Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Not Quite What Was Intended

In email received from San Francisco Symphony:


5 comments:

Michael Walsh said...

They all look alike?

Lisa Hirsch said...

No. They don't.

Tod Brody said...

On a related subject, does anyone else think it weird to call this piece the "Great Symphony"? For most of my lifetime, and for long before that, it was the "Great C Major" symphony, which distinguished it from Schubert's #6, the "Little C Major". The adjective "Great" referred primarily to its length and secondarily to its majesty. "Great Symphony" a la "New World Symphony" or "Sea Symphony" sounds pretentious and wrong. I think Schubert would be appalled.

Lisa Hirsch said...

I'm with you, Tod: it's nuts. I also believe "Great C Major" is to distinguish it from the "Little C Major."

I did find that Schubert told someone in a letter that he was working on a "grosse sinfonie" (a grand or large symphony), but I'm sure he just meant big or long, not "Great Symphony," as it were.

Anonymous said...

The mangling of the Schubert work's nickname bothered me more than the wrong photo did.

In Schubert's day, "grosse Sinfonie" was a genre designation. It wasn't the proper name of a work any more than "grand opera" meant the name of the piece was "Grand".