired the severity and logic of the form and how it created connections between motifs, Mahler said the symphony should be like the world, it should embrace everything. 

The program briefly looked at Mahler, in particular his 3rd symphony and the ground breaking developments he made in orchestration and musical sound. They mentioned how he grew up around military marching bands and how he tried to re-create the sound of the "slightly out of tune" marching band; Mahler tries to create a very raw and biting tone to some of the passages. He also knows exactly how he wants pieces to sound, calling for oboes and horns to play with their bells in the air. They say in passing how Mahler was the Berlioz of his day for musical sound and orchestration. Having studied Berlioz's 'Symphonie Fantastique' at school I understand what they mean by this; both composers did some ground breaking things with their respective works.