摘錄自英國《衛報》的一篇討論交響樂曲的文章；和音樂同好分享。

作者額爾德爵士1947年出生，英國籍指揮家；現任英國曼徹斯特哈理交響樂團音樂總監。

The five symphonies that changed music

Ahead of a new four-part series exploring how the symphony has shaped our history and identity, Mark Elder choses the form's five key works

* Video: Simon Russell Beale introduces the BBC's new series
(Not Shown here, see the Guardian website)
Sir Mark Elder conducts for the BBC series The Symphony. Photograph: Mark Allan

Haydn, Symphony no. 22, 'The Philosopher' (1764) 海登
交響樂第22號《哲學家》

It's thanks to Haydn that the symphony became the place where a composer's grandest, most original, and most daring thoughts were to be found. His first symphonies are more like suites, the historical form out of which the symphony developed. They were composed in Esterhazy for the court where he worked. There is a quality of having his feet on the ground that gives all of his symphonies an incredible humanist breadth. He gave his first symphonies a new sense of humour and a new sense of pictorialism, and he also composed with a new virtuosity in his wind and brass parts, as well creating some astonishing excitement in the string writing. Haydn's 22nd Symphony, the so-called Philosopher – although nobody really knows why - is an extraordinary example of the range that he gave to the form. Nobody up to that time had thought of starting a symphony with a noble slow movement, as he does in this piece, nor had anybody ever thought of the extraordinary sound that the symphony begins with: a chorale played by two horns and two cor anglais against an incessant pattern of notes in the strings. It all gives this movement a strange, unexpected beauty. That spirit of adventure continues in the rest of the symphony's three movements. It's one of those pieces in which you feel the symphony as genre expanding into a forum for the expression of a composer's most profound thoughts.

Beethoven, Symphony no. 3, 'Eroica' (1804)
貝多芬交響樂第3號《英雄》

This is the piece that moves the symphony into new dimensions of length, structure, and meaning. It was originally conceived by Beethoven to honour the achievements of Napoleon, to celebrate what he saw as the quality of his leadership. But when Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven was disgusted and struck out the dedication. It now reads instead "to the memory of a great man". That's an essential ticket into the world of the Eroica. Where Beethoven's first two symphonies are full of the spirit of Haydn – albeit in a craggier and weightier form – in the 3rd, the idea of what the symphony can do takes a huge leap forward. The energy of each of the four movements is on a new scale of immediacy, power, and sheer length. The first movement is a huge essay in unstoppable musical momentum, the second is the apotheosis of the funeral march, the third is a demonic scherzo instead of a courtly minuet, and the fourth is an epic set of variations. It's fair to say that the Eroica is the first time that we meet the totally mature Beethoven, the composer who would go on and produce such an incredible string of symphonies, culminating in the 9th. The first movement is also a very good example of how our way of performing and thinking about Beethoven has changed over the last 30 years. Beethoven's own speeds for his symphonies are much faster than they were used to be played when I was growing up. But if you play it at Beethoven's markings, it's possible to make the music feel much more revolutionary in character, more biting in its rhythmic character. At that speed, the music goes off like an Exocet missile.

Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6, 'Pathétique' (1893)
柴可夫斯基交響樂第6號《悲愴》

I'm very fond of Tchaikovsky's last symphony. The aura that surrounds it is partly because the story of the piece is mixed up with rumours about his death, about whether he committed suicide in 1893. It's clear this work has an enormous amount of autobiographical resonance, but Tchaikovsky never revealed its true meaning. Through the symphony's unusual form and inspirational level of intensity it creates huge emotional force and dramatic narrative. Everything is alchemised by that expressive power into new musical solutions. The first movement feels like a fantasia, a nightmare of its own that could almost stand alone as a piece in its own right. The second movement is a lilting dance, with a considerably lighter emotional temperature, but it's in the symphony's final two movements that the power of Tchaikovsky's plan is fully realised. The third movement starts like a scherzo (輕快、輕鬆的樂章) but becomes more and more demonic until it feels like the arrival of some tempestuous army. And then there's the masterstroke of the final slow movement, in which Tchaikovsky's particular brand of melancholy builds to desperate levels of tragic feeling. That relationship between the third and fourth movements is the crucial moment in any performance of this piece. When I conducted it recently with the Hallé, I said to the orchestra we have to end the third movement in a way that makes the audience applaud, that makes them feel it's the end of the symphony. Because if you do that, the start of the final adagio is all the more shocking, emotionally and musically.

Mahler, Symphony no. 9 (1909-10)
馬勒交響樂第9號《悲愴》

There are connections between Tchaikovsky's last symphony and Mahler's own last completed symphony, his ninth: both have four movements, and both end with a great slow movement. But in Mahler, the scale is even greater, the emotional journey even more kaleidoscopic, and the connection with personal autobiography even more profound. Mahler knew when he composed this symphony that his life was not going to go on for much longer. It's often said that the character of the last movement, a 25-minute adagio, is about the acceptance and the inevitability of death. That may be part of what this movement expresses, but for me, it says something yet more touchingly poignant. I feel that it's an elegy for his dead daughter. His wife, Alma, had already thought that Mahler had tempted fate when he set poems on death of children by Rückert, a song-cycle called Kindertotenlieder. But when, years later, he lost one of his daughters, he was stricken with guilt. Alma had been proven right. And in this last movement of the ninth symphony, I sense music of mourning in the long, broad string lines, and also in the contrasting music of utter emptiness, the lowest bassoon put against the highest flute line, that expresses the emotional emptiness he must have felt without his daughter. That connection with his lost child is immeasurably heightened on the last page of the symphony, when there's an unmistakable quotation from one of the Kindertotenlieder songs, the one that speaks of the children passing on to great heights. The music dissolves into quiet at the end of the symphony, but I sensed at the very end of it when I conducted it last year a feeling of resolution, of acceptance. Of course, it is possible to hear this symphony without knowing anything of this biography – to hear it as "pure music" - but knowledge of what the composer was going through can reveal the inspiration behind the achievement. I find the combination of life and music an incredibly strong emotional experience in this symphony.

Shostakovich, Symphony no. 7, 'Leningrad' (1941)
夏斯塔卡維奇交響樂第7號《列寧格勒》

The circumstances of the wartime performances of Shostakovich's seventh Symphony may be the most dramatic of any symphony, ever. Sent round the world on microfilm, the score was premiered in the US and the UK as well as in Russia, before a performance in the besieged city of Leningrad from what remained of the orchestra there. That has embedded the work in every musician's imagination as one inspired by the conflict between the Russians and the Nazis. But it's actually much more than that. We now know that an enormous amount of the piece was written before the war started, and that the emotional journey through the four huge movements is just as much about a response to life under Stalin as it is about the horrors of war. In the middle of the first movement, there's an incessant drumming that begins quietly but gets louder and louder until the whole orchestra, topped by an additional brass band, bursts out in macabre fury. It's a portrayal of any malevolent arrival, not just the Nazis in Leningrad. On some level, to me, the work is a hymn not just to the inner strength of its creator, but the strength of all people living under the yoke of totalitarian suppression. At the very end of the symphony, the elegy that forms much of the last movement seems superficially to climax in victory, but as Shostakovich always said, those who listen properly would understand that there is no real victory. Until the last note, it's as if the fate of the Russian people is crying out to be heard. The melody the symphony sings carries right through to the end, with the tears pouring down the faces of the entire nation. No symphony mattered as much to a people, to a cause, as the Leningrad Symphony, and no symphony may ever again carry the same gigantic emotional and political power.

* The BBC's four-part Symphony series, presented by Simon Russell Beale, begins tonight on BBC4. Radio 3 features a range of complementary programming, and from 4 November - 2 December will be broadcasting over 60 symphonies. Mark Elder was talking to Tom Service.

See also: Tom Service's picks