Symphonic Music Archives - Behind the Music

Mahler Rises to the Occasion with His Resurrection Symphony (No. 2)

May 4, 2026 by debisimons

You may think of this blog post as a smorgasbord of information about Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from which you can pick and choose what seems most relevant to you. Use the table of contents box above or just scroll through and see what catches your eye. The notes for each movement include a link to a corresponding podcast episode from a delightful series called “Embrace Everything.” These episodes are only about 40 minutes long and are packed with goodies. You’ll enjoy them and profit at the same time.

How Did Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” Become So Famous? (And How Did Barber Feel About Its Fame?)

March 13, 2021January 8, 2019 by debisimons

Samuel Barber, 1944, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, image accessed via Wikipedia.

Has the thought ever occurred to you that the author/composer/performer of a famous work has a life that’s totally separate from that work? It’s one of those obvious-but-overlooked kind of things. For example, I remember wondering about the life of Sir John Tavener back when my choir sang “The Lamb” for a Christmas concert. He had said about that piece, “‘The Lamb’ came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” The piece became extremely popular, so much so that there are probably many people who automatically associate Tavener with this piece when they hear his name, just as they associate Beethoven with “dah-dah-dah-DAH.” (Well, Beethoven’s Fifth may be a little more well known.) Or Handel with “The Hallelujah Chorus.” I was particularly struck with the Tavener story because he spent so little time actually writing the piece (if he’s telling the truth, and I assume he is). One afternoon’s effort changed his life, forever associating him with that piece.

Why Did Beethoven Put a Chorus In His Ninth Symphony?

December 11, 2020July 31, 2015 by debisimons

Short answer: We don’t know. Where does any creative artist get the idea for any of his creations?

So much for that. We’ll never know how the thought welled up in Beethoven’s mind that it would be a cool idea to have a choir march out at the end of the fourth movement. We do know, however, that he had been interested for some time in creating new forms of music. He had already created a hybrid piano concerto/choral work in his “Choral Fantasy,” a 20-minute piece whose words and music are very much a precursor to the Ninth; Beethoven himself said in a letter that the symphony was “a setting of the words of Schiller’s immortal ‘Lied an die Freude’ in the same way as my pianoforte fantasia with chorus, but on a far grander scale.”