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.
Tone Poem Tuesday
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
[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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Tone Poem Tuesday
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 I hear an orchestral work that brings simple, sheer pleasure, as often as not it’s something by Antonin Dvorak. His music seems to be very closely attuned to my happier, non-brooding self, and that certainly applies here, as well.
Of course, the most famous composer of tone poems of all time, Richard Strauss, would not long afterwards write a work called A Hero’s Life, which has not been neglected as has the Dvorak work. We’ll get to Strauss in good time, but for now, here’s the Dvorak.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Is there a more Me thing to do, blogging-wise, than announce a new series, post the first post in that new series, and then promptly forget about that series a week later? Oops! I completely forgot about Tone Poem Tuesday last week. Now, I did have a lot of different stuff going on, but Ye Gods, I gotta do better than that.
So this week we attend upon a work by Sir Arnold Bax (Great Britain, 1883-1953). In fact, this might be Bax’s most well-known work, although I personally have only heard it a handful of times. Bax’s music tends to be earthy and rustic, almost to the point of being rough-hewn. In addition, Bax’s music is atmospheric and clearly molded in the spirit of Romanticism, which is almost certainly why, to a large extent, his music fell into neglect after his death: his particular musical idiom was simply not in fashion anymore. Couple that with the fact that his scores tend to require large numbers of performers, and it all adds up to music that spent several decades languishing, except for occasional dustings-off of his tone poems, the most famous of which is apparently this one: Tintagel.
Bax was also heavily influenced by Celtic lore, and the castle of Tintagel in Cornwall is of major import in such lore, seeing as how it’s traditionally held as the birthplace of King Arthur. Bax’s tone poem is meant to convey some of the emotions of the location and give a sense of its character, through music. Bax eschewed any specific program for this work, intending it to be mainly suggestive of the ruined castle on the tiny spit of land that is constantly being pounded by the sea.
Here is Tintagel by Sir Arnold Bax.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
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 you asked! Tone Poem is a term that is often used interchangeably with symphonic poem or any number of other similar terms, denoting a single-movement work, usually intended to be illustrative or at least suggestive of some extra-musical work, be it a particular story or poem or legend or something else. Tone poems tend to be free in their form, usually eschewing the more strict notions of form that most symphonies (particularly sonata-allegro form). As such, tone poems really found their chief flowering from roughly 1830 to 1920, during the Romantic period and the post-Romantic period that followed.
We’ll start off with a work I’d never heard before the other day when I wrote this, by a composer I’d never heard of until I tracked down this list of tone poems. Mieczyslaw Karlowicz was a Polish composer who lived from 1876 to 1909, when he was killed in an avalanche while skiing. The tone poem here, Stanislaw and Anna of Oswiecim, is dense music clearly in the tradition of Wagner and Strauss, but with its own thrilling lyricism. The work is based on a local legend involving the illicit love affair between a brother and sister (more here). It’s amazing how often the great works of art draw inspiration from tragic stories of doomed and forbidden love.
Next week? Gosh, I don’t know. I’m just getting started!