Elements in Classical Music

The written score of a symphony defines the identity of the symphony, and it sets the boundaries as to where the symphony will go and how the story will unfold. An orchestra is the medium through which the written score of a particular symphony can be shown to the audience. To some extent, the characteristics of a particular symphony, including the timbre, the tempo, the dynamics, the development, the intensity, and the place of the accent, are largely determined by how the performers in an orchestra and the conductor of the orchestra interpret the written scores and how they are going to present the work to the audience. This is inevitable due to symphony’s nature: after all, a symphony is just an acoustic event, which is a form of art, and it is not unusual that different people will have different interpretation of an artwork. Therefore, there is no correct answer to which interpretation is better because the interpretation of an artwork is subjective and people may get different insights from different performances.

We have listened to four different versions of the third movement of Haydn S104, people can clearly tell the differences between the four. The one conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler was performed in 1950; people could tell that this performance was very bright and cheerful. Since it was performed only a few years after the World War II, it tried to depict a picture that showed people were sanguine and people were working together to rebuild their new home. It was very danceable, and it used many pauses to gradually build up the tension and finally reached the climax. At that time, the recording technology was not so developed; therefore people could still here the noise from the recording and the sound were not so clear making it sound more like a old recording. Unlike the one conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler, the ones conducted by Georg Solti and Adam Fischer in 1985 and 1989,

respectively, sounded much smoother and the melodies were slower...