Classical Romantic Music Sheet Music for Orchestra

Very few musicians are aware of the fact that Beethoven arranged his violin concerto also as a piano concerto. It is only recently that some pianists have discovered this truly rewarding work. Clement...

Beethoven probably completed the 6th Symphony in the early summer of 1808. Titled the 'Pastoral Symphony' by the composer himself, this orchestral work was premiered together with the 5th Symphony in...

The premiere of this work in December 1813 ranks among the greatest successes Beethoven ever celebrated in public as a composer. One reviewer wrote at the time that in its themes the new symphony was...

Sandwiched between the popular Symphonies Nos. 7 and 9, the relatively short Eighth Symphony finds itself in a difficult position even now. Right after the premiere in February 1814, one critic opined...

After the first sketches had been put to paper in 1815, Beethoven only finally put the finishing touches to his last completed symphony in 1824. With its extended finale in which soloists and choir pe...

All music lovers are familiar with Haydn's great late oratorios - but who also knows the first one that he wrote about 25 years earlier? Although the Biblical story of young Tobias who is able to cure...

Spurred on by the tremendos success of the 'Creation', van Swieten, who had written the libretto and comissioned the work, prompted Haydn to compose a further large-scale oratorio. At first, the compo...

Brahms struggled for years with composition of his First Symphony -- the feeling of impotence in the face of Beethoven's works seemed overwhelming. He wrote to his friend, the conductor Hermann Levi:...

Between 1859 and 1885 Johannes Brahms, with his four symphonies, two piano concertos, violin concerto, dances, variations and overtures, became the representative of large-scale orchestral music. In 1...

During composition of his First Symphony, Brahms was still very much under Beethoven's influence; in his Second Symphony he loosened the ties considerably. The principle of motivic embellishment now i...

On the premiere of the 3rd Symphony in the Musikvereinssaal in Vienna in 1883, the Wagnerites, who disliked Brahms, hissed after every movement. Yet Brahms' biographer Max Kalbeck said, 'The audience...

The genesis of the Fourth Symphony possibly goes back to the 1870s when Brahms was studying the Bach Cantata 'Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich', whose chaconne theme forms the nucleus of the finale. Aro...

Around 40 minutes in length and scored for diverse instruments including horns, trumpets and timpani, the Serenade in D major by Johannes Brahms comes close to the symphony. Written in 1858/59 by the...

In his Serenade no. 2 op. 16, composed in 1858-60, Brahms keeps to the usual, smaller, scoring for this genre, using pairs of winds and horns as well as low strings (no violins!). His friend Clara Sch...

Johannes Brahms only approached the symphony genre slowly and with a great many qualms. After he had revised and rejected numerous earlier attempts, he did not introduce himself to the public as a sym...

Debussy's Rhapsody was commissioned by the wealthy amateur Elise Hall, who paid the composer a considerable sum in advance. Yet work on it was not easy; following his death all that existed was a fini...