Finales!

There are really only two kinds of endings — those that return us to silence, like Beethoven's last piano sonata, its destiny fulfilled — and those that bring us roaring back to life, like Mahler's 2nd Symphony, dying so that it may live again.

The two have one thing in common: the ending is earned. The previous one or two or three or ten movements have brought us to a closing statement that makes the piece worth more than the sum of its parts.

Often, the “cinematic” lens works well for these finales. They might call back to specific themes from earlier in the piece. And the finale will deliver the big Marvel-esque fight against the Big Bad and good will triumph over evil in the most satisfying of climaxes.

This is the trajectory that Beethoven patented; take this transition from the scherzo to the finale, in the 5th symphony, for instance. We pick it up with the strings plucking lightly the “duh duh duh dun” figure from the first movement.

Not to make superhero movies sound too profound by comparing them to Beethoven (as much as I love my superheroes)—but this is what The Avengers has in common with Beethoven: the fact that you feel like you don't know what's going to happen throughout the whole tumultuous journey, dark and hazy fraught, and you legitimately feel like it could all go wrong. And then the end comes. The heroes enter. And there was never a doubt.

Sometimes, the same theme that explodes in the finale will have the same seed as a theme we heard earlier in the piece, called being “cyclic.” Often, especially if it's your first listen, you won't be able to make the connection. But when the best climaxes come, they don't hold back.

The climactic theme of Sibelius's 2nd symphony, for instance, does share a seed from the first movement, but Sibelius builds it back up in the finale so that even if you missed where it came from, you won't miss the satisfaction of finally hearing the melody played to completion.

In the case of Sibelius 2, like Tristan und Isolde from the Opera chapter, and like some movies, the ecstasy of the climax will have one of two effects on listeners. Either they'll think, “Gee, all the waiting made it so much more satisfying when we got there,” or they'll think, “Next time I'll skip the first half hour and leave right after I hear it.” (Performers may think the same things, they just don't have a choice. ^💬)

If you feel the former, that climax must really have been earned by the composer, the performers, and the listeners, all together. If the latter, maybe it's not so transformational an experience and you can go listen to the best part in a TikTok video as an encore. Or I suppose they might think instead, “that's all? not worth it.”

People on internet forums constantly profess that studying a piece's recordings before seeing it live is the way to enjoy a classical music concert. But it can sometimes backfire. If you listen to Bernstein or Dudamel and come to expect that level of passion, then your local semi-professional orchestra (and, certainly, mine) will leave you unsatisfied.

When it works, you feel why all four movements are part of the same piece. And it might have held together on a technical level because the themes were shared or called back somehow, but it works on an emotional level because of the storytelling.

This is the same effect for finales in any form, not just things called Symphony or Sonata.

Composers are free of convention in the final movement to use whatever form they want. Fugues are popular, since they naturally grow towards a climax as the voices layer on each other. So is theme and variation, and even sonata form, since all of them afford the feeling of climax and inevitability. But the most popular is the rondo.

Rondo form is maybe the easiest form of all to understand today because it's basically “pop song” form, though it looks more complex than the others: ABACA ^💬. Basically, it's just music that keeps coming back around like a chorus in a song with different verses in between. The word rondo comes from the French word for “round” dances, which had a recurring refrain.

Rondos and Hungarian Dances: The Pocket Concert

It feels a bit random that this of all of classical music's forms morphed into the pop song form, but it certainly has its advantages. A catchy tune, like a chorus, is very easy to get stuck in your head, enjoyable to hear over and over again, and can make people leave the concert hall singing it—or wanting to dance. Likely, this is why it's used so often for finales.

The first piece in the pocket concert is the last movement of the Bruch violin concerto, a typically virtuosic finale in which the recurring theme is a dance, and the intervening episodes give us singing, improvisatory melodies.

I'll point out the structure in the analysis. I think you'll find that with a piece like this, you really don't need to be able to analyze the structure in order to follow it or enjoy it. But identifying new sections gives you signposts to graft on to so you don't get lost in a sea of sound—a key strategy especially when you're not told what form the piece is going to be in. When in doubt, use section changes to pull you back in to the piece.

There are many variants of the finale-rondo form. This one was more of an ABABA. Sometimes you'll see an ABACA or ABACADA or even merge the rondo form with sonata-form: they'll take the AB section and treat it like the exposition of a sonata, then have a C section that is like the development, and then the last A section will be the recapitulation. What this means is that it's basically never necessary to follow along with the form beyond just hearing when the A section comes back, and hearing when it changes again. The most well-known rondo, Mozart's Rondo alla turca, is maybe the least like a typical rondo: an ABCBAB, where the refrain is actually the second music!

The Bruch concerto is an example of one of the most common finales, what Brahms and others would call alla zingarese, “Gypsy Style,” to refer to the folk music of the Romani people. ^💬 Romani musicians were the professional café and tavern performers across much of Central and Eastern Europe for centuries, so there is a lot of stylistic overlap between what composers called "Gypsy,“ ”Hungarian Dances,“ or ”Romanian Dances."

Here is the finale of Brahms' first piano quartet, orchestrated by Schoenberg. It is marked alla zingarese, “in Gypsy Style,” but without a single soloist, the freedom of performance is more simulated than actually spontaneous. As you listen, I'd ask what it is about these folk dances that make them such good fodder for finales. Why did composers keep turning to popular and folk music for excitement?

Once again I'll try to keep track of the structure in the commentary. I'll go ahead and tell you that this is not a simple form like an ABABA. It turns out it's relatively easy to identify new sections and write out a letter when you have a pen and paper in front of you, but I probably would not be keeping track if I were listening to this live in a concert hall.

As you've probably come to expect by this point, we can also hear rondos outside of just the sonata-finale structure. Just like sonata-form, slow music, and scherzos, rondos exist by themselves. Sometimes, they are just as bombastic as finales and suitable as concert encores, like Beethoven's sarcastic Rondo capriccioso “Rage over a lost penny.” Sometimes, they are not called a rondo at all, as in Schubert's F minor Impromptu.

Or a piece might not end up to technically be a rondo at all, but it can still be listened to the same way—listening for a recurring theme and noticing the changes in character. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is home to one of classical music's great endings—and it is earned precisely because the whole thing—all 30 or so minutes of it—are basically just one big rondo.

In the piece, the composer is walking down an exhibition of his friend Viktor Hartmann's paintings, and we hear a "Promenade" to depict his stroll. Then we encounter a new movement for each painting he sees, say a gnome or a ballet of unhatched chicks, like the contrasting sections of a rondo, and in between we hear the Promenade again and again, changed by the character of the painting he just saw. The first five promenades basically come every other movement. Then we don't hear any for a while all the way till the last painting, the majestic Great Gate of Kiev.

But if we listen closely, the Great Gate of Kiev is basically just a minor variation on the promenade theme, with just some minor alterations to make it grander. Here's the main “cell” of the theme, if they were played the same speed:

So when we finally hear the Great Gate theme in all its glory, we're also subconsciously remembering all the Promenades we've heard over the last half hour. And since we haven't heard a Promenade at all for the last five movements, the payoff is even sweeter when it somehow emerges out of the previous movement, the Hut of Baba Yaga. Ironically, Mussorgsky does give us the actual promenade later into the Great Gate, but it's hidden in a barrage of notes—you might not realize that's what you're hearing. If you do realize, it can feel a bit like finding buried treasure. In Ravel's version for full orchestra, it is much easier to hear. You can hear both below.

The Small Ending and the Goodbye

Ending a piece “small” is much harder to earn than ending “big.” A soft, slow ending is a slow movement, and has to be listened to as such, so the audience has to be pre-engaged, ready to pay close attention.

In some ways, prepping the audience for deep listening is easier in the finale than in the middle of the piece, as you've had, say, 3 full movements to buy their attention. On the other hand, you've had 3 full movements to lose it. As such, you sometimes hear people say things like, “Brahms' 3rd symphony would be as popular as the 4th symphony if it had a bigger ending.” Holst's The Planets might seem like an exception, a perennially programmed crowd-pleaser which closes with Neptune, fading to silence with an other-worldly women's chorus. But its bigger bangers, Mars and Jupiter are still frequently pulled out by themselves, leaving the “Neptune, the Mystic” behind. Not to mention that you have plenty of less secure composers who wouldn't dare end a piece softly because they feel a need to bring the crowd to its feet.

On the other hand, you have late Beethoven. Of his last three sonatas, two (Opp. 109 and 111) end soft, and in the middle, Op. 110 ends with a slow movement. Add in Mahler 9 and Tchaikovsky 6, their last completed symphonies, you have a bit of a category: great composers ending their last works softly.

As we said in our first discussion of silence in the film section, silence can easily represent death. But it would be way too neat to just say, “all these composers ended their last pieces soft to say goodbye to the world.”

Of course, the concept of a swan song does exist. Strauss's last song, which belongs to this group of Greatest Of All Time finales, concludes,

How travel-weary we are— Could this perhaps be death?

A goodbye if there ever was one.

So it can understandably be difficult to shake the temptation to interpret these last great slow movements as swan songs. Nothing will stop musicologists, musicians, and audiences from trying to interpret the great works of art autobiographically. Like a broken clock right twice a day, sometimes they may be correct. That may be the case for Tchaikovsky's last symphony. It may even be the case for Mahler's final symphony.

Adorno wrote,

“Smiling away'” is the gesture of farewell. Every work of Mahler's, from the Songs of a Wayfarer to the Ninth Symphony, is saying farewell. Thus, in the theme of its adagio, the violin climbs into its cloud-heaven… each [step] bigger than a man, in his weakness, could ascend—the greeting of someone who is disappearing. Of someone who is destroyed? Alive? In lieu of an answer, the gesture remains behind, as speechless as a legend. One would need to have the most disbelieving and the most believing ears to interpret it.

I think this is a beautiful analysis of Mahler 9—as poetic and true as one can hope to write in words, at least—and I have no idea what it means. Surely, this is because this is the only way to evoke in the reader something akin to the experience of the ending of Mahler 9. That is the only way to interpret it. Or not interpret it. I don't know. Neither do you, or Adorno. Or probably even Mahler.

It may even be the case that Beethoven's last piano sonata has some autobiography in it, despite all the counterexamples we have throughout his life—many of his happiest sounding pieces were written in the darkest times of his life, and vice versa.

Even if Beethoven 111 was a farewell of some sort, it's hard to imagine that it's just a farewell. All the pieces in this category also earn the soft finale by adding substance to the movement. That is to say, yes the preceding movements in the piece (and in some cases, the composer's whole oeuvre) have gotten the listener to the place of buying whatever the composer is selling, but also, the slow finale itself is an emotional centerpiece.

Mahler 9 gives us 25 minutes of slow movement finale. In the case of Beethoven 109 and 111, the finales are theme and variation works that double their preceding movements in length—something unheard of when Beethoven first started composing. They give us an entire world just in the finale—something that shouldn't make sense—but in doing so—the finale earns itself. Variations are like a rondo in that you get to know the main theme quite intimately, but unlike a rondo in that the journey they take you on doesn't have to keep coming back to where it started.

It is, to some extent, silly to quote a number of different artists waxing philosophical about the end of 111, and what it “means” to them, all some variation of “it's a farewell” or “it's an exploration of the universe.” And it is equally silly to sort of tell the reader “here's a 20-minute piece of music, go have a profound experience,” which is why I haven't embedded it yet.

We'll leave that for the next and final chapter of the book—music for the heart and spirit. People often get hooked by the big climaxes in classical music, like the finales in the first half of the book. But they stay for the spiritual ones, like these.

We started the chapter with a quote about Op. 111, so I think it's only fitting to close with one. And I will show you the piece, without any pressure to feel a certain way—or any way at all. I have had this spiritual experience with the closing of Op. 111, but only a few times in my dozens of listens (albeit many of those listens were piano students learning the piece). I have had it with other art, too—the last episode of The Americans stands out to me. I don't know if you will have it now, with this pianist, with these speakers or headphones, wherever you're sitting.

But here is pianist Maria João Pires playing the last several variations of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 111, with passages from Milan Kundera's “Book of Laughter and Forgetting” that will begin after the first variation, a trill that reaches higher and higher.