A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other non-musical source. The German term , literally tone poem, appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.
Background While many symphonic poems may compare in size and scale to symphonic movements (or even reach the length of an entire symphony), they are unlike traditional classical symphonic movements, in that their music is intended to inspire listeners to imagine or consider scenes, images, specific ideas or moods, and not necessarily to focus on following traditional patterns of musical form such as sonata form. This intention to inspire listeners was a direct consequence of Romanticism, which encouraged literary, pictorial and dramatic associations in music. According to the musicologist Hugh Macdonald, the symphonic poem met three 19th-century aesthetic goals: it related music to outside sources; it often combined or compressed multiple movements into a single principal section; and it elevated instrumental program music to an aesthetic level that could be regarded as equivalent to, or higher than opera.Macdonald, New Grove (1980), 18:428. The symphonic poem remained a popular composition form from the 1840s until the 1920s, when composers began to abandon the genre.
Symphonic poems are thought to bridge the gap between different modes of expression. Much research has been done on the semiotic relationship between symphonic poems and their extra-musical inspiration, such as art, literature and nature. Composers used many different musical gestures to evoke a non-musical concept. Some musical gestures appear to be literal representations of their non-musical counterparts. For example, Sergei Rachmaninoff uses an uneven time signature throughout The Isle of the Dead in order to suggest the rocking of a boat. In Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, the composer uses the orchestra to mimic the sound of an irregular heartbeat and labored breathing. Other musical gestures capture the essence of the subject on a more abstract level. For example, In Franz Liszt’s Hamlet, Liszt portrays the complex relation between Hamlet and Ophelia by juxtaposing a somber motif that is harmonically inconclusive (Hamlet) against a tranquil and harmonically conclusive motif (Ophelia), and developing the music from these principles. In Death and Transfiguration, a sprightly melody in a major key evokes childhood.
Some piano and chamber works, such as Arnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht, have similarities with symphonic poems in their overall intent and effect. However, the term symphonic poem is generally accepted to refer to orchestral works. A symphonic poem may stand on its own (as do those of Richard Strauss), or it can be part of a series combined into a symphonic suite or cycle. For example, The Swan of Tuonela (1895) is a tone poem from Jean Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Suite, and Vltava (The Moldau) by Bedřich Smetana is part of the six-work cycle Má vlast.
While the terms symphonic poem and tone poem have often been used interchangeably, some composers such as Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius have preferred the latter term for their works.
The first use of the German term Tondichtung (tone poem) appears to have been by Carl Loewe, applied not to an orchestral work but to his piece for piano solo, Mazeppa, Op. 27 (1828), based on the poem of that name by Lord Byron, and written twelve years before Liszt treated the same subject orchestrally.Linda Nicholson 2015), "Carl Loewe: Piano Music Volume One", liner notes to Toccata Classics CD TOCC0278, pp. 5–6. Accessed 14 January 2016.
The musicologist Mark Bonds suggests that in the second quarter of the 19th century, the future of the symphonic genre seemed uncertain. While many composers continued to write symphonies during the 1820s and '30s, "there were a growing sense that these works were aesthetically far inferior to Beethoven's.... The real question was not so much whether symphonies could still be written, but whether the genre could continue to flourish and grow." Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Niels Gade achieved successes with their symphonies, putting at least a temporary stop to the debate as to whether the genre was dead. Nevertheless, composers began to explore the "more compact form" of the concert overture "...as a vehicle within which to blend musical, narrative and pictoral ideas." Examples included Mendelssohn's overtures A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826) and The Hebrides (1830).
Between 1845 and 1847, the Belgian composer César Franck wrote an orchestral piece based on Victor Hugo's poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne. The work exhibits characteristics of a symphonic poem, and some musicologists, such as Norman Demuth and Julien Tiersot, consider it the first of its genre, preceding Liszt's compositions.Ulrich, 228.Murray, 214. However, Franck did not publish or perform his piece; neither did he set about defining the genre. Liszt's determination to explore and promote the symphonic poem gained him recognition as the genre's inventor.Macdonald, New Grove (2001), 24:802, 804; Trevitt and Fauquet, New Grove (2001), 9:178, 182. The idea of the symphonic poem, was a new musical concept for Liszt. He wanted a new way to engage the audience. The symphonic poem invented by Liszt had the main theme heard at the start of the piece, then develop through thematic transformation, never leaving behind musical coherence.
Liszt
The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt desired to expand single-movement works beyond the concert overture form. The music of overtures is to inspire listeners to imagine scenes, images, or moods; Liszt intended to combine those programmatic qualities with a scale and musical complexity normally reserved for the opening movement of classical symphonies.Spencer, P., 1233 The opening movement, with its interplay of contrasting themes under sonata form, was normally considered the most important part of the symphony.Larue and Wolf, New Grove (2001), 24:814–815. To achieve his objectives, Liszt needed a more flexible method of developing musical themes than sonata form would allow, but one that would preserve the overall unity of a musical composition.Searle, New Grove (1980), 11:41.Searle, Works, 61.
Liszt found his method through two compositional practices, which he used in his symphonic poems. The first practice was cyclic form, a procedure established by Beethoven in which certain movements are not only linked but actually reflect one another's content. Liszt took Beethoven's practice one step further, combining separate movements into a single-movement cyclic structure.Walker, Weimar, 357.Searle, "Orchestral Works", 281. Many of Liszt's mature works follow this pattern, of which Les préludes is one of the best-known examples. The second practice was thematic transformation, a type of variation in which one theme is changed, not into a related or subsidiary theme but into something new, separate and independent. As musicologist Hugh Macdonald wrote of Liszt's works in this genre, the intent was "to display the traditional logic of symphonic thought;"Macdonald, New Grove (1980), 18:429. that is, to display a comparable complexity in the interplay of musical themes and tonal 'landscape' to those of the Romantic symphony.
Thematic transformation, like cyclic form, was nothing new in itself. It had been previously used by Mozart and Haydn.Macdonald, New Grove (1980), 19:117. In the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven had transformed the theme of the "Ode to Joy" into a Turkish march.Walker, Weimar, 310. Weber and Berlioz had also transformed themes, and Schubert used thematic transformation to bind together the movements of his Wanderer Fantasy, a work that had a tremendous influence on Liszt.Searle, Music, 60–61. However, Liszt perfected the creation of significantly longer formal structures solely through thematic transformation, not only in the symphonic poems but in other works such as his Second Piano Concerto and his Piano Sonata in B minor. In fact, when a work had to be shortened, Liszt tended to cut sections of conventional musical development and preserve sections of thematic transformation.Walker, Weimar, 323 footnote 37.
While Liszt had been inspired to some extent by the ideas of Richard Wagner in unifying ideas of drama and music via the symphonic poem,'Wagner's Faust Overture (1840, revised 1855) had an important formative influence on Liszt and indicates how closely Wagner's imaginative world might have approached the symphonic poem had he not devoted himself so single-mindedly to music drama'. Macdonald, New Grove (1980), 18:429. Wagner gave Liszt's concept only lukewarm support in his 1857 essay On the Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, and was later to break entirely with Liszt's Weimar circle over their aesthetic ideals.
Czech composers Composers who developed the symphonic poem after Liszt were mainly Bohemian, Russian, and French; the Bohemians and Russians showed the potential of the form as a vehicle for the nationalist ideas fomenting in their respective countries at this time. Bedřich Smetana visited Liszt in Weimar in the summer of 1857, where he heard the first performances of the Faust Symphony and the symphonic poem Die Ideale.Clapham, New Grove (1980), 17:392, 399. Influenced by Liszt's efforts, Smetana began a series of symphonic works based on literary subjects—Richard III (1857–58), Wallenstein's Camp (1858–59) and Hakon Jarl (1860–61). A piano work dating from the same period, Macbeth a čarodějnice (Macbeth and the Witches, 1859), is similar in scope but bolder in style. Musicologist John Clapham writes that Smetana planned these works as "a compact series of episodes" drawn from their literary sources "and approached them as a dramatist rather than as a poet or philosopher."New Grove (1980), 17:399. He used musical themes to represent specific characters; in this manner he more closely followed the practice of French composer Hector Berlioz in his choral symphony Roméo et Juliette than that of Liszt.Clapham, New Grove (1980), 17:399. By doing so, Hugh Macdonald writes, Smetana followed "a straightforward pattern of musical description".
Smetana's set of six symphonic poems published under the general title of Má vlast became his greatest achievements in the genre. Composed between 1872 and 1879, the cycle embodies its composer's personal belief in the greatness of the Czech nation while presenting selected episodes and ideas from Czech history. Two recurrent musical themes unify the entire cycle. One theme represents Vyšehrad, the fortress over the river Vltava whose course provides the subject matter for the second (and best-known) work in the cycle; the other is the ancient Czech hymn "Ktož jsú boží bojovníci" ("Ye who are God's warriors"), which unites the cycle's last two poems, Tábor and Blaník.Macdonald, New Grove (1980), 18:429–30.