 Throughout the history of the choral symphony , works have been composed for special occasions . One of the earliest was Mendelssohn 's Lobgesang , commissioned by the city of Leipzig in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg 's invention of movable type . More than a century later , Henryk Górecki 's Second Symphony , subtitled " Copernican " , was commissioned in 1973 by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus . In between these two works , in 1930 , conductor Serge Koussevitzky asked Stravinsky to write the Symphony of Psalms for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and , in 1946 , composer Henry Barraud , then head of Radiodiffusion Française , commissioned Darius Milhaud to write his Third Symphony , subtitled " Te Deum " , to commemorate the end of World War II . 
