Tune in every day at 1 PM when host Chris Wolf will feature a different symphonic poem by the Hungarian composer.

Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, had attempted to write a Revolutionary Symphony as early as 1830; however, his focus for the early part of his adult life was mostly on his performing career. By 1847, Liszt was famous throughout Europe as a virtuoso pianist. "Lisztomania" swept across Europe, the emotional charge of his recitals making them "more like séances than serious musical events", and the reaction of many of his listeners could be characterized as hysterical.

Musicologist Alan Walker says, "Liszt was a natural phenomenon, and people were swayed by him.... With his mesmeric personality and long mane of flowing hair, he created a striking stage presence. And there were many witnesses to testify that his playing did indeed raise the mood of an audience to a level of mystical ecstasy." The demands of concert life "reached exponential proportions" and "every public appearance led to demands for a dozen others." Liszt desired to compose music, such as large-scale orchestral works, but lacked the time to do so as a travelling virtuoso. 

In September 1847, Liszt gave his last public recital as a paid artist and announced his retirement from the concert platform. He settled in Weimar, where he had been made its honorary music director in 1842, to work on his compositions.

Weimar was a small town that held many attractions for Liszt. Two of Germany's greatest men of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, had both lived there. As one of the cultural centers of Germany, Weimar boasted a theater and an orchestra plus its own painters, poets and scientists. The University of Jena was also nearby. Most importantly, the town's patroness was the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the sister of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. "This triple alliance of court, theater and academia was difficult to resist." The town also received its first railway line in 1848, which gave Liszt relatively quick access from there to the rest of Germany.


Inventing the Symphonic Poem

Liszt desired to expand single-movement works beyond the concert overture form. As he himself said, "New wine demands new bottles," and as Alan Walker points out, the "language of music was changing; it seemed pointless to Liszt to contain it in forms that were almost 100 years old."

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. 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, he 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. Liszt took Beethoven's practice one step further, combining separate movements into a single-movement cyclic structure. Many of Liszt's mature works follow this pattern, of which Les préludes is one of the best-known examples.

Here is Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a recording of Les préludes (from Alphonse de Lamartine), symphonic poem No.3, S.97.

 

 

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.  Thematic transformation, like cyclic form, was nothing new in itself; it had already been 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 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.

Between 1845 and 1847, Belgian-French 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. 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.

Until he coined the term "symphonic poem", Liszt introduced several of these new orchestral works as overtures; in fact, some of the poems were initially overtures or preludes for other works, only later being expanded or rewritten past the confines of the overture form. The first version of Tasso, Liszt stated, was an incidental overture for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1790 drama Torquato Tasso, performed for the Weimar Goethe Centenary Festival.

Here is part one of Tasso.

 

 

Orpheus was first performed in Weimar on February 16, 1854 as a prelude to Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice. 

Here is Orpheus S 98 - Symphonic Poem No. 4 performed by  the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stanislav Macura.

 

 

Likewise, Hamlet started out in 1858 as a prelude to the Shakespearean tragedy.

Here is part one of Hamlet.

 

Liszt first used the term "Sinfonische Dichtung" (symphonic poem) in public at a concert in Weimar on April 19, 1854 to describe Tasso. Five days later, he used the term "poèmes symphoniques" in a letter to Hans von Bülow to describe Les preludes and Orpheus.

Reaction

Liszt composed his symphonic poems during a period of great debate among musicians in central Europe and Germany, known as the War of the Romantics. While Beethoven's work was admired universally, conservatives that included Johannes Brahms and members of the Leipzig Conservatory considered it unsurpassable. Liberals such as Liszt, Wagner and others of the New German School saw Beethoven's innovations as a beginning in music, not an end. In this climate, Liszt had emerged as a lightning-rod for the avant-garde. Even with the innovative music being written by Wagner and Berlioz, it was Liszt, Walker says, "who was making all the noise and attracting the most attention" through his musical compositions, polemic writings, conducting and teaching.

Aware of the potential for controversy, Liszt wrote, "The barometer is hardly set on praise for me at the moment. I expect quite a hard downpour of rain when the symphonic poems appear." Joseph Joachim, who in his time in Weimar had found Liszt's workshop rehearsals and the trial-and-error process practiced in them to be wearisome, was dismayed at what he considered their lack of creativity. Vienna music critic Eduard Hanslick found even the term "Sinfonische Dichtung" contradictory and offensive; he wrote against them with vehemence after he had heard only one, Les préludes. Surgeon Theodor Billroth, who was also a musical friend of Brahms, wrote of them, "This morning [Brahms] and Kirchner played the Symphonic Poems (sic) of Liszt on two pianos ... music of hell, and can't even be called music—toilet paper music! I finally vetoed Liszt on medical grounds and we purged ourselves with Brahms's [piano arrangement of the] G Major String Sextet."

Wagner was more receptive; he agreed with the idea of the unity of the arts that Liszt espoused and wrote as much in his "Open Letter on Liszt's Symphonic Poems". Walker considers this letter seminal in the War of the Romantics:

It is filled with penetrating observations about the true nature of "programme music", about the mysterious relationship between "form" and "content" and about the historical links that bind the symphonic poem to the classical symphony.... The symphonic poems, Wagner assured his readers, were first and foremost music. Their importance for history ... lay in the fact that Liszt had discovered a way of creating his material from the potential essence of the other arts.... Wagner's central observations are so accurate ... that we can only assume that there had been a number of discussions between [Liszt and Wagner] as to what exactly a "symphonic poem" really was.

Such was the controversy over these works that two points were overlooked by the critics. First, Liszt's own attitude toward program music was derived from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony,  and he would have likely argued that his music, like the Pastoral, was "more the expression of feeling than painting." Second, more conservative composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Brahms had also written program music. Mendelssohn's The Hebrides Overture could be considered a musical seascape based on autobiographical experience but indistinguishable in musical intent from Liszt's symphonic poems. By titling the first of his Op. 10 Ballades as "Edward", Brahms nominated it as the musical counterpart of its old Scottish saga and namesake. This was not the only time Brahms would write program music.

Legacy

With the exception of Les préludes, none of the symphonic poems have entered the standard repertoire, though critics suggest that the best of them—Prometheus, Hamlet and Orpheus—are worth further listening. Musicologist Hugh MacDonald writes, "Unequal in scope and achievement though they are, they looked forward at times to more modern developments and sowed the seeds of a rich crop of music in the two succeeding generations." Speaking of the genre itself, MacDonald adds that, although the symphonic poem is related to opera in its aesthetics, it effectively supplanted opera and sung music by becoming "the most sophisticated development of programme music in the history of the genre."  Liszt authority Humphrey Searle essentially concurs with MacDonald, writing that Liszt "wished to expound philosophical and humanistic ideas which were of the greatest importance to him." These ideas were not only connected with Liszt's personal problems as an artist, but they also coincided with explicit problems being addressed by writers and painters of the era.

Bernard Haitink leads the London Philharmonic in a recording of Prometheus.

 

 

In developing the symphonic poem, Liszt "satisfied three of the principal aspirations of 19th century music: to relate music to the world outside, to integrate multi-movement forms ... and to elevate instrumental programme music to a level higher than that of opera, the genre previously regarded as the highest mode of musical expression."  In fulfilling these needs, the symphonic poems played a major role,  widening the scope and expressive power of the advanced music of its time. According to music historian Alan Walker, "Their historical importance is undeniable; both Sibelius and Richard Strauss were influenced by them, and adapted and developed the genre in their own way. For all their faults, these pieces offer many examples of the pioneering spirit for which Liszt is celebrated."

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonic_poems_(Liszt)

 

 

 

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