There were many candidates for the "Great American Symphony" by the 1940s (among them Roy Harris’s Third, Samuel Barber’s First, and William Schuman’s Third) and yet by the end of the second world war there was still a need for a grand musical expression of a nation’s hopes, joys, and anxieties about the post-war world. And there remained a musical gap for a piece that would genuinely galvanise the widest possible musical public as well as satisfy the stringent demands of what a popular but serious mid-century American symphony might be; music that would take on the most symbolically European of forms and reform it in the image of a post-war, post-New Deal America.

In 1944, Aaron Copland started work on his Third Symphony, commissioned by conductor Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What would end up becoming a piece that, in Copland’s words, would “reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time” when it was premiered in 1946, started out with the less nationalist but equally challenging goal of pleasing Koussevitsky and the conductor’s liking of “music in the grand manner” while remaining true to what had become Copland’s signature style, music of the populist but sophisticated daring of Appalachian Spring, Billy The Kid and Rodeo.

Copland knew that composing such a large-scale, public piece (the symphony was to be his longest-ever orchestral work) would inevitably invite a larger sphere of interpretation. And he made the connection between the work’s high-profile commission and the post-war effort crystal clear in one of the work's biggest musical decisions. Copland based the last movement on his Fanfare for the Common Man, which had been premiered in 1943 by Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, part of a series of 18 fanfares that Goossens commissioned, as “stirring and significant contributions to the war effort”. (Copland’s title came from a 1942 speech made by the US Vice President in which he hailed the coming of the “Century of the Common Man”.)

But Copland wasn’t content simply to use the Fanfare as the stirringly uplifting climax of the symphony. The finale is a full-scale symphonic movement that uses the earlier work’s theme as the basis for a musical argument that’s both a hard-won symphonic prize from the three preceding movements, but which also crowns the piece with one of the rarest emotions in 20th century music: a genuinely-felt and achieved sense of heroism and optimism, with not a trace of cynicism in sight. As Leonard Bernstein, arguably the work’s greatest interpreter, said: “The symphony has become an American monument, like the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial”.

Which is precisely why you might criticise Copland’s symphony: what could have less to say to today’s world of doubt, ambiguity and creeping tragedies than a piece that sets out to appeal to the widest possible audience, to be appreciated on the most immediate level as a grandiloquently emotional public work, and which has all the marmoreal quality of the grandest architectural paeans to the American dream?

But what makes Copland’s symphony such a vital contribution to the genre in the 20th century, in the US or anywhere else, is that this really is a “Symphony for the Common Man”, in the best possible sense. The piece never once panders to populist taste for the sake of self-conscious “communication” but instead reconfigures symphonic discourse - the craft and graft of abstract musical argument - as a site of communal meditation, reflection and transcendence. On one hand, Copland’s Third works as an emotional journey from the uneasy tranquility of the opening movement to the heroic gestures of optimism of its finale; on the other, it functions as an abstract musical discourse in which its moments of expressive transcendence are prepared with the fastidious subtlety of a composer for whom the most important task was making sure “the right note [was] in the right place”.

And in fact, the Third Symphony is not only the conventional symphonic monument it might seem at first. The first movement is a spacious “Molto Moderato” that breathes the wide-open spaces, simultaneously new-minted and nostalgic, that Copland’s music conjurs so uniquely (he makes you re-hear the simplest building blocks of music - intervals of 4ths, 5ths, and 2nds - in new ways that nonetheless sound absolutely right); its tunes also prefigure some of the material of the Fanfare, just one of the ways that Copland ties the symphonic room together. More than that, this first movement owes precisely nothing to the first movements of most classical and romantic symphonies. It’s cast in an arch shape, so that it ends with a version of the music you hear at the start, an idea that’s more reminiscent of Bartók’s practice in his instrumental and orchestral works than anything else. The scherzo second movement has a more traditional shape, after its brassy call-to-attention introduction, and features some show-stopping, post-Rodeo high-jinks. But the third, slow movement is the most unconventional of all, a series of lyrical episodes that contains the symphony’s most darkly emotional music, as well its most consoling lyricism.

That music leads straight into the finale, and the symphony ends with an apotheosis both of the Fanfare and the symphony’s very opening theme. No wonder, I think, that Koussevitsky thought the piece “the greatest American symphony ever written”. But its greatness isn’t just as a monument to post-war hope, it’s also a vindication of the still-popular power of symphonic thinking in expressing, as the playwright Clifford Odets puts it, “as lofty a nature as we in America have yet expressed”.

Three key recordings



London Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland Copland’s conducting wasn’t always thought to be the finest, but there’s no doubting the commitment he draws from the LSO in this performance.

New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein: Bernstein’s last recording of the Third makes every bar speak with significance - symphonic, emotional and American.

Detroit Symphony Orchestra/Neeme Järvi: Järvi’s is a Technicolor performance in recorded sound and emotional impact.

