Tone poems? (long)
Andrea TRAVE
when you are referring to this kind of composition, you mean a piece of music
with an extra musical content, eventually a written program which accompanies
the work itself, no clearly defined structure and, usually but not always, a
short range of development.
Yet, this is not a biunivocal definition. Just for the freedom you have in
defining a tone poem, in this category there may be works quite different
each from the others. It is very hard to put together Franck's "Psyche'",
Honegger's "Pacific 231" and Maw's "Odyssey"! Again, you are likely to find
a lot of pieces with some other technical name that fall into the definition
of tone poem.
The origin of the tone poem may be found very early in music history, when
musical form was still a necessity, which some composers of great inventive-
ness tried to overcome. You may think of the extra-musical imitations of
Biber, or of the concertos of Vivaldi (the 4 seasons have 4 sonnets which
literally describe, step by step, the events which music refers to), or of
several works of the Madrigalists in Italy.
Then, the birth of the symphonic genre pushed several more or less known
composers to exploit the symphony "a programma": Haydn, Beethoven (not
Mozart:is just this the reason why I don't like him?). This process continued
until the form literally burst in the hands of the composers. The point of
no return was Berlioz, whose genius gave us a series of "symphonies" (but
you can hardly recognize Romeo and Juliet as a symphony!) that can surely
be called as immediate parents of the tone-poem genre.
You have always two parents for a son (well, sometimes even more!!! ;-) ),
and in this case the mother was the concert ouverture, another genre born
with the Romanticism, and in particular with Carl Maria von Weber. Composers
began to write ouvertures not directly linked to any stage work, which in
a short temporal range described a sort of extra-musical subject (which
may be a literary work, a geographical site, a myth... anything the composer's
fancy could think of), cast in a form that is less strictly defined than a
sonata-form movement. Anyway, this kind of work is normally *inspired* by,
but not strictly *follows* this external subject: so, you cannot find what
a single passage in Mendelssohn's "Hebrides" means, but the piece, in the
whole, give you an impression of the atmosphere of those (wonderful indeed!)
islands.
Then came Ferenc... Liszt was a strenuous advocate of Berlioz and Weber, so
he surely had them as reference points. I think (not sure of this!!!) that
he was the first person who used the definition "tone poems" for his works.
His first TP was inspired by a poem of Victor Hugo, "Ce qu'on entend sur la
montaigne", and, even if the result was not particularly remarkable, it set
immediately the characteristics of this kind of work: *NO* rigorous form
(a ouverture still preserved the sonata structure) and any kind of source
of inspiration. If we look to his tone poems, we find literature ("Les
Preludes", "From cradle to tomb"), myth ("Prometheus", "Orpheus"), history
("Tasso", "Mazeppa"), art ("Hunnenschlacht"). The formal freedom allowed him
to exploit also the orchestral writing, iontroducing new instruments (bells
in "Heroide funebre", organ in "Hunnenschlacht") and stressing them with
very tasking passages, following the example of Berlioz. However, even he
felt the necessity of cast the most tasking subjects in a rigorous symphonic
form: in fact, he wrote two programmatic symphonies which took inspiration
by two masterpieces of the world literature: Dante's "Divina commedia" and
Goethe's "Faust". He was not able yet to write long and unstructured pieces:
this would be possible at the end of the century with Strauss.
Immediately, a certain numbers of scholars took his example to write TPs. In
particular, Cesar Franck gave interesting results in "Le Chausser maudit",
"Les Eolides" and "Psyche'" (but this has a curious form in separated parts).
Anyway, the golden age fot the TP was in the second half of '800, whit the
birth of the national schools which, in their search for unrestricted output,
found a practical means in it for conveying their ideas. Smetana released
the cycle "Ma Vlast", Dvorak ended his career with an excellent series of
5 tone poems after popular ballads ("The Golden Spinning-wheel" and "The
Noon Witch" above all), Rimsky Korsakov wrote "Sadko", Balakirev the
beguiling and exotic "Tamara", Saint Saens was a massive producer, and so
Sibelius (look for his lesser known works, like "The Oceanides", "Night
Ride and Sunrise" or "Luonnotar", for orchestra and soprano!).
Literally speaking, Tchaikovsky wrote only a tone poem ("Fatum"), but in this
category you can easily put his fantasy ouvertures "Romeo and Juliet" and
"Hamlet", symphonic fantasies "Francesca da Rimini" and "The Tempest", the
symphonic ballad "The Voyevoda" and the Lisztian symphony "Manfred".
Russian composers were very fond of this genre: Liadov, Glazunov, Gliere,
Kalinnikov, Rachmaninov.
With the turn of the century, the tone poem came to reflect the different
modern schools of literature and art which came to a birth. Decadentism
inspired the egomaniac works of Skrjabin ("Poeme de l'extase") and the lush
and over-riped compositions of the late Suk ("Ripening", "Summer Tale"), but
also the refined and suggestive "La Peri" of Paul Dukas or the first,
tentative works of Schonberg ("Verklarte Nacht" and "Pelleas und Melisande")
and Webern (the symphonic idyll "Im Sommerwind"). The Impressionism caused
a change of scope, and Debussy was a clear example of this new mood. His
works are never called "tone poems" but "images", "esquisses" (although this
was not sufficient for Satie, who mocked him maintaining to like above all
the moment around 11:15 in "De l'aube au midi sur la mer"). Other composers
who were inspired by the Impressionists were De Falla (his "Noches" are
practically a tone poem with concertante piano) and, in the USA, Charles
Griffes ("The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Kahn" and "The White Peacock"). I would
add also Delius that, if not directly inspired, surely was very near to their
poetical ideas.
Another champion was Richard Strauss. His opulent writing style and rich
fantasy gave birth to a magnificient output, always standing on a level of
excellence. Even he felt the need to introduce a sort of internal structure
in his works, to avoid any lack of unity: so, "Till Eulenspiegel" is cast in
a rondo form, "Don Quixote" is a set of variations, "Eine Alpensinfonie"
is a symphony, even if not so well recognizable. He used very rigorous
relations among themes and sections in "Zarathustra" and "Ein Heldenleben",
and introduced solo instruments with an extra-musical valence. Thus, the
more classically written tome poems are his first: "Don Juan", "Macbeth"
and "Death and Transfiguration", but even there you can find strains of
his search for surprising novelties and virtuosistic writing.
This century had this genre a bit scarcely considered, qualitatively rather
than quantitatively. As a matter of fact, a lot of composers wrote tone poems,
but almost always regarding them as minor works, written for delight without
serious contents.Stravinsky gave us the glittering divertissement "Le Chant
du Rossignol", Nielsen the pastorale "Pan and Syrinx", Milhaud the spirited
"Le boeuf sur le toit", Martinu "The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca". None
of the works of Prokofiev or Shostakovich may be considered a TP, and so is
the case of Britten or Vaughan Williams (to great disappointment for me :-( ).
At the same time, also the other classical symphonic forms came to a crisis,
and this was the source for such cross-overs like Bernstein's "The Age of
Anxiety" (a bit symphony, a bit concerto, a bit suite, abit program music...)
or Ives's "Holydays Symphony". The latter was, under a certain optics, a good
producer of program music: just think of "Central Park in the Dark". Yet, the
range of this work is so reduced that they cannot be fitted to this definition
but rather the can be considered "musical reflections" or "impressions".
However, there were also some excellent 20th-C TP composers: Respighi
(beyond his most known production, try "Ballad of Gnomids" or "Church
Windows"), Honegger ("Pastorale d'ete'", "Pacific 231", "Rugby"), Copland
("Quiet City", "El salon Mexico"), Bax (an enormous output, with the
curiosity of the so called "nature poem" "Nynpholept").
I end mentioning Revueltas's "Sensemaya'", an incredible short piece which
describes a sacral rite of the Mayas.
I don't think to have given a good and precise definition of what a tone poem
is, but I hope to have given some hints about the multi-faced nature of this
kind of composition.
Happy listening!
--
Andrea Trave tr...@cibs.sns.it
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URL http://sns.it/~trave/
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"...le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile."
(Henry de Regnier, quoted by Ravel above the score of his "Valses nobles et
sentimentales")