Engelchöre

All symphonies with singing composed in German-speaking countries in the long 19th century are sublime, exceptional compositions in which the idea of angelic choirs plays a role. When he tried in vain to talk Franz Liszt out of the choral finale in his Dante Symphony, Richard Wagner described the finale of Ludwig van Beethoven's 9th Symphony as being due to the "embarrassment of a real tone poet [...] who does not know how he should finally (after hell and purgatory) depict paradise". But the evocation of angelic choirs is also central to Felix Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, Gustav Mahler's 3rd Symphony with the movement „Was mir die Engel erzählen“, the final scene from Goethe's Faust composed by Liszt and Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg's Jakobsleiter, initially conceived as the final movement of a symphony. The interpretations of the symphonies with singing by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Mahler, Schoenberg and Jean Louis Nicodé focus on the actualization of a music of angels. A text-genetic approach aims both to accentuate the relevance of the ideas of angelic choirs in the symphonies and to relativize them.