The Orchestral Symphonies of Charles-Marie Widor: Context, Form and Performances
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation studies the five orchestral symphonies of Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), who was an organist and composer highly regarded in his own time. These works have been severely neglected by major studies of French Romantic symphonies, by symphony orchestras, and by the organ world (three of the orchestral symphonies also include organ), even though his solo organ works have remained popular in the repertory. Following an introduction that surveys the relevant extant literature, Chapter 1 situates the symphonies in the context of Widor’s long and successful professional career and within the context of symphonies by other composers in the French Romantic symphonic tradition, such as Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Franck. In Chapter 2, I study Widor’s orchestration manual and its relation to orchestration in the five orchestral symphonies and his Symphony for organ and orchestra, Op. 42bis, a transcription of three movements from his symphonies for solo organ (Nos. 2 and 6). Chapter 3 provides a substantial study of form, addressing thematic layout and key scheme, both within and across movements, as well as the borrowing of pre-existing musical material from sacred sources (Gregorian chant and Lutheran chorale). The chapter chronicles two trends from early symphonies to late: the increasing complexity of inter-movement (cyclic) thematic relationships and the increasing sense that the final movement is the culmination of a formal trajectory that spans the entire symphony. I make a case that in the later symphonies Widor is experimenting with two-dimensional sonata form (Vande Moortele 2009), in which a multi-movement work has sonata forms within one or more individual movements and a large-scale, overarching, sonata-like trajectory that encompasses the whole piece. Chapter 4 addresses performance issues. It surveys Widor’s own comments on performance practice, provides practical considerations for performing symphonies with organ, and studies tempi choices in Widor’s recorded performance of his famous organ Toccata. The chapter concludes with a case study of Symphony No. 1, which relates form to performance, compares tempi strategies in extant recordings of the work, and communicates some personal performance ideas based on my experience performing the work with the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Chapter 5 is a brief epilogue that reviews the main conclusions of the thesis and points to ideas for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".