Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Tchaikovsky! Technically this isn’t a “tone poem”; Tchaikovsky himself called it a “Fantasy overture”. But for the purposes of this series I take a pretty expansive definition of “tone poem” anyway, so here’s Romeo and Juliet.

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Jean Sibelius and the virtual national classical music work of Finland. Here’s Finlandia. (Worth watching in HD fullscreen.)

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As much as I love the Russian Romantics, the work of Modest Mussorgsky has always left me a little cold. However, it’s the Halloween season, and Night on Bald Mountain is a staple of scary music, so…here it is.

Kind of.

I was driving home the other day and Night on Bald Mountain was on the radio, but it wasn’t really Night on Bald Mountain. There was a vocal component to it that I had never heard before, and I ended up listening to the entire thing. It turns out that this was an earlier version of the work, called St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain. Confused, I looked the work up when I got home.

Mussorgsky’s personal life was apparently something of a mess — and by that, I mean, he was an absolute wreck. So much so that when he died young, he left behind piles of manuscripts in various states of completion and/or disrepair, which is why the most famous version of Night on Bald Mountain, the one that everyone knows, is actually an edit made by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. (Also, his famous Pictures at an Exhibition‘s orchestral version is by Maurice Ravel.) At some point, Mussorgsky made a version including child choir, standard choir, and baritone soloist. It’s hard to figure out what is Mussorgsky and what belongs to later editors, but this version of the work is, to my ears, more interesting than the standard Rimsky-Korsakov arrangement.

And as a bonus, here’s another Halloween-appropriate work, Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead.

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American music before the rise of jazz — roughly, prior to George Gershwin’s rise to prominence — presents a kind of odd musical landscape. The musical culture here was still greatly steeped in European traditions and formal approaches, and attempts to create a kind of “national” American music by grafting Native American songs and black spirituals onto European forms mostly resulted in works that are often interesting and even quite good, but never really great. There was good work being done in the USA in the late 19th century, but the work almost never rises above the level of the second tier of European composers of the day.

The most famous of these composers was likely Edward Macdowell, whose work was regarded highly in his day but faded as it became clear that MacDowell’s work really did not advance music much at all, but rather looked backward toward traditions that were already fading. Still, MacDowell’s music is hardly worthy of complete neglect, and gradually his work has seen more exploration and appreciation over time.

Here is Hamlet and Ophelia, a tone poem that began as two separate pieces that were later edited into one by the composer. MacDowell may not have been a terribly original composer, but he was a fine creator of moody Romantic music that is often tinged with idealistic views of old legends and beloved literature, and one hears all of that in Hamlet and Ophelia.

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I found this while searching for recordings by Sir Neville Marriner for yesterday’s post on his passing. Marriner seems to be best known for conducting Baroque and Classical-era music, but he was far from limited to those periods. Frederick Delius lived from 1862 to 1934, and this work, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, premiered in 1912. Delius’s work defies easy classification. He is more Impressionist than anything else, it seems to me, but even that’s not a totally fair way to look at his music. This work has a very English feel to it, but some of its melodic material is based on Norwegian folksong, and Delius had many other influences in his music. He accomplishes something very atmospheric in a mere six minutes here.

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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 – give up very slightly (C sharp minor)

Debussy’s intent is not at all to meditate on humans and their relationship with the sea, but on the sea itself. Like a lot of Debussy, the work is haunting and evocative, sweeping the listener along on a series of orchestral “images”.

Here is La mer.

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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 a collection of light-hearted tunes and even drinking songs, richly orchestrated in vigorous fashion. I can never help, when I hear this piece, wishing that Brahms had managed to tap into this part of his own psyche a little more often. Alas!

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[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, Richard Wagner was an enormously complex man. As David Dubal writes, in describing this work, “That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb.”

Here is the Siegfried Idyll.

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