Mods: if this is better suited to Cafe Society, feel free to move it there. But I suspect there’s a factual answer to the question, or at least some interesting facts to be known.
Whenever I listen to Classical or early Romantic symphonies, it seems like the movements are almost four independent pieces that have been stitched together into a large piece of music; a given movement rarely (if ever) “quotes” an earlier movement in the symphony. However, themes seem to show up in multiple movements in later Romantic and 20th-century symphonies—for example, Tchaikovsky’s 4th (the folk-song theme giving way to a reprise of the opening fanfare in the finale) or Shostakovich’s 15th (the opening theme being brought back to bookend the piece in the finale.)
My questions are: who started this practice of tying the movements together in this way? Was it just “not done” earlier? Beethoven had that odd little recitative/recap section in the Finale of his Ninth, and Berlioz used it quite a bit in the context of his programmatic symphonies, but it didn’t seem to really catch on in “absolute music” until much later. Or am I just finding a pattern where non exists?
Not an actual answer to your question, but it’s worth noting that at the time of Beethoven’s Ninth, the concept of the symphony wasn’t all that old. Haydn composed his first symphony around 1760, Beethoven’s Ninth was composed around 1815.
The symphony developed out of the suite, a series of dances, that had a more or less clearly defined structure and those dances didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. So it took a while for today’s concept of a symphony to form, and Beethoven had a pretty heavy hand in that.
I believe I was taught that the originator of the practice in symphonic music was indeed Berlioz, whom you mention, in the Symphonie fantastique. The technique was called the idée fixe (term also coined by Berlioz) and was used extensively in tone poems through the 19th centuries. I’m guessing the reason it tended to be used in programme music (i.e., a piece that tells a narrative) more than absolute music, is because, as in Symphonie fantastique, it tends to represent a person or concept, so there wasn’t a real need in absolute music.
You always hear that Wagner was the one who popularized the leitmotif, but that’s not quite the same thing — and, of course, he’s hardly an early opera composer.
Beethoven’s Fifth also does this. The very familiar four notes at the beginning of the first movement reappear somewhere in the third movement, although the fourth note is the same as the first three (unlike in the first movement).