Tone Poem Tuesday (Page 41)

I hated Debussy for years, but I started coming around a decade or so ago, when I began to appreciate his atmospherics more than I had before. La mer is, quite simply, a musical depiction of the sea, in three parts: “From dawn to noon on the sea” or “From dawn to midday on the sea” – very slow – animate little by little (B minor) “Play of the Waves” – allegro (with a very versatile rhythm) – animated (C sharp minor) “Dialogue of the wind and the sea” or “Dialogue between wind and waves” – animated and tumultuous –Down the rabbit hole….

Closely related to the tone poem is the Concert overture, which is the forerunner of the tone poem in many ways. Also a single movement work, a concert overture was often intended to kick off a program of symphonic music, much in the way a standard overture does for an opera. Here is one of the finest such concert overtures: the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms. Brahms composed this work as a “thank you” gesture to the University of Breslau, after the school awarded him an honorary degree. Displaying humor that’s fairly rare for Brahms, the work is mainly aDown the rabbit hole….

[Oops. Saved as draft and forgot to publish, as I do. Frequently.] This work by Richard Wagner is about as far as you can get from his huge, enormous, dense opera scores. Wagner composed this tone poem for chamber orchestra as a birthday gift for his wife, Cosima, arranging for it to be played privately by an orchestra arrayed on the stairs of their home on the morning of her birthday as she awoke. It is a gentle, almost magical work, full of luminous emotion that almost defies belief when one considers the usual nature of Wagner’s work. But then,Down the rabbit hole….

Antonin Dvorak wrote five major symphonic poems in his life, of which we hear the last today. A Hero’s Song has no specific program to describe or illuminate its action, and some have concluded that it is partially autobiographical. I don’t know about that, but it is a typically fine Dvorak work, full of melody and energy that is at times infectious, especially in the final bars when the kinetic nature of the music really picks up. I’ve found over the last several years that when I get in the car and turn on the classical music station and IDown the rabbit hole….

So let’s try something new! I already have Symphony Saturday, but symphonies are far from the only worthy form used by classical composers. There is plenty of music that is symphonic without being an actual symphony, so in this series we’ll explore that wonderful world. One major difference is that while I’ve arranged the Symphony Saturday posts roughly in the chronological order of the works’ composition, I’m not going to do that here. We’re just going to jump through time a lot, and hopefully hear some wonderful things along the way. So, what is a “tone poem” anyway? Glad youDown the rabbit hole….