This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Survival of the Symphony, given by Alexander Goer, was originally broadcast in 1987.

The very mention of the symphony evokes the names of everyone's favourite composers.

Mozart and Hayden, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Chikovsky and Marla. All these men in their different ways found

fulfilment for their ideas in the symphony. And as a result, it was for a long time the apex of

classical music. Orchestras are still known as symphony orchestras, and in America, the place in which

they perform is often called simply the symphony.

Concert programs used to be a balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Standards of past

achievement provided criteria for the judgment of contemporary works, and until comparatively

recently, the new could be presented in the context of the old.

As long as it lasted, this was a good arrangement. Every young composer aspired to have a symphony performed.

He wanted to create something new and surpass his predecessors, and he could do this without running into any insuperable difficulties.

Nowadays, there's a very large public who go to hear orchestras play the great masterpieces of the past,

and from time to time they are prepared to accept a new name,

but one has an awful feeling that Shostakovich is going to be the last to break

into the standard repertoire. This might suggest that composers aren't as gifted as they once were,

but I don't believe that's true. There's plenty of talent about, but the talent doesn't happen

to find the form and conduct of the symphony particularly inspiring.

Composers tend to regard it as a purely historical phenomenon, which has little to do with them.

Well, so what? If the composers don't want to have any more to do with the symphony,

why don't they just go off and do their own thing and leave the audience and the performers to get on

with the existing repertoire? Many composers, in particular the avant-garde, think just this. There's

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