Musical Form
Program Music
Music that tells a story or paints a picture - and the great debate about whether music should.
Orchestral
Program music is instrumental music that tells a story, describes a scene, or depicts something outside music itself - a landscape, a character, a poem, or a painting. The "program" is the story or idea behind it, often printed for the audience. Its opposite is absolute music, which is about nothing but music: its themes, harmonies, and forms.
Painting with sound
Composers have always loved imitating the world: birdsong, storms, battles, and bells. In the Baroque era, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (1725) was published with sonnets describing what each passage depicts - birds, a thunderstorm, a shepherd's barking dog, slipping on ice. Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony (1808) evokes a day in the countryside, with a brook, birdsong, a peasant dance, and a storm, though Beethoven insisted it was "more the expression of feeling than painting."
The Romantic program
Program music flourished in the Romantic era, when composers wanted music to connect with literature, painting, and personal experience. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830) came with a detailed printed program telling the story of an artist's opium-fueled visions of his beloved, his own execution, and a witches' sabbath.
Liszt created the symphonic poem, a one-movement orchestral work inspired by a poem, painting, or legend, and composers across Europe took it up: Smetana's Vltava follows a river, Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre shows skeletons dancing at midnight, and Richard Strauss's tone poems depict everything from the pranks of Till Eulenspiegel to a mountain climb. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is a whole gallery in sound.
The great debate
Not everyone approved. In the mid-19th century, a fierce argument divided the musical world, sometimes called the "War of the Romantics." On one side, Liszt and Wagner argued that music should unite with poetry and drama and express ideas. On the other, the critic Eduard Hanslick, and the admirers of Brahms, insisted that music's beauty lay in its own forms, and that a symphony needed no story. The debate never really ended - and many composers happily wrote both kinds of music.
Famous program music
- Vivaldi - The Four Seasons.
- Beethoven - Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral".
- Berlioz - Symphonie fantastique.
- Smetana - Vltava (The Moldau).
- Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre.
- Paul Dukas - The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
- Richard Strauss - Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks.
Where to start listening: "Spring" from The Four Seasons, reading the sonnet as you listen, then Danse macabre and Vltava. For contrast, try a work of absolute music such as Brahms's First Symphony, and see the symphony page.