Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy exists somewhere in the space between tone poem and concerto, with its prominent and technical part for solo violin. It’s not a concerto, however; its structure more casts it as a fantasy on a number of Scottish folk tunes. Bruch was a prolific composer in the Brahmsian tradition, although not much of his music is heard today. His Violin Concerto is a mainstay in the repertoire, and the Scottish Fantasy has not disappeared either. The nature of the work puts me in mind of Berlioz’s great symphony Harold in Italy.
Tone Poem Tuesday
Here is an oddity of sorts. I can’t really say much about it, because I have found almost no information whatsoever about it online. It is a symphonic poem called Visions, by Jules Massenet. Massenet was a French Romantic who is best known for his operas, and for the “Meditation from Thais“, which is one of the most famous solo violin works in all of classical music and a staple on “Music for a peaceful mood” compilations. Massenet was a gifted melodist whose work tends to exhibit high craftsmanship. Debussy eulogized Massenet thusly:
He was the most genuinely loved of all our contemporary musicians. His colleagues never forgave him for having such a power to please; it really was a gift. Massenet realized he could better express his genius if pastel tints and whispered melodies in works composed of lightness itself.
Visions is a late work in Massenet’s life, and it was never published. How it saw the light of day, I have no idea; nor do I have any information about its composition or its inspiration. All I have here is, quite literally, the music, which is meditative and playful and ultimately dreamlike, with an offstage solo violin and an offstage soprano. It’s a highly meditative work that seems a cross between Romanticism and Impressionism, or between the symphonic language of Europe in the 1800s and the glass-like textures of Ralph Vaughan Williams to come. There is something compelling about this piece, which I found simply by doing a YouTube search for “Jules Massenet”. I ended up listening to it three times in succession as I worked.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
The waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr. are more than just waltzes. They’re much more than just dance music for an elegant age now gone by; they all contain some of the most wonderful tone painting that I know. It’s impossible to hear these waltzes and not get a feel for the culture in which Strauss was raised, with its attention not just to courtly elegance but also to the pastoral nature that surrounded the sparkling city of Vienna.
Here is one of the most famous of those waltzes, Tales from the Vienna Woods.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Some years ago I wrote about the Oliver Stone movie Nixon, which is a sort of companion piece to his JFK. As in the earlier film, John Williams provided the score, and it’s an underrated standout in his long parade of amazing works. The opening track on the CD is, in my mind, a brilliant film music tone poem, called “The 1960s: The Turbulent Years”. There are brief moments of lyrical optimism, but they are shot through with moments of militaristic menace.
Williams’s score for the film highlights Stone’s mood of inward-looking paranoia that dominates the film, and it accentuates the central tragedy that Nixon might well be the quintessential political figure for America in the last half of the 20th century. It’s a brilliant score, and this track shows why.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
If you listen to this overture without knowing what it is, as I did the other morning when it came on the radio, you might think — especially at the end — that it’s a very British work.
Something about that big rendition of “God Save the Queen” at the very end, I’m guessing! But…that’s not “God Save the Queen”. Nor is it “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. Sure, it’s the same melody, but in this case, the anthem is actually “Heil dir im Siegerkranz”, which was the national anthem of Prussia during the life of composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), who wrote this piece. It’s the “Jubilee Overture”, which Weber wrote for a festival in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the ascension of King Frederick Augustus the First of Saxony. The European royal families were famously inter-related, so it seems somehow fitting that their inter-relations should extend to things like their anthems, no?
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Tone Poem Tuesday
I heard this work on the radio just the other day and I found it captivating. It is Im Sommerwind — “In the Summer Wind” — by Anton Webern.
I am honestly not sure if I have ever heard anything by Webern before. Primarily an early-20th century composer, Webern is known for being one of the chief students and followers of Anton Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, in which the traditional systems of tonality in Western music were finally broken down completely. I’ve always found twelve-tone music difficult, and in truth I have honestly never much explored it (and yes, perhaps I should). This piece is an early work of Webern’s, written before he really took Schoenberg’s twelve-tone lessons to heart, but it is still easy to hear the way it straddles the line between Romanticism and Modernism. This work is deeply steeped in the late Wagnerian sound, the post-Tristan period when a lot of music felt like it was simultaneously grounded and at sea.
Webern apparently felt that Im Sommerwind was not representative of where, as a young man, he wanted to go as a composer, and he shelved the piece. It went unperformed until 1962, fifteen years after the composer’s death.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a number of liturgical melodies and chants throughout the work, giving the piece a feel of being both older and newer than it actually is. Apparently in Russia Easter is called “the Bright Holiday”, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture teems with both a celebration of the Resurrection and a more pagan exultation in the coming of Spring.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: “He wrote The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”
Which he did.
The Sorceror’s Apprentice is pretty much the only work by Dukas to enter the standard repertoire, and I couldn’t begin to tell you without Googling what else he might have written. This is partly because apparently Dukas was extremely self-critical, and he actually destroyed a good number of his own works rather than let them be heard. A number of his works have survived, but as of this writing, Dukas remains to me entirely unknown outside of this one tremendously famous piece (which received an assist from Walt Disney when it was included in Fantasia).
Here is The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
An American in Paris.
Is it a tone poem? You bet! Or rather, a “symphonic poem”, which is really much the same thing. Gershwin intended the work to reflect the energy and rhythms he experienced while traveling in 1920s Paris himself, and the work really does buzz with a certain cosmopolitan energy, at least until the pace slackens and we turn to the plaintive blues sung by the solo trumpet. It’s amazing to me that such an optimistic work could be inspired by a European city so soon after the cataclysm of World War I, but in the roaring twenties, I imagine Paris was a place of amazing energy. I tend to see this work as a companion to the Rhapsody in Blue, but an older, more mature one.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Here’s a strange work by Ludwig van Beethoven, written to commemorate a victory in battle by the Duke of Wellington. The piece is viewed as one of Beethoven’s lesser works, and probably rightly so. Even Beethoven himself admitted as much, saying “What I shit is better than anything you come up with!” Still, it’s worth a fun listen once in a while. It’s basically a potboiler of a piece. Here’s Wellington’s Victory.
Of course, this type of thing would be done a lot more convincingly decades later by Tchaikovsky in the 1812 Overture….