Strong start; slow finish......

[jerfilm]

I'm curious to know if others have had this same experience.  How often I have listened to a new piece (new for me, I mean) and thought, Wow, this is going to be something else?  An opening that really rouses you?  And perhaps a nice adagio or scherzo.  And then, the finale comes along and seems to be a huge nothing.  Just doesn't live up to the promise of the opening movements. 

I'm thinking perhaps the composer had some really good ideas for starters, pretty much used them up in the first movements and then came to the finale and thought "Oh G**, what am I gonna write now?"  Perhaps by now, a little tired and ready to move on to something else?   Or is it just me?

[monafam]

In those cases, will a composer try to rearrange the movements (maybe not as easy in the Classical/early Romantic periods?) so as to hide the "weaker" one while opening/ending strong? 

[eschiss1]

Consider the quantity of classical music published and recorded. A small percentage of it has inspiration to begin with. A smaller percentage of it maintains it. I think "some" rather than "seldom" follows from Sturgeon's Law (the second part of it).
Eric

[mbhaub]

In general, composers have often had trouble mostly with the finale of symphonies. Creating a finale that is a worthy apotheosis to the preceeding movements has dogged practically every composer at one time or another. Brahms surely nailed finales correctly in each of his four, but is there any other composer who had such a success rate? And the lesser the composer, it seems the more trouble finales created. As much as I love the Kalinnikov symphonies, there's no doubt that the finales contain a lot of loud, repetitious bombast while the composer tries to create a sense of triumph from meagre materials. The finales are perhaps the biggest problem with the Weingartner symphonies. Raff often goes astray and he's not alone.

[eschiss1]

well, post-early-Classical composers. I don't know if early-Classical composers worried much about the Finale Problem. Maybe they did...

[John H White]

I love the opening movement of Spohr's 4th symphony but he seems to fizzle out in the finale.