# Where did the tone poem come from?



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Question: Why is Liszt generally credited with inventing the tone poem? Didn’t some earlier concert overtures, like Beethoven’s Coriolan or a couple by Mendelssohn, meet the definition?

Per Wiki, “A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source.” Wiki adds, “Liszt's determination to explore and promote the symphonic poem gained him recognition as the genre's inventor.”

Whaddya think? Are there other pre-Liszt examples of the tone poem?


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I thought it was Franck who wrote the first - _Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne_ - in 1846, beating Liszt by two years. Of course, Beethoven and Berlioz wrote programmatic symphonies, but I don't count the _Pastoral_ or _Fantastique_ as symphonic (tone) poems. Franck didn't identify the work as a symphonic poem (I don't think it was played in his lifetime, either) and it was Liszt who really promoted the genre. When was the last time anyone heard any of them in concert? I conducted _Les Preludes_ a few years ago just so the orchestra would be familiar with it!


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

In Beethoven's day it used to be called merely an 'overture' even when it wasn't the overture to anything. Then later on someone (let's say Liszt) called his free-standing fantasias 'Tone Poems'.

The end.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

The tone poem came from, obviously, the tone poem fairy:angel:


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## Guest (Mar 15, 2019)

Pretty sure in the19th century there was a bit of a struggle to work out how to move on past Beethoven's symphonies when it came to the symphonic/orchestral repertoire. One the one hand you get the more traditional responses of symphonic music from composers like Brahms, who famously felt as if he was composing in Beethoven's shadow, and on the other hand there were a group of composers who were interested in structurally evolving the music into something a little different. Liszt still took cues from sonata form and stuff like that, but he wasn't as bound to these forms. From what I remember from my undergraduate says, I think there was also something of a divide between absolute and programmatic approaches to symphonic music as well. It's a product of Romanticism that this attitude to composition helped forge the ideas behind 'tone poems' or 'symphonic poems' as well as programmatic and absolute music from Beethoven's time onward.


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

mbhaub said:


> I thought it was Franck who wrote the first - _Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne_ - in 1846, beating Liszt by two years. Of course, Beethoven and Berlioz wrote programmatic symphonies, but I don't count the _Pastoral_ or _Fantastique_ as symphonic (tone) poems. Franck didn't identify the work as a symphonic poem (I don't think it was played in his lifetime, either) and it was Liszt who really promoted the genre. When was the last time anyone heard any of them in concert? I conducted _Les Preludes_ a few years ago just so the orchestra would be familiar with it!


I played "Les Preludes" many times, i also played "Tasso", "Hunnenschlact" and Mazeppa.....one conductor took "Preludes" so slow, so logy, so deadly that we re-named it "Les Quaaludes" lol!!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The Romantic age was fascinated by cross-fertilization among the arts, particularly the ways in which music could express literary ideas. This was represented in the florescence of the art song (Schubert), the "program symphony" (Berlioz), the tone poem (Liszt), and the music drama (Wagner). Wagner theorized, in preparation for his "total art work," that Beethoven incorporated words into his 9th symphony because he realized that purely musical expression had reached a high point beyond which it could hardly go without allying itself with poetry. This was fanciful, but very much in the spirit of the age. A popular source of musical inspiration was Goethe, whose Faust inspired many operas and instrumental works (I believe Beethoven contemplated an opera on Faust) and was utilized by Liszt several times.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Heck148 said:


> I played "Les Preludes" many times, i also played "Tasso", "Hunnenschlact" and Mazeppa.....one conductor took "Preludes" so slow, so logy, so deadly that we re-named it "Les Quaaludes" lol!!


Hahaha.

Anyone interested in "Les Preludes" and the meaning of "tone poem" should hear Willem Mengelberg for some real Romantic music-making:


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

shirime said:


> Pretty sure in the19th century there was a bit of a struggle to work out how to move on past Beethoven's symphonies when it came to the symphonic/orchestral repertoire. One the one hand you get the more traditional responses of symphonic music from composers like Brahms, who famously felt as if he was composing in Beethoven's shadow, and on the other hand there were a group of composers who were interested in structurally evolving the music into something a little different. Liszt still took cues from sonata form and stuff like that, but he wasn't as bound to these forms. From what I remember from my undergraduate says, I think there was also something of a divide between absolute and programmatic approaches to symphonic music as well. *It's a product of Romanticism that this attitude to composition helped forge the ideas behind 'tone poems' or 'symphonic poems' as well as programmatic and absolute music from Beethoven's time onward.*


I like that idea.
Romanticism opened up "form" in art. Classicism cherished strict form: poetry with rhyme and meter and similarly structured stanzas, for instance. But when poet William Wordsworth (born 1770, same year as Beethoven) burst onto the scene with his _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, the break with rhyme and meter and similarly structured stanzas took hold. The somewhat haphazard looking _Intimations Ode_ cannot be confused for the rigorous structures of Alexander Pope or even the "Churchyard" poem of Thomas Gray, where the rhyme, meter, and stanzas are regular. Romantic poets, painters, and composers eased up on strict form, which opened the path for composers to create fluid, morphing structures that no longer followed the strict classical patterns of, for example, sonata form. Even the Overtures of Beethoven can be analyzed with sonata form. In fact, the concert overture as a form today generally follows sonata form -- two contrasting melodies (one dynamic, the second lyrical) presented, developed, and recapitulated. But fantasias and rhapsodies and tone/symphonic poems don't analyze so carefully to formal structuring. They allow for a loose flow, the way Romantic poetry goes, or the wash across the canvas of a Romantic landscape. And I for one am glad for it. Music is broad enough to allow for structure and free-form flow. We're adults. We can handle it.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons remains one of the most evocative renderings of poetry in music. While it had no impact until it was unearthed in the 1940’s, another concerto amounting to a tone poem did. Weber’s Konzertstuck has a program attached to it (about some fair maiden waiting for her knight in shining armour). Weber was among Liszt’s idols.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SONNET CLV said:


> I like that idea.
> Romanticism opened up "form" in art. Classicism cherished strict form: poetry with rhyme and meter and similarly structured stanzas, for instance.* But when poet William Wordsworth (born 1770, same year as Beethoven) burst onto the scene with his Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the break with rhyme and meter and similarly structured stanzas took hold.* The somewhat haphazard looking _Intimations Ode_ cannot be confused for the rigorous structures of Alexander Pope or even the "Churchyard" poem of Thomas Gray, where the rhyme, meter, and stanzas are regular. Romantic poets, painters, and composers eased up on strict form, which opened the path for composers to create fluid, morphing structures that no longer followed the strict classical patterns of, for example, sonata form. Even the Overtures of Beethoven can be analyzed with sonata form. In fact, the concert overture as a form today generally follows sonata form -- two contrasting melodies (one dynamic, the second lyrical) presented, developed, and recapitulated. But fantasias and rhapsodies and tone/symphonic poems don't analyze so carefully to formal structuring. They allow for a loose flow, the way Romantic poetry goes, or the wash across the canvas of a Romantic landscape. And I for one am glad for it. Music is broad enough to allow for structure and free-form flow. We're adults. We can handle it.


Wordsworth didn't break with meter. Where he broke with rhyme it was with the blank verse of Milton and Shakespeare. The revolution of Lyrical Ballads was more in the idiomatic language, the focus on everyday people, the inclusion of supernatural stories, and the philosophical, meditative, "conversation poems." The rhyming couplet form of Pope and Dryden was more an anomaly in the history of English poetry--before them Chaucer was probably the biggest proponent--than Wordsworth's various forms. Even the "nonce" form of something like the Intimations Ode had quasi predecessors in the metaphysical poets.

However, your general point about the loosening of strict forms in romanticism is solid.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Sid James said:


> Vivaldi's Four Seasons remains one of the most evocative renderings of poetry in music. While it had no impact until it was unearthed in the 1940's, another concerto amounting to a tone poem did. Weber's Konzertstuck has a program attached to it (about some fair maiden waiting for her knight in shining armour). Weber was among Liszt's idols.


However the definition of tone poem in the OP calls for it to be "in a single continuous movement," which rules out _The Seasons_.... Weber sounds more promising.

Anything before Beethoven? I'll bet the baroque has something.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

KenOC said:


> However the definition of tone poem in the OP calls for it to be "in a single continuous movement," which rules out _The Seasons_.... Weber sounds more promising.
> 
> Anything before Beethoven? I'll bet the baroque has something.


I read the OP. Your thread title asks "where did the time poem come from?" and I answered. The nearest precursor from the Baroque period is the Four Seasons.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Sid James said:


> I read the OP. Your thread title asks "where did the time poem come from?" and I answered. The nearest precursor from the Baroque period is the Four Seasons.


Apologies, I certainly didn't mean to dismiss your answer!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

No worries. I’m not fixated on that particular definition. I think it rules out too much, including Liszt’s two symphonies and other similar works (e.g. Sibelius’ Four Legends) but also those which don’t have an orchestral component (e.g. Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night in its original sextet version).


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## Dimace (Oct 19, 2018)

Praise Lord Byron and Franz Liszt and don't look further. The purest English/Hungarian partnership in the art history. Poetry and symphonic music in one body and soul. After Liszt (not a coincidence) look for R. Strauss. He explains perfectly (with his music) who is his Master. (I'm not very familiar with Dvorak. But his form sounds also as Lisztian.) This is all about the "musical romantic poetry.''


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Sid James said:


> I read the OP. Your thread title asks "where did the time poem come from?" and I answered. The nearest precursor from the Baroque period is the Four Seasons.


The 'time poem'? Mmm. An interesting concept.


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## MusicSybarite (Aug 17, 2017)

Barbebleu said:


> The 'time poem'? Mmm. An interesting concept.


Somehow it "exists"


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I LOVED that! Thanks for bringing to our attention. Just ordered the CD.


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