A rose by any other name…
On WBJC, we use the terms symphonic poem and tone poem interchangeably, and that tends to lead to confusion on the part of some of our listeners. In fact, they are the exact same thing. Whatever term we use, we are referring to a single-movement orchestral piece that tells a story or paints a musical picture of a non-musical subject. That could be a literary work, a legend, a work of art, an inspiration from nature, or even an idea.
So why, then, do we have two different terms for the exact same thing? To confuse matters still more, there is also the concert overture, which is a single-movement orchestral piece inspired by a particular theme or story—distinct from an overture to a theater piece. What sets a concert overture apart from a symphonic or tone poem, though, is that it sticks to traditional classical forms—like sonata form, for example, with an exposition, development, and recapitulation. (The theater overture was, after all, the basis of early symphonies during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and both followed a fast-slow-fast, three-section format.)
The first—justly famous—example of a concert overture is A Midsummer Night’s Dream after Shakespeare’s comedy, which Felix Mendelssohn wrote in 1826, when he was just seventeen-and-a-half years old. It’s written in sonata form and features regular phrasings and harmonic transitions. In a concert overture, the music dictates the form that the story takes, whereas the story dictates the structure of the music in a symphonic or tone poem.
Franz Liszt wanted to expand the single-movement concert overture into a musical form that he could shape according to the programmatic requirements. The first time he used the term “symphonic poem” (Symphonische Dichtung) in public was at a concert in Weimar on February 23, 1854 to describe Les preludes, the third of his thirteen symphonic poems. This work began as a prelude to a projected choral cycle, The Four Elements, on four poems by the French author Joseph Autran. When Liszt abandoned the choral cycle project, he revised the overture as a stand-alone piece with a new title, Les préludes (d’après Lamartine), referring to an ode by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine—although the inspiration seems to have been more after the fact than directly related to the ode.
The reason why we have two distinct terms for the same musical form is purely semantic. While Liszt coined the name “symphonic poem” in the 1850s, when Richard Strauss began composing his massive single-movement symphonic works in the 1880s, he preferred the term “tone poem” (Tondichtung), though the concept remained identical.
Strauss’s vast reputation rests, largely, on his operas and his tone poems. He made his first forays into composing programmatic music—as opposed to abstract music like symphonies, concerti, and so on—when he spent several weeks touring Italy, during which time he made sketches for Aus Italien, which he initially categorized as a Symphonic Fantasy. His first fully fledged tone poem was Macbeth, inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy. Eight months later came Don Juan, and Strauss’s reputation as a preeminent composer of tone poems was sealed.
Regardless of which name we use, these works share a few distinct and defining traits. Symphonic poems and tone poems typically condense their whole structure into a single-movement narrative form. These works are, in a sense, like an opera without words in the way they conjure particular images, emotions, or literary themes. The musical form is guided by the plot or story being told, so these works tend to have a free structure, rather than classic musical forms.
For your listening pleasure and exploration:
A sampling of other well-known works in this genre:
There are, of course, many others, and I wish you well exploring them!
Tags:Symphonic Poem, Tone Poem
