# Nostalgic Composers/Pieces/Passages



## schuberkovich (Apr 7, 2013)

Inspired by mstar's thread:
Which composers wrote very nostalgic music? Which pieces in particular sound to you especially nostalgic?

I was listening to Mahler's 9th and this fleeting section I found to be incredibly nostalgic sounding (even though the whole symphony seems to be): 




(the cello part at 8:54).

Another example is this melody in Dvorak's cello concerto which seems to be almost an overload of wistful nostalgia:




(34:49)


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen was the first that came to my mind.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

The recapitulation and coda from the first mvt of Mahler's 7th will always remind me of November/December 2012. There, nostalgia.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

It's hard for me to deny that Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 is nostalgic to quite an extreme! I feel so "hollow" deep down in my heart when I hear it, the silences as well.... I almost feel sorrow for Chopin! 

Tchaikovsky's Third Piano Concerto has such emptiness, and of course nostalgia. I do find some of Chopin's nocturnes, especially the later ones, to be nostalgic as well!


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

What comes to my mind is the Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21, which is haunting and eerie, if not strictly nostalgic.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

For some reason "Sailing By" by Ronald Binge always comes to mind when I think of nostalgiac music. This piece is used as the closing theme song for BBC Radio 4.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Mahler's 9th is a great example! The piece I personally find the most beautifully nostalgic is Ravel's _Pavane pour une infante defunte_.


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

I'm confoosed. A piece/melody is only nostalgic because that particular individual experiences sentimental emotions. We aren't saying, "Here, THIS piece is nostalgic, generally," right?


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I think it could be that the timbre of the cello itself is nostalgic. My apologies that I have posted this clip before, but I keep coming back to it myself.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

Avey said:


> I'm confoosed. A piece/melody is only nostalgic because that particular individual experiences sentimental emotions. We aren't saying, "Here, THIS piece is nostalgic, generally," right?


Well, some pieces have more potential to be nostalgic than others, especially if that's how the composer intended them to be!


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

Nostalgia galore. I enjoyed these pieces when I was younger. 
Vivaldi - The Four Seasons.
Tchaikovsky - The Nutcracker
Bach - 25 Bach Favorites
Beethoven - Pathetique


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Avey said:


> I'm confoosed. A piece/melody is only nostalgic because that particular individual experiences sentimental emotions. We aren't saying, "Here, THIS piece is nostalgic, generally," right?


I think certain pieces absolutely have a nostalgic quality, just as other pieces might seem "triumphant" or "heroic" etc. I find Ravel's music often has this nostalgic quality, for example this is how Andre Laplante described his Prelude:

_"The tiny Prelude was written in 1913 as a sight reading exercise for the Paris Conservatoire. It must have been difficult for the sight reading candidates to resist being lulled into reverie by it's atmosphere of *nostalgia*, perhaps missing some of the harmonic surprises in the process!_"


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A lot of Brahms's symphonic music makes me think of guys in tuxedos wandering around in a deep forest, playing French horns and looking for something lost so long ago that they don't remember quite what it was. Nostalgia of a sort...


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

Well, I'm not sure what _nostalgic_ sounds like to you, or you, or them.

But to me, it sounds like *Debussy's Reverie*.


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## maestro267 (Jul 25, 2009)

Elgar's Second Symphony, mourning the passing of the Edwardian era.


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## Norse (May 10, 2010)

I guess one can differentiate between music that just sounds nostalgic to you for whatever reason, and music that has a sort of nostalgic 'program', or text etc. A pretty obvious example of the latter is Schumann's Kinderszenen. These are not meant to be 'children's pieces', they are meant to portray the feelings of an adult reminiscing about childhood. Of course, not all of the pieces would necessarily be thought of as that nostalgic if you weren't aware of this 'program', but some of them are pretty nostalgic sounding in their own right.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Mahler's music frequently has a nostalgic cast to it. Think only of the ending to the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (the corresponding passage in the third movement of the First Symphony as well) or the Fourth Symphony's evocation of heavenly joys. Whether these nostalgias are longings for real or imagined pasts is more or less irrelevant.

But here's an example where the nostalgia is explicit in both music and text.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> Mahler's music frequently has a nostalgic cast to it. Think only of the ending to the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (the corresponding passage in the third movement of the First Symphony as well) or the Fourth Symphony's evocation of heavenly joys. Whether these nostalgias are longings for real or imagined pasts is more or less irrelevant.
> 
> But here's an example where the nostalgia is explicit in both music and text.


I've just "discovered" Mahler quite recently, and I'm in love with so many of his works!

Has anyone noticed, though, that Romantic Era composers tend to have nostalgic feel in their works towards the ends of their lives, even and especially Mahler and Tchaikovsky?


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

mstar said:


> Has anyone noticed, though, that Romantic Era composers tend to have nostalgic feel in their works towards the ends of their lives, even and especially Mahler and Tchaikovsky?


You can add Brahms (late chamber music) and Strauss (Vier letzte Lieder, Metamorphosen) as well.


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## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

mstar said:


> I've just "discovered" Mahler quite recently, and I'm in love with so many of his works!
> 
> Has anyone noticed, though, that Romantic Era composers tend to have nostalgic feel in their works towards the ends of their lives, even and especially Mahler and Tchaikovsky?


Yup, I think that's a normal human reaction as you feel your life nearing the end.


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## badRomance (Nov 22, 2011)

I think Rachmaninov's piano concertos 2 and 3 are brimming with nostalgia.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Finzi - the andante from the Cello concerto





As one of the comments in the video says " Finzi's music definitely brings out feelings of nostalgia in me more than any other﻿ composer"

And probably something of Delius too.
Oh, and I don't know if it's possible to consider it a classical composition, but there's the famous Cavatina of Stanley Myers


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

*Would anyone regard Mozart's Requiem up to and including the Third Sequence as nostalgic??*


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Well, if you mean "nostalgia producing," I tend to associate many pieces of music with what I was doing when I first started familiarizing myself with them -- often what books I was reading at the time. i.e. a particular suite from Swan Lake with the series of Dr. Doolittle books, Copland's El Salon Mexico with a particular work of juvenile Science Fiction; the Dance of the Apprentices from Die Meistersinger with Dickens description the Carmagnole from A Tale of Two Cities; Beethoven's Opus 109 sonata with a girl I was infatuated with at the time.


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