https://courses.lumenlearning.com/vccs-tcc-mus121-1/wp-admin/post.php?post=646&action=edit

Symphonic Poem

We have already explored  program music and the application of programmatic principles to traditional genres like the symphony especially noted with Berloiz’s Symphony  Fantastique. In this topic you’ll read about later Romantic composers’ pursuit of a new structure in which to use instrumental music as a means of depicting a story, picture, or landscape – the symphonic poem.  We have encountered the  overture  (a prelude to a larger work, usually a staged work such as an opera or ballet.) Often the overture  previews some of the important melodic themes that will be heard over the course of the opera or ballet. Overtures from popular operas are also  performed as standalone concert pieces.

However, composers then  began to write overtures that were not restricted in their connection to a larger musical work. Such works referred to some other well-known story or scene. This  link (from the overture)  leads to  a practice evolved into the genre known as the symphonic poem or tone poem.

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral or concert band music, usually in a single continuous section (a movement) that illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term to his 13 works in this vein. In its aesthetic objectives, the symphonic poem is in some ways related to opera. Whilst it does not use a sung text, it seeks, like opera, a union of music and drama.

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 to focus on following traditional patterns of musical form. This intention to inspire listeners was a consequence of Romanticism, which encouraged literary, pictorial and dramatic associations in music.

While many composers continued to write symphonies during the 1820s and 30s, “there was 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 increasingly turned to the “more compact form” of the concert overture “as a vehicle within which to blend musical, narrative and pictorial ideas.” Examples included Mendelssohn’s overtures A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) and The Hebrides (1830).

Evolution of the Symphonic Poem: Between 1845 and 1847, Franco-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. Some musicologists consider it the first of its genre, preceding Liszt’s compositions. 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.

The  Hungarian composer Franz Liszt desired to expand single-movement works beyond the concert overture form.  He intended to combine those programmatic qualities with a scale and musical complexity normally reserved for the opening movement of classical symphonies. The opening movement, with its interplay of contrasting themes under sonata form, was normally considered the most important part of the symphony. 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.

The origins and meaning LIszt’s  Les Preludes is not perfectly clear. A version of the preface  written for the occasion of a performance of Les préludes on December 6, 1855 alludes to the  poet Lamartine’s  alleged query but attributed to Princess Wittgenstein:

“What else is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death?—Love is the glowing dawn of all existence; but what is the fate where the first delights of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, the mortal blast of which dissipates its fine illusions, the fatal lightning of which consumes its altar; and where is the cruelly wounded soul which, on issuing from one of these tempests, does not endeavor to rest his recollection in the calm serenity of life in the fields? Nevertheless man hardly gives himself up for long to the enjoyment of the beneficent stillness which at first he has shared in Nature’s bosom, and when “the trumpet sounds the alarm”, he hastens, to the dangerous post, whatever the war may be, which calls him to its ranks, in order at last to recover in the combat full consciousness of himself and entire possession of his energy.” 

A further version of the preface was made for a performance of Les préludes on April 30, 1860, in Prague probably written by Hans von Bülow who directed the performance.  According to this version, Les préludes illustrates the development of a man from his early youth to maturity. In this interpretation, Les préludes may be taken as part of a sketched musical autobiography.   Liszt himself, in a letter to Eduard Liszt of March 26, 1857, gave another hint with regard to the title Les préludes.  According to this letter, Les préludes represents the prelude to Liszt’s own path of composition.

https://youtu.be/-mkJuWbbjaI

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/vccs-tcc-mus121-1/wp-admin/post.php?post=587&action=edit