Most unusually, I wrote and published my previous entry on Josef Suk's Asrael Symphony without having recently listened to the piece. After publishing, I took it with me on a car drive and listened right through, and found out that memory, the weakest of all witnesses, had let me down in one or two details.
First: although the opening movement begins, proceeds, and ends in a relatively slow andante there are some faster passages, and a truly monumental climax, which my mind immediately interprets as an expression of the composer's rage at the cruel blows of fate.
The last movement, too, opens in a mood something like anger before finally spending its passion and finishing in a bleak, calm C major.
Also, in the slow 4th movement there is a frequently repeated melodic motif which opens with a descending major third played twice. This seems like an unconscious or semi-conscious reminiscence of the opening melody of Dvořák's concert overture Amid Nature. What else it might mean in the context of Suk's musical tribute to Otilka I can't imagine, which is why I'm less inclined to see this as a deliberate quotation (unlike the death motif from Dvořák's Requiem in the second movement.
Another interesting point is that the orchestration of that second movement in places intriguingly anticipates the scoring of Schmidt's 4th Symphony, which was the subject of my previous major post. I don't know if Asrael was familiar to Schmidt, but it seems entirely possible, even likely, that he heard it and perhaps even played it himself.
In sum: the Asrael Symphony is by no means all slow and solemn as I had previously written, but the dark and sombre mood certainly colours the entire work regardless of tempo.
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