Five Women Composers Who Studied at the Paris Conservatoire

by Emily E. Hogstad  September 20th, 2026

The Paris Conservatoire was founded in 1795 after the French Revolution. Since then, many of classical music’s greatest figures have passed through its doors.

Initially, women weren’t allowed to benefit from the Conservatoire’s rigorous education. In fact, women weren’t admitted outside vocal classes until 1849, when French violin prodigy Camilla Urso broke that glass ceiling at the age of nine.

Urso proved to the institution that women could be extraordinary students, and hundreds of women followed in her footsteps.

Today we’re looking at five largely forgotten women composers who studied at the Paris Conservatoire.

Grace Becker Vamos

Grace Vamos

Fontainebleau Suite  

Grace Becker was born in 1898 in California to a violinist father and pianist mother. The musical couple had a spare cello that Grace started playing as a child.

As a young woman, she studied at the Paris Conservatoire and the Fontainebleau School of Music.

In 1937, she moved to Hungary to study with composer Zoltán Kodály, then returned to America when World War II broke out in the summer of 1939.

She spent most of the rest of her career in California, interspersed with frequent visits to Mexico.

Her piano concerto was the first orchestral piece ever written by a woman to be performed in California.

In addition to composing, she also founded a trio called the Trio Moderne, an all-woman ensemble featuring Becker Vamos, flautist Christine Howells Pfund, and harpist Marie Hughes Marguarrie.

In 1946, she married Ernest Vamos, a dentist and an amateur cellist. They never had any children. Instead, she focused on her career, teaching countless students and endowing multiple scholarships and competitions.

Today, the scores of Grace Becker Vamos’s works are available through Vamos Publishing.

Koharik Alis Gazarossian

Koharik Alis Gazarossian

Koharik Alis Gazarossian was born to Armenian parents in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) in 1907.

As a child, she took piano lessons from a former student of Franz Liszt.

In 1926, at nineteen, she moved to Paris and began studying at the Conservatoire.

Her piano teacher was Lazare Lévy, whose other pupils included John Cage, Clara Haskil, and Monique Haas.

She also studied composition with Paul Dukas, composer of the tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Her own work often drew upon Armenian folk influences. Among her fans was fellow Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian.

Her set of 24 Etudes, finished in 1958, covered the twelve major and minor keys. Each one is dedicated to a friend or pupil. Listeners can hear influences of pianists like Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev.

These works were recorded in 2022 by Armenian pianist Naré Karoyan.

Jeanne Demessieux

Jeanne Demessieux      In 1933, at twelve, she began studying at the Paris Conservatoire. Three years later, she began studying organ with Marcel Dupré. The organ soon became her primary instrument.

In 1941, at the age of twenty, she earned a first prize in organ performance and improvisation at the Conservatoire.

In 1947, she became the first female concert organist to sign a record deal.

She was especially famous for her memory. Apparently, she memorised 2,500 pieces over her career, including the entire organ output of J.S. Bach.

She was also a composer, writing works for solo organ, piano, and vocal music.

She died in November 1968 of throat cancer. She was only 47 years old.

Sylvia Soublette

Sylvia Soublette

Pequeña Suite para Violín y Piano   

Sylvia Soublette was born in 1924 in Viña del Mar, Chile. Music ran in the family: both of her parents were musical, and her paternal grandmother was a composer.

In 1941, as a teenager in college, she founded the Coro Femenino Viña del Mar (the Viña del Mar Women’s Choir). She also began composing.

In 1951, she earned a scholarship from the French government to study at the Paris Conservatoire. While there, she studied under Milhaud and Messiaen.

After her studies in Paris, she returned to Chile. In 1960, she founded the Ancient Music Ensemble and led it until the 1973 military coup.

She married politician Gabriel Valdés in 1945, and he served as Chile’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1964 to 1970. After Pinochet came to power, Valdés, Soublette, and their four children travelled to the United States and Venezuela.

The family returned to Chile in 1981, and Soublette resumed her musical career there.

In 1991, she founded the Santiago Music Institute and toured internationally.

Toward the end of her long life, she said, “I am a composer, but from another time. Not from the 21st century, but from the 20th century. However, at this point, what I feel most like is an educator.”

She died in January 2020 at the age of 95.

Édith Canat de Chizy

Édith Canat de Chizy

Édith Canat de Chizy was born in Lyon, France, in 1950.

As a college student, she studied at the Sorbonne and the Paris Conservatoire. She won half a dozen first prizes in analysis, composition, counterpoint, fugue, harmony, and orchestration.

In 2006, she began teaching at the Regional Conservatory of Paris. She has published over a hundred opus numbers’ worth of music.

In 2005, she became the first female composer to be elected to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts.

The violin is her main instrument. Here’s her fourth quartet, “En noir et or” (In black and gold).

A Debut of Note: Himari

 by Maureen Buja  October 7th, 2026

The young Japanese violinist Himari (b. 2011 as Himari Yoshimura) made her American concert debut with Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor with the Santa Fe Symphony in 2023, aged 11, and then made her European debut with the work in 2025, age 13. That debut with the Berlin Philharmonic is captured on her debut recording on Decca Classics, appropriately called Debut.

Himari © himari-info.com

Himari started her violin study at age 3, working with Koichiro Harada and Machie Oguri. She made her debut with a professional orchestra at age 6, and at age 11 she was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied with Ida Kavafian. At age 13, she signed an exclusive contract with Decca Classics, becoming the label’s youngest female artist.

In competition, Himari has been awarded grand prizes at the Arthur Grumiaux Competition in Belgium (2019) and the International Competition for Young Violinists in Honour of Karol Lipinski and Henryk Wieniawski, Lublin, Poland (2021), as well as the 26th Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition in Italy and the Kogan International Violin Competition in Belgium. She plays the 1717 ‘Hamma’ Stradivari on loan from Mr Yusaku Maezawa. Her bow is on loan from the Munetsugu Collection.

Henryk Wieniawski (1835–1880) wrote his first violin concerto in 1851 while on tour in Russia with his brother. After returning to give concerts in Leipzig, Paris, and London, he returned to Russia in 1860 at the invitation of Anton Rubinstein. He spent the next 12 years there, variously as solo violinist to the Tsar, leader of the opera Orchestra, and professor of violin at Rubinstein’s conservatory. When he returned to his touring career in 1872, he extended his travels to North America with Rubinstein. When he returned to Europe in 1875, he was appointed professor of violin at the Brussels Conservatory. His health was increasingly frail, and he had to leave the stage during a performance of his Violin Concerto No. 2 in Berlin. Joseph Joachim was in the audience and took his place on stage, replacing the concerto with a performance of the Bach Chaconne on Wieniawski’s violin. Despite this setback, Wieniawski continued his tour out of financial need, but he was often forced to leave the stage, unable to perform. Wieniawski died on 31 March 1880 in the house of Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Nadezhda von Meck.

In the first movement, after a first subject in the clarinet and a more lyrical second subject, the violin enters in a technically demanding solo entry in 10ths. The first subject follows, played only on the G string. The rest of the movement includes a brief cadenza, followed by a lyrical passage that gives the violinist a chance to display technique, complete with triple-stopped chords and difficult but dazzling arpeggios. The final coda brings back the first subject.

Henryk Wieniawski: Violin Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor, Op. 14 – I. Allegro moderato

Himari plays with authority and assurance, and even her own teacher remarks on her maturity: ‘If you’re listening to Himari and you close your eyes, you wouldn’t realise her age. Inside Himari, there is an older person and a wise musician… she’s immensely talented.’

After this brilliant orchestra debut, Himari fills the rest of the album with recital material of the highest quality, including Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne No. 16 in E-Flat Major, Op. 55, No. 2 (transcribed by Jascha Heifetz); Leopold Godowsky’s Triakontameron: XI. Alt Wien (transcribed by Jascha Heifetz); Jean Sibelius’ Mazurka, Op. 81, No. 1; and Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C sharp minor (transcribed by Nathan Milstein). These are works by the virtuosos of their day, and even Sibelius’ Mazurka is technically demanding, with a cadenza-like opening, double stopping, and huge leaps in the melodic line, requiring a virtuoso hand.

With its mix of orchestral and recital material, Himari’s debut recording gives us an exceptional view of her skills. Sometimes, as happens on live recordings, her leaps may fall a hair short, but that’s the excitement of live performance. In the piano and violin works, where Chelsea Wang, who made her own orchestral debut at age 6, ably accompanies her, we have a more traditional format. Still, again, Himari’s choice of works distinguishes her. In Wieniawski’s Faust Fantasia, she has the vision to create a coherent storyline amid all the virtuoso fireworks.

Himari: Debut (Wieniawski, Chopin, Sibelius, and Godowsky)

Himari, violin; Berlin Philharmonic with Sebastian Weigle, conductor; Chelsea Wang, piano
Decca Classics 00028948722099

Why We Don’t Hear Them: Tim van Beveren on Women Composers and DORA

 by Fanny Po Sim Head  October 9th, 2026

Filmmaker and journalist Tim van Beveren’s documentaries Women Composers and DORA – Escape into Music explore the lives and music of composers whose work has largely disappeared from the standard classical repertoire. Made in collaboration with pianist Kyra Steckeweh, the films focus on composers including Fanny Hensel, Emilie Mayer, Mel Bonis, Lili Boulanger, and Dora Pejačević. The films have also received international recognition, with Women Composers winning several documentary awards and the 2020 Opus Klassik for audiovisual music production, while DORA – Escape into Music received awards including Best Documentary at the Florence Film Awards and Filmtage Oberschwaben, as well as the 2024 Opus Klassik. In a conversation with Interlude, van Beveren reflects on how making these films changed his understanding of musical history, the challenges of bringing overlooked composers to audiences, and the role performers, conductors, programmers, and record labels play in determining what music gets heard.

DORA – Escape into Music

Around 2016, Steckeweh asked van Beveren to make a few short films to accompany her concert program of music by women composers. She had already been researching their lives and works and bringing their music back to the concert stage. Van Beveren, by contrast, knew next to nothing about the subject then. “I had never heard of female composers before,” he recalls. He knew Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel by name but had never given serious thought to the wider history of women who composed, “because they were simply not performed in concert halls.”

Steckeweh opened that largely unknown world to him. During a drive from Berlin to Paris, she began telling him about the composers she had encountered through her research and performances: about their music, their lives, and the obstacles they had faced in their struggle to be taken seriously as professional composers. What had begun as a conversation about a few short concert films was turning into something far larger. As Steckeweh told their stories, van Beveren realised that the real subject lay less in a list of forgotten names than in the circumstances that had allowed so much of their music to vanish from public memory. For women composers of earlier generations, recognition had been hard to come by. They lived in societies that did not regard women as equal to men and denied them the same legal and social standing; only a few held the public’s attention for long.

Kyra Steckeweh and Tim van Beveren

“I said, well, stop right here,” he recalls. “This is stuff which is much more interesting for a full-blown documentary than just a two- or three-minute clip.”

That conversation became the starting point for Women Composers, a documentary by van Beveren and Steckeweh that traces the lives and music of Mel Bonis, Lili Boulanger, Fanny Hensel, and Emilie Mayer. The film travels across Europe to the places where these women lived and worked, weaving historical research and interviews together with performances of their music.

Women Composers

WOMEN COMPOSERS – Theatrical Trailer   

One composer who particularly affected van Beveren was Emilie Mayer. She had written eight symphonies, yet her name was largely unfamiliar to the public. Van Beveren was struck that, as early as 1850, Mayer had managed to present a concert devoted entirely to her own compositions at Berlin’s Royal Theatre with royal approval. Even the location of her grave had become difficult to identify, and her music had faded from public awareness.

The experience made van Beveren question how musical history is preserved and, perhaps more importantly, how it is heard. For him, recordings and performances are essential because audiences cannot form an opinion about music they never have the opportunity to hear.

“Only a very small percentage of the population can read music – provided the scores have even been published. So how can people decide what they like if they can’t hear it?” he asks.

While filming Women Composers, van Beveren and Steckeweh also gathered reactions from audiences in Berlin. They asked concertgoers to name composers and sing or whistle a melody by them. Mozart was easy. Beethoven was easy. But when they asked about women composers, the responses were very different.

“For female composers? None,” van Beveren recalls.

The experiment demonstrated something that had already become apparent during their research: the problem was not simply that audiences had forgotten these composers. Many had never been introduced to them in the first place.

After Women Composers, van Beveren and Steckeweh began considering another film. Their next subject became Dora Pejačević, the Croatian composer whose music had once been performed in major European cities but disappeared from the repertoire after her death in 1923. Pejačević’s privileged background gave her opportunities that many women composers of her time did not have. She grew up in a noble family; her household supported music, and the family held concerts at the castle. Yet these advantages did not prevent her music from being forgotten.

Dora Pejačević

While reading about Pejačević, van Beveren again recognised the potential for a much larger story.

“I said this again,” he remembers. “She is a fascinating subject for a full-blown documentary.”

His interest deepened when he began hearing Pejačević’s music. After learning about her from a friend in Zagreb, he searched for her scores and sent them to Steckeweh. She began studying the piano works, among them the Sonata in D minor, and recorded them for Deutschlandfunk.

“The first time Kyra played it,” van Beveren says, “I was shivering.”

Kyra Steckeweh

DORA – Escape into Music   

The resulting film, DORA – Escape into Music, follows Pejačević’s life, her music, and the European world she lived in. It also documents an extraordinary attempt to bring one of her major orchestral works back into the concert hall. During their research, van Beveren and Steckeweh discovered a 1921 newspaper article indicating that Pejačević’s Symphony was scheduled to be performed by conductor Arthur Nikisch in 1922. Their research eventually led to the Symphony’s first performance by the Gewandhausorchester, conducted by Andris Nelsons in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic complicated the production, and the planned concert nearly fell through. The film nevertheless incorporated the performance story into its larger exploration of Pejačević’s life and musical legacy.

Before making the films, van Beveren says he was “totally unaware” of the vast body of music written by women. Now he describes it as an “enormous treasury” of compositions that are still rarely performed in a concert repertoire dominated by familiar male names. But he is careful not to suggest that every forgotten work deserves attention simply because its composer was a woman. The important thing, he believes, is to give the music a genuine opportunity to be heard and judged.

Some pieces, he says, are extraordinary. Others may not be. But without professional performances, audiences cannot make that distinction for themselves. For van Beveren, that responsibility extends beyond individual performers. Programmers, conductors, record companies, and major concert institutions all influence which works enter the musical landscape. “You need professional performers,” he says, emphasising that forgotten works need the same level of attention, quality, and commitment as established repertoire.

He also sees a generational shift. Younger musicians, he believes, are less and less concerned with whether a man or a woman wrote a piece. What matters to them is whether the music speaks to them and deserves to be played.

That change can begin with relatively simple choices. After screenings of their films throughout Europe, Steckeweh and van Beveren encouraged audiences to ask their local radio stations to play music by women composers. For them, rediscovery need not remain an academic project or a documentary subject. It can happen through the ordinary ways people encounter music: a concert, a recording, a radio broadcast, or a performer’s recommendation.

A vast amount of music still awaits discovery. Van Beveren points to the Archiv Frau und Musik in Frankfurt, a library that holds works by thousands of women composers, as an indication of how much remains to be explored. When women’s music is left out of the repertoire, he says, “you’re missing half of the cultural heritage of mankind.”

Both films make that absence visible. More importantly, they invite us to consider what might happen when we finally hear this missing music.

The films are available to stream on demand or to buy at:

DORA – Escape into Music (original title: “DORA – Flucht in die Musik”)

English-language version

Spanish-language version

German-language version

WOMEN COMPOSERS – full-length director’s cut (original title: “KOMPONISTINNEN”)

English-language version

German-language version

30 Pieces of Classical Music About Autumn

 by Emily E. Hogstad  September 2nd, 2024

Need some classical music about autumn and the fall season to add to your playlist? We’ve got you covered!

© Davidgn/Dreamstime.com

Today, we’re looking at almost four centuries of music. So grab a pumpkin spice latte, settle in, and enjoy these thirty pieces of classical music about autumn.

The 4 Seasons by Christopher Simpson (ca 1640s)   Christopher Simpson was an English composer and virtuoso viol player. (Viol instruments were predecessors to modern string instruments.)

Simpson wrote his Four Seasons for a treble instrument, two bass viols, and continuo. In each one, he included a fantasy, an air, and a galliard (a type of energetic dance).

Players also added their own ornamentation to the work to customize their interpretations.

Autumn from the Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi (1724)  

Let’s be honest…you knew this work would be on the list!

In 1724, composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi wrote a set of violin concertos inspired by each of the four seasons.

He also included poetry in the score to describe in words what he was describing in music.

His autumn concerto portrays harvest celebrations and hunting parties.

Autumn from The Seasons by Joseph Haydn (1801)    ut in modern movie terms, The Seasons was a bit of a cash-grab sequel to Haydn’s wildly popular oratorio The Creation.

Unfortunately, like many sequels, it wasn’t as successful as the work that inspired it, but it’s still worth enjoying today.

The forces required to mount The Seasons include a large orchestra, a chorus, and three vocal soloists.

Like Vivaldi, Haydn chose to highlight harvest celebrations and hunting parties. The hunting chorus is one of the best of its era.

October from Das Jahr (The Year) by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1841)   

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was composer Felix Mendessohn’s older sister, as well as a brilliant pianist and astonishingly productive composer.

Because she was a woman, many of her works never entered the standard repertoire in the way that her brothers did. Luckily for listeners, that’s beginning to change.

Das Jahr (The Year) is a set of piano pieces that trace the year month-by-month.

In a clever twist on the autumnal hunting motif, Hensel’s October’s piece features horn calls that turn out to be traveling minstrels. The deer in the forest may be startled, but the work ends with a happy flourish.

In Autumn by Edvard Grieg (1865)   

Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg was 22 when he wrote this overture. A fellow composer friend told him, “This is trash, Grieg; go home and write something better.”

So Grieg transcribed it for two pianos and submitted it to a composing competition…and that critical composer friend just happened to be on the jury! Amusingly, In Autumn ended up winning first prize.

E.Grieg Concert Overture “In Autumn” op.11 for piano 4 hands  

Autumn Song by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1876)   

In the 1870s, Tchaikovsky had the same idea as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: writing a series of piano works, one inspired by each month.

His October song begins with a snippet of poetry:

Autumn, our poor garden is all falling down,
the yellowed leaves are flying in the wind.

The music itself is a wistful, lovely sigh for solo piano, with the melancholy that is brought on by the season in full display. Anyone who has lived in a northern climate can relate!

Symphony No. 10: “To Autumntime” by Joseph Joachim Raff (1879)  

Joachim Raff was born in 1822 in Switzerland.

He worked with many of the big names of Romantic music (including Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Clara Schumann) and was widely acclaimed in his own time, but is rarely heard today.

This symphony has four movements, and each was published with subtitles:

I. Impressions & Feelings
II. Ghostly Round-Dance
III. Elegie
IV. Men Hunting

“Pensée d’automne” by Jules Massenet (1887)  

In the song Pensée d’automne, or Thoughts in Autumn, composer Jules Massenet set a poem by French poet Armand Silvestre to music.

The poem speaks of “grieving birds” and “withered flower cups.” The narrator wistfully invites a lover to return to the place where they courted in the springtime.

He then points out that his love for her has made the season irrelevant:

Let the beautiful days die! Let the harsh winter be born again!
Like a joyful hymn in the moaning wind,
A song of love emerges from my devoted heart!

Autumn: Etude de Concert No. 2, Op. 35 by Cécile Chaminade (1886)   

French composer Cécile Chaminade was one of the most popular composers of her era. She focused primarily on writing piano music and miniatures. They proved to be especially popular in the domestic sheet music market.

That popularity, combined with her sentimental romantic style as well as her gender, led her to be dismissed as an unserious artist.

This autumn-inspired etude challenges that assumption. It’s both achingly tender and technically challenging.

8 Characteristic Pieces, En Automne, by Moritz Moszkowski (1886)   Play

Moritz Moszkowski was a German pianist and composer of Polish origin. Although his work is rarely seen on programs today, he was very popular during his lifetime.

This work, from his set of eight Characteristic Pieces, seems to portray a chilly wind blowing leaves off the trees in colored swirls.

Four Sketches, op. 15: In Autumn by Amy Beach (1892)   

Amy Beach was a profoundly talented American composer and pianist. She began writing little waltzes for piano when she was only four years old.

After she got married at the age of eighteen, she focused on composition because it wasn’t seemly for a respectable wife of a doctor to tour as a piano soloist.

In 1892’s Four Sketches, written when she was twenty-five, a snippet of poetry appears at the “In Autumn” movement: “yellowing foliage on scattered lawns.” This is a quote from French poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine.    moods of autumn.

From Vivaldi’s lilting Four Seasons to Tchaikovsky’s melancholy “Autumn Song” to Musgrave’s grim fall hunt, classical music evokes the complex emotions brought about by the season in a way that no other art form can.

The History of the Symphony: From Opera Overture to Postmodern Portrait

by Emily E. Hogstad  October 3rd, 2026

The symphony began as a kind of warm-up act – a short instrumental piece played before a larger work, meant to settle a restless audience.

Over the next two centuries, composers turned that warm-up act into one of classical music’s most ambitious forms.

Today we’re tracing that transformation by looking at specific symphonies – and how each of the major composers inherited their predecessors’ rules, then threw them out.

Sammartini – Sinfonia No. 6 in F major (c. 1744)  The symphony originated in the sinfonia, a genre traditionally used as an orchestral introduction to a larger work, like an opera.

Italian composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c. 1700–1775) was one of the first composers to detach the sinfonia from the opera and perform it independently. This change laid the groundwork for the modern symphony.

Sinfonias were often in three parts: a bright, rhythmic fast section, followed by a lyrical, slower section, followed by a dance-like conclusion.

Haydn, Symphony No. 104, “London” (1795)   

Austrian composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) inherited the form that Sammartini had pioneered.

Haydn’s first symphony dates from 1759. Its structure closely follows Sammartini’s, with three movements: a fast presto, a slower andante, and another presto.

In the 1760s, he began adding a third movement, a minuet. By the 1770s, the four-movement structure became standardised.

Another vital development that Haydn helped pioneer was writing first movements in sonata form: i.e., a form in which two themes are played, contrasted, and developed.

Joseph Haydn

By the time he completed his 104th symphony in 1795, Haydn had spent nearly forty years codifying the modest sinfonia into a genre that would dominate orchestral writing for over a century.  

Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 (1822–1824)  

German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) inherited Haydn’s four-movement structure and broke it – twice.

His third symphony, nicknamed the Eroica, runs nearly twice as long as a typical Haydn symphony. The second movement is not just the customary slow movement; it is a theatrical funeral march, fit for a tragically fallen hero.

Beethoven originally dedicated it to Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing him as a champion of more egalitarian Enlightenment ideals – but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven reportedly scratched out the dedication in fury, tearing the title page.

Christian Horneman: Beethoven, 1803 (Beethovenhaus Bonn)

Two decades later, Beethoven shattered the conventions again. His ninth symphony is scored for a full orchestra, four vocal soloists, and a chorus – the first time vocal soloists and a chorus had ever been used in a symphony.

He also pushed forward the idea that extramusical ideas can be expressed in the symphony; the text he set was Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” an explicit call for universal brotherhood.

Between them, these two symphonies wrestle with the question: how far can the boundaries of a symphony be pushed before it stops being a symphony at all?

With these two works, Beethoven made that question the genre’s central preoccupation for the next century.

Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique (1830)  

French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) answered Beethoven’s innovations by going somewhere Beethoven never had: autobiography.

His Symphonie fantastique – subtitled “Episode in the Life of an Artist…in Five Sections” – consists of five movements tracing an artist’s opium-induced descent through obsession, heartbreak, and, finally, hallucinations of his own execution.

August Prinzhofer: Hector Berlioz, 1845

The unhealthy obsession Berlioz drew on here was very real. In 1827, he became infatuated with Irish actress Harriet Smithson after seeing her perform Shakespeare in Paris.

The symphony’s recurring melody, dubbed the idée fixe, represents her idolised image, returning in various guises across all five movements to show the artist’s fixation on her everywhere.

The idée fixe was a striking new way to create cohesion across a large orchestral work, and it became a tempting tool for composers who wanted to inject narrative into their symphonies.

Brahms – Symphony No. 1 (1855–1876)   

Beethoven pushed the symphony into new territory of expression, and Berlioz followed him. By the mid-1800s, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were going even further, pushing extramusical narratives and program music, the so-called “music of the future.”

Johannes Brahms, c. 1872

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), however, wanted to rewind the clock. He believed the symphony could still work in its older, “absolute” form, with no story attached.

Intimidated by Beethoven’s example (he compared his legacy to “the tramp of a giant”), he took his time making his case. He began composing his first symphony in the mid-1850s but didn’t finish it for two decades.

The result was worth the wait. Brahms’s majestic first symphony proved that absolute music could still make an emotional and intellectual impact, even with a traditional structure and without an extramusical narrative.

It also argued that composers don’t necessarily have to “break” what came before or forget it. Sometimes the music of the future could look back to the past.

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique” (1893)   

In 1893, two of the most popular symphonies of all time premiered. Each one offered a potential path for future composers to pursue.

Symphonies almost always close with a fast, affirmative finale. But Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique breaks that unwritten rule: its final movement is slow and mournful, fading into silence.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

In this symphony, Tchaikovsky split the difference in the ongoing 19th-century battle between program music and absolute music. He created a program, but kept it secret, and wanted audiences to come up with a story on their own.

(Intrigue about that program grew after Tchaikovsky died just nine days after conducting the symphony’s premiere, reportedly of cholera – a death that’s remained the subject of speculation and debate ever since.)

Whatever the symphony’s private meaning, its structural statement is clear: honest, emotional expression can dictate a symphony’s structure.

Dvořák – Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” (1893)  

The Pathetique pointed one way a symphony could go: toward personal expression of private emotional extremes.

Another 1893 symphony that offered a path forward was Dvořák’s ninth: the communal experience of folk music.

Dvořák had spent his career inspired by the folk songs, dances, and rhythms of his native Bohemia. The Slavonic Dances and his Eighth Symphony both draw on melodic shapes and rhythmic patterns inspired by Czech folk music.

Antonín Dvořák, 1882

Between 1892 and 1895, Dvořák took a job teaching in America, and his influences expanded accordingly. The melodies of his ninth symphony evoke the pentatonic scales and rhythmic character of American spirituals and folk songs.

Tchaikovsky’s sixth looked inward for inspiration, while Dvořák’s ninth looked outward.

Mahler – Symphony No. 9 (1908–1909)   

German-Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) stretched symphonic conventions to their breaking point.

Mahler’s ninth throws out multiple conventions. It runs roughly ninety minutes, longer than any other symphony on this list. It also opens with what would traditionally be a slow movement instead of a fast one, and its massive final movement is a slow adagio rather than a triumphant allegro.

Mahler was acutely aware of his own mortality while writing it. He’d recently been diagnosed with a fatal heart condition and had lost his young daughter the year before.

Moritz Nähr: Gustav Mahler, 1907

That biographical weight seems to show up in the music itself – quotes or gestures that mimic the beating of a heart; long passages that seem to dissolve rather than resolve; and a final page that fades to near-silence, marked in the score with an instruction usually translated as “dying away.”

Here, Mahler borrowed all kinds of innovations – including Beethoven’s scale, Berlioz’s embrace of autobiography, and Tchaikovsky’s emotional intensity – and blended them. The work would be his final completed symphony.

Sibelius – Symphony No. 7 (1914–1924)   

In his seventh symphony, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) condensed his ideas into one twenty-minute movement, dictating with precision how tempo and character should evolve gradually over time.

He originally envisioned a more conventional multi-movement work, but as he worked with his material, he came to believe it would be most effective in its ultimate condensed form.

Because of this, he even hesitated to call it a symphony, toying with the idea of designating it a “fantasia sinfonica” before giving in.

Jean Sibelius, 1923

Nearly every composer before him had contributed to the genre by adding something: length in Haydn and Beethoven’s cases, an extramusical story in Berlioz’s, intense and effusive emotional expression in Tchaikovsky’s. Sibelius did something radical by removing what made it a symphony in the first place: clearly delineated movements.

Schnittke – Symphony No. 1 (1969–1974)

Portrait of Alfred Schnittke by Reginald Gray

By the mid-1900s, so many symphonic innovations had already taken place, changing, stretching, and challenging the genre in multiple ways, that it was becoming increasingly difficult for composers to think of new ones while remaining faithful to the genre’s conventions.

But Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) had one innovation up his sleeve. He developed a style he’d dubbed polystylism – the deliberate blending of different, dissimilar styles – and then wrote his first symphony employing it.

In this symphony, he quotes Haydn, Beethoven, and Strauss waltzes. Jazz improvisation occurs. At certain points in the score, musicians are instructed to walk on and offstage.

Any listener would be forgiven for wondering if this is still actually a symphony – if, perhaps, sometime between Haydn and Sibelius, the word had lost its meaning…or perhaps gained a new one.

Every symphony on this list up to this point defined itself by responding to what came before. Schnittke’s contribution was to enshrine that history rather than build on it.

Conclusion

By the time Schnittke walked musicians on and off the stage mid-performance, quoting Haydn and Strauss in the same breath, the question Beethoven had first posed with the Eroica – how far can a symphony be pushed before it stops being a symphony at all? – had effectively been answered. That answer was: as far as a composer’s willingness to break rules would take them.

Composers still write symphonies today. But whether the word still means what it meant to Haydn in 1795 is another debate entirely.