Composers "Plagiarizing" Themselves

[pianoisthebest23]

Hi All, the other day in my school's wind ensemble, my teacher noticed that the composer of two of our pieces used an almost identical passage in both works. 

This made me wonder how often composers do that to themselves. Have any of you ever noticed that in classical music (or any style really)?

[Bob]

I've heard of that.  Consciously or unconsciously.  I remember a couple conductor's mocking a composer who's pieces all have the same format.  They were taking over motives and making up new pieces that matched the style. They didn't like the composer obviously.  But he's successful.  It's just a question of which motive to plug into the formula each year. 

[pianoisthebest23]

I've actually noticed that the beginnings to Chopin's first and third impromptus are quite similar.

[liszt1022]

Mozart recycled a sonata finale, one in C and one in F.
Some of Beethoven's 9th symphony 3rd mvt sounds like the 2nd mvt of the Pathetique sonata.
And I heard a similar passage from Beethoven's sonata op. 2 no. 3 first mvt in some kind of piano/string ensemble that I'm not sure of.
Berlioz's Idee fixe from Symphonie fantastique came from an earlier cantata of his own called Hermione.

[mjames]

Chopin Sonata No. 3 first movt

Allegro de Concert


It's hard to describe it....but here it goes

Chopins makes a really big leap to a really high note, there's suspense for a few milliseconds and then the notes come running down..........
i love it.....

And then when he replays this passage later on in both works he modifies it a bit and creates a new melody.......

ill explain it better when i can play both pieces
which is like in at least 8 years
hopefully

CHOPIN REUSES HIS IDEAS SOOOOOOOOO MUCH

god dammit i wish I could play almost all of his works

I'll come back to this thread in 10yrs

[j_menz]

Handel was notorious for it.

I suspect in the days before recordings, reusing ideas was pretty commonplace. We often forget that back in the day, people only heard things if they were played live, which means that large scale works, in particular, would only be heard once or twice in a lifetime, even by the musical litterati.