Above is a quote from Ron Dough on the Now Spinning thread.

Can anyone else think of works that are clearly inspired by preceding works but are superior or at least equal?

I know that the Grieg piano concerto owes a lot to the Schumann, but is probably more popular. This doesn't make it better, of course, but it's a good example of what I am talking about.

Please also say who wrote the 'model' work, for everyone else's edification...

in the case of Pulcinella, original music attributed to Pergolesi. (Though later suspected to be in part by a bevy of other Italians...)

Here's a strange one which I've mentioned before elsewhere: the influence of Britten on Stravinsky. It sounds unlikely, but it works like this: they had the same publisher, and Stravinsky, who was very money-conscious, found out how much money Britten was making, which rather miffed him. I'm sure there's no need to point out that there was no musical influence at all in that direction (though Britten was known to have been very taken with the string sound of Apollo: a sound which colours his own string writing thereafter, nowhere more strongly than in The Prince of the Pagodas). What Stravinsky did take from Britten was texts (and of course his original lyricist, W. H. Auden).

Had it just been a case of setting the Lyke-Wake Dirge in his Cantata after Britten had used it in the Serenade, it might look like coincidence, but much more bizarrely when the older composer came to make settings of the biblical stories of Abraham and Isaac and Noah's flood he used the same mediæval texts, not that common, and certainly not immediately what one would expect a Russian ex-pat in the States to use. Needless to say the settings are very different: it will come as a huge shock to anyone who knows Britten's entry of the animals into the Ark section to hear the same words, slightly modernised, recited to what can only be descibed as a 'hoe-down' accompaniment. To cap it all, once Igor had had his snipe at the War Requiem he proceeded to set the Latin text himself in the Requiem Canticles: again very far removed from the Britten, but for me just as valid for all its spare strange soundworld.

 Usefully the arrival of the Sony box returning many of the Stravinsky rarities to circulation means that the peripheral works are easy to access again, though I know Bryn will join me in wishing that they'd included just a few more of the rarities that were in the archive, particularly the Craft recordings of the first one (and a half) versions of Svadebka/Les Noces. ( I've not forgotten you, Bryn, just haven't reached the turntable stage yet.)

Max Paddison says that everything Berg wrote has the stamp of the Chamber Symphony or Wagner's Tristan prelude.

Really; is that majority opinion?  For me the Chamber Concerto is Berg's best non-operatic work, and I'd take it over virtually anything by Schoenberg, and at least half of Webern too.

Beethiven's Pastoral Symphony and Brahms' first Cello sonata were both directly modelled on now-forgotten works by now-forgotten composers. In both cases the composer knew the earlier work and decided he could go one better.

And of course there's Diabelli's little waltz (actualy quite a good little piece I think) which Beethoven scorned as a 'Schusterfleck' but then returned to with immortal results.

Dvorak's Slavonic Dances were inspired by Brahms' Hungarian Dances and the former has ever since been more popular and, I think, better.

Welcome Poivrade! Are you perhaps the first of our number whose first post concerns Chausson and Ysaÿe? I suspect so...