Home > Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music > Ocean Symphony

ANTON RUBINSTEIN'S Second Symphony, 1854, in C major, first performed in Leipzig. He wrote it when he was only 24 years old, and it became his most popular symphonic work. It was criticized as having "too much water and too little ocean," but it endured for half a century as long as its kind of expansive Germanic ROMANTICISM held sway.

It was a sort of ritual for the N.Y. Philharmonic to open its seasons with the Ocean Symphony. Then, suddenly, something snapped. The work became unacceptable to aesthetically minded music lovers, and it simply vanished from the repertory. Sic transit Oceanus!