Seemingly insignificant music forming the final climax

[Maestro267]

I have two examples here where some seemingly insignificant music either out of nowhere or buried in the middle of a movement turns out to become the crowning glory of the symphony in the closing bars of the finale.

Mahler 5 - A few minutes from the end of the 2nd movement, a D major chorale appears and is not really dwelt on again, until it suddenly emerges as the triumphant climactic music at the end of the finale.

Rachmaninov 2 - Near the end of the scherzo, once again a chorale appears, this time fairly quietly during the wind-down. This turns out to be the music that, in E major, emerges as the crowning glory that the symphony has been striving towards.

Other examples of this?

[some guy]

I don't think I've noticed this, Maestro, not as such.

My favorite is similar--things early in a piece that come back late in a piece, in entirely different contexts. Oh, that's fun!!

Dvořák's wind serenade is a good example. The tune from early comes back in the last movement to a huge build up. Build up to what? We don't know, but it's definitely a buildup and huge. And then the whole business just collapses, leaving only that tune from the opening of the serenade, unaltered but completely fresh and new and startling in its new context.

Fun!!

Anyway, since I had nothing to contribute to your interesting pattern, could I persuade you to share some more examples, yourself? (I don't want to wait for if and when someone else jumps in.)

[relm1]

Sibelius 2.  The ending coda is a huge statement of an idea that seams to be an afterthought earlier and keeps coming back.  I think this is not actually rare at all.  This is the essence of drama.  It's the greek chorus saying "remember what was said, it will be important later" and is all over drama for millennia.  Shostakovitch No. 7 for example ends with a huge version of the opening statement that is ignored throughout the work but comes back with a vengeance.  The whole symphony is developed from the opening moment even though it's not apparent.  Mahler 2, the rising of the dead is a brief statement in the finale that returns several times each growing in significance until the tremendous ending. 

[Brian]

Rachmaninov 2 - Near the end of the scherzo, once again a chorale appears, this time fairly quietly during the wind-down. This turns out to be the music that, in E major, emerges as the crowning glory that the symphony has been striving towards.

Whoa, I have listened to this symphony hundreds of times, have it memorized and can play it in my head, and never realized that those are the same tune. Wow. Thank you! (Of course, both of them are just a slight variation on the very first theme in the very intro of the symphony.)

The love theme supplies the ending of Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane but I guess as a love theme it is pretty important.

[kyjo]

Whoa, I have listened to this symphony hundreds of times, have it memorized and can play it in my head, and never realized that those are the same tune. Wow. Thank you! (Of course, both of them are just a slight variation on the very first theme in the very intro of the symphony.)

Same here! Anyone who thinks Rachmaninov wasn't a sophisticated composer can now exit the premises.

[Mandryka]

I have two examples here where some seemingly insignificant music either out of nowhere or buried in the middle of a movement turns out to become the crowning glory of the symphony in the closing bars of the finale.

Mahler 5 - A few minutes from the end of the 2nd movement, a D major chorale appears and is not really dwelt on again, until it suddenly emerges as the triumphant climactic music at the end of the finale.

Rachmaninov 2 - Near the end of the scherzo, once again a chorale appears, this time fairly quietly during the wind-down. This turns out to be the music that, in E major, emerges as the crowning glory that the symphony has been striving towards.

Other examples of this?

The very ending of Rosenkavelier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D7abQTy71I&t=195m14s

[DaveF]

Rachmaninoff again - at the end of the first Symphonic Dance, where you might expect a return of the sad saxophone theme that has formed the middle section, you get instead a theme that you haven't heard before in this piece, our old friend the Dies Iræ plainchant.  I don't know any other composer who made one theme so much his own that he could produce it in many different guises in so many different works and make it sound like a recapitulation.

[Jo498]

It's doubtful if it should count as climax but the coda of the finale in Beethoven's quartet op.95 has apparently quite new music only distantly connected to anything before as well as a change to a fast tempo, different meter and the major. It's a "resolution" out of nowhere.

Also not quite answering the question but in WTC I f# major fugue a humorous subsidiary theme takes over at some stage in the fugue and dominates even at the end of the piece.