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. 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 5/8 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.
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). 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 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
thumb|upright|Franz Liszt in 1858
The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt desired to expand single-movement works beyond the concert overture form. 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.
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. Many of Liszt's mature works follow this pattern, of which Les préludes is one of the best-known examples. 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. In the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven had transformed the theme of the "Ode to Joy" into a Turkish march. 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. 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
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 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. 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. 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. By doing so, Hugh Macdonald writes, Smetana followed "a straightforward pattern of musical description".
While expanding the form to a unified cycle of symphonic poems, Smetana created what Macdonald terms "one of the monuments of Czech music" Clapham adds that in his musical depiction of scenery in these works, Smetana "established a new type of symphonic poem, which led eventually to Sibelius's Tapiola". Also, in showing how to apply new forms for new purposes, Macdonald writes that Smetana "began a profusion of symphonic poems from his younger contemporaries in the Czech lands and Slovakia", including Antonín Dvořák, Zdeněk Fibich, Leoš Janáček and Vítězslav Novák.
Dvořák wrote two groups of symphonic poems, which date from the 1890s. The first, which Macdonald variously calls symphonic poems and overtures, however, the sequence of events and characters portrayed does not correspond to the notes. Macdonald writes that Stasov and the patriotic group of composers known as The Five or The Mighty Handful, went so far as to hail Mikhail Glinka's Kamarinskaya as "a prototype of Russian descriptive music"; despite the fact that Glinka himself denied the piece had any program, In this Glinka was influenced by French composer Hector Berlioz, whom he met in the summer of 1844.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote only two orchestral works that rank as symphonic poems, his "musical tableau" Sadko (1867–92) and Skazka (Legend, 1879–80), originally titled Baba-Yaga. While this may perhaps be surprising, considering his love for Russian folklore, both his symphonic suites Antar and Scheherazade are conceived in a similar manner to these works. Russian folklore also provided material for symphonic poems by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Glazunov. Glazunov's Stenka Razin and Lyadov's Baba-Yaga Kikimora and The Enchanted Lake are all based on national subjects.
While none of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's symphonic poems has a Russian subject, they hold musical form and literary material in fine balance. R.W.S. Mendl, writing in The Musical Quarterly, states that Tchaikovsky was by temperament peculiarly well-fitted for the composition of symphonic poems. Even his works in other instrumental forms are very free in structure and frequently partake of the nature of programme music.
Among later Russian symphonic poems, Sergei Rachmaninoff's The Rock shows as much the influence of Tchaikovsky's work as Isle of the Dead (1909) does its independence from it. A similar debt to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov imbues Igor Stravinsky's The Song of the Nightingale, excerpted from his opera The Nightingale. Alexander Scriabin's The Poem of Ecstasy (1905–08) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1908–10), in their projection of an egocentric theosophic world unequalled in other symphonic poems, are notable for their detail and advanced harmonic idiom. it still had a well-established tradition of narrative and illustrative music reaching back to Berlioz and Félicien David. For this reason, French composers were attracted to the poetic elements of the symphonic poem. In fact, César Franck had written an orchestral piece based on Hugo's poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne before Liszt did so himself as his first numbered symphonic poem.
The symphonic poem came into vogue in France in the 1870s, supported by the newly founded Société Nationale and its promotion of younger French composers. In the year after its foundation, 1872, Camille Saint-Saëns composed his Le rouet d'Omphale, soon following it with three more, the most famous of which became the Danse macabre (1874).
After Saint-Saëns came Vincent d'Indy. While d'Indy called his trilogy Wallenstein (1873, 1879–81) "three symphonic overtures", the cycle is similar to Smetana's Má vlast in overall scope. Henri Duparc's Lenore (1875) displayed a Wagnerian warmth in its writing and orchestration. Franck wrote the delicately evocative Les Éolides, following it with the narrative Le Chasseur maudit and the piano-and-orchestral tone poem Les Djinns, conceived in much the same manner as Liszt's Totentanz. Ernest Chausson's Vivane illustrates the penchant shown by the Franck circle for mythological subjects.
Germany
thumb|[[Honoré Daumier, Painting of Don Quixote, ]]
Both Liszt and Richard Strauss worked in Germany, but while Liszt may have invented the symphonic poem and Strauss brought it to its highest point, overall the form was less well received there than in other countries. Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner dominated the German musical scene, but neither wrote symphonic poems; instead, they devoted themselves completely to music drama (Wagner) and absolute music (Brahms). Therefore, other than Strauss and numerous concert overtures by others, there are only isolated symphonic poems by German and Austrian composers—Hugo Wolf's Penthesilea (1883–85), Alexander von Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau (1902-03) and Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande (1902–03). Because of its clear relationship between poem and music, Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (1899) for string sextet has been characterised as a non-orchestral 'symphonic poem'. Strauss's handling of form is also worth noting, both in his use of thematic transformation and his handling of multiple themes in intricate counterpoint. His use of variation form in Don Quixote is handled exceptionally well, One of Sibelius's greatest works, Finlandia, focuses on Finnish independence. He wrote it in 1901 and added choral lyrics – the Finlandia hymn by Veikko Antero Koskenniemi – to the central part after Finland became independent.
The symphonic poem did not enjoy as clear a sense of national identity in other countries, even though numerous works of the kind were written. Composers included Arnold Bax and Frederick Delius in Great Britain; Edward MacDowell, Howard Hanson, Ferde Grofé and George Gershwin in the United States; Carl Nielsen in Denmark; Zygmunt Noskowski and Mieczysław Karłowicz in Poland and Ottorino Respighi in Italy. Also, with the rejection of Romantic ideals in the 20th century and their replacement with ideals of abstraction and independence of music, the writing of symphonic poems went into decline.