# Looongest Opening Movements in Classical music



## peeyaj (Nov 17, 2010)

Schubert's D.960 sonata (Molto Moderato) clocks at 21 minutes, with Richter's notorious performance at 25+ minutes, including all repeats. The opening movement of Schuber's String Quintet is 20+ minutes, depending if the repeats were observed, while his String Quartet no. 15 is even longer!

Mahler and Bruckner have huge opening movements too.. Is that "heavenly length"?

Post some of the loooonnggeest movements in this thread. Do you like them?


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Mahler's 3rd symphony has a first movement which is over thirty minutes long, longer than virtually any entire individual symphony by Haydn or Mozart . Unless it's the Mozart Jupiter symphony,no 41 symphony with all the repeats, something rarely done .


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

peeyaj said:


> Mahler and Bruckner have huge opening movements too.. Is that "heavenly length"?


You bet'cha!


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## Carpenoctem (May 15, 2012)

1st movement of Beethoven's Violin Concerto is around 23 minutes long.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

The opening to Ives' second piano sonata is around 17 minutes, and the first movement of Schnittke's Symphony No. 1 is around 25 minutes long.


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## powerbooks (Jun 30, 2012)

Well, think of the Ring cycle as a whole opera drams, its opening Das Rhinegold takes a whole night, 150 min more or less.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

The opening movement of Sibelius's 7th symphony is about 25 minutes long.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

This is a very interesting question - particularly if you expand it to 'what are the longest, through-composed continuous pieces of music?'

So, the last movement of Mahler 6, at around 30 minutes, is more than the equal of the first movement of his third; the sixth and final movement of Brian's _Gothic _symphony clocks in at, at least, 35 minutes.

Ballets and operas, by virtue of their being one thing after another, don't count as continuous music. I am minded not to consider works whose movements are merely played _attacca_, nor even works which are sectional but played without a break, like Pettersson 7. The absence of a pause between sections/movements does not constitute continuity.

It's like people who argue that that the last chapter of Joyce's _Ulysses _is one sentence (many pages) on the grounds that there aren't any full stops. No, it's many sentences that don't have any punctuation.

I'd also reject for these purposes all the process music which could basically go on forever: the poverty of invention nullifies inclusion as real music however much one enjoys it.

So there are individual acts of operas which play continuously - though there the structure is largely imposed by the libretto and the action, so I would count them as rather less strongly structured than, say, Mahler 6 iv.

Although Stockhausen's _Hymnen _(at around 100 minutes) has a lot of events in it, the compositional arc is sufficiently strong that it feels a unified work to me.


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

Opening movement of Liszt's _A Faust Symphony_ goes for around half an hour.


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

Back in the LP days the only first movement which couldn't be contained on one side of an LP that I owned was the first movement to Mahler's Third Symphony. This was actually a fortunate occurrence, because the movement ended with a long fortissimo, which would have sounded awful if crammed into one side and confined to the innermost grooves of the record.

Interestingly enough, all of the long Strauss tone poems (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Alpensymphonie) that I own have the CD divided at the points where Strauss puts in a new title, presumably so that you can listen to the part where Don Quixote fights the windmill or where the Hero meets his love. This, of course, never happened on the LP versions, since the music is through-composed without breaks. Using this as an example would probably make the Alpensymphonie about 50 minutes long in reality.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Ramako said:


> The opening movement of Sibelius's 7th symphony is about 25 minutes long.


Isn't that the whole symphony? I heard this symphony performed live, and it's a continuous symphony (no breaks) but I believe that's just how long the whole thing is, 25 min.

Tchaikovsky's 1st movements for symphonic works are very long. For the Piano Concerto No. 1 and Violin Concerto, they are both over 20 min long. Also, the 4th Symphony's 1st mvmt. is about 20 min.

And Scriabin's Symphony No. 3 has a 24 min 1st mvmt.


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## crmoorhead (Apr 6, 2011)

Ordering my iTunes library by length:

6th Movement of Brian's Gothic Symphony: 35 mins 42
1st Movement of Mahler's Third: 33 mins 30
4th Movement of Mahler's Sixth: 32 mins 48
Rautavaara's 5th Symphony (single movement): 31 mins 46
1st Movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony: 30 mins 53
1st Movement of Shostakovich's Seventh: 28 mins 57
1st Movement of Mahler's Ninth: 26 mins 50
Weill's First Symphony (single movement): 26 mins 50
1st Movement of Gorecki's Third: 26 mins 47
1st Movement of Shostakovich's Eighth: 25 mins 55
1st Movement of Scriabin's Third: 25 mins 46

There are also some noteworthy non-symphonic works in single movements in the list:

Glass: Music with changing parts (61mins 41)
Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande (40 mins 20)
Schoenberg: Verklarte Nacht (31 mins 1)
Mahler: Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde (29 mins 33)

This is only stuff that I have in iTunes. I think there is a single movement string quartet by Morton Feldman that is extremely long and probably something very long by Sorabji. Going to the level of ridiculous, however, there is Vexations by Satie and As Slow as Possible by Cage.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

crmoorhead said:


> 1st Movement of Shostakovich's Seventh: 28 mins 57
> 1st Movement of Shostakovich's Eighth: 25 mins 55


Forgot about those ones.


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## Cnote11 (Jul 17, 2010)

Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1


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## mtmailey (Oct 21, 2011)

tchakovsky symphony 4-19 minutes
elgar symphony 1-19minutes or more
beethoven symphony 3-18 minutes
dvorak symphony 2-18 minutes
schubert string quintet-like 20 minutes.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

A good performance of the first movement of Schubert's G major sonata (and by good, I mean appropriately thoughtful) is around 20 minutes.


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## NightHawk (Nov 3, 2011)

The 7th, of course, is a one-movement symphony and it is fascinating to hear the work transform itself - it is a highly organic work and is one of my favorite symphonies.



Ramako said:


> The opening movement of Sibelius's 7th symphony is about 25 minutes long.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

Ramako said:


> The opening movement of Sibelius's 7th symphony is about 25 minutes long.





Huilunsoittaja said:


> Isn't that the whole symphony? I heard this symphony performed live, and it's a continuous symphony (no breaks) but I believe that's just how long the whole thing is, 25 min.





NightHawk said:


> The 7th, of course, is a one-movement symphony and it is fascinating to hear the work transform itself - it is a highly organic work and is one of my favorite symphonies.


Before anything else I want to state that my remark was a _joke_. Just in case there are any misunderstandings.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Ramako said:


> Before anything else I want to state that my remark was a _joke_. Just in case there are any misunderstandings.


On a whole, the people on this forum have a remarkably under-developed sarcasm detector.


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

I listened to Mahler's 3rd Symphony today. First movement is more than 30 minutes. (Kraeftig - Entschieden)

But Bruckner is better 

And Also Rachmaninoff's Symphony #2 (+24 mins).


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