Musical Form
Symphonic Poem
A single-movement orchestral work that tells a story.
Orchestral
A symphonic poem (also called a "tone poem") is a single-movement work for orchestra built to depict something specific - a story, a poem, a painting, a landscape - rather than following the abstract multi-movement logic of a symphony. Where a symphony's structure is justified by its own internal musical logic, a symphonic poem's structure follows its subject.
Where it came from
Composers had told stories in orchestral music before. Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony paints scenes from country life, Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830) follows a lovesick artist through an opium-fueled nightmare, and Mendelssohn's concert overtures - such as The Hebrides - are vivid scenes in a single movement. Franz Liszt coined the term "symphonic poem" and pioneered the form in the mid-1800s, writing twelve of them in Weimar (and a thirteenth late in life) on subjects drawn from poetry, myth, and painting.
How it works
Most symphonic poems follow a program - a story or idea, often printed for the audience - and the music tracks it: a hero's adventures, a river's course, a battle. Composers often use recurring themes to represent characters, transforming them as the story changes, much like the leitmotifs of Wagner's operas. Liszt's technique of thematic transformation - turning a single theme tender, triumphant, or menacing as needed - became a central tool of the genre.
The great composers of tone poems
The form became a favorite vehicle for Romantic and Late Romantic composers who wanted to fuse orchestral music with literature, myth, or vivid scene-painting. Richard Strauss's tone poems
- his preferred term, Tondichtung - are especially famous for their detailed, almost cinematic depiction of their subjects: the seducer Don Juan, the prankster Till Eulenspiegel, the knight Don Quixote, and the philosophy of Also sprach Zarathustra.
Camille Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre (1874) shows skeletons dancing in a graveyard, their bones rattling on the xylophone. Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897) follows Goethe's ballad of magic gone wrong - famously animated with Mickey Mouse in Disney's Fantasia - and Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain conjures a witches' sabbath.
Nationalism in sound
The form also became a natural outlet for musical nationalism: composers used it to depict their own country's landscapes, folklore, and history in a way a symphony's abstract structure didn't easily accommodate. Bedřich Smetana's cycle Má vlast ("My Homeland"), whose best-known movement musically traces the Vltava river through the Czech countryside, and Jean Sibelius's Finlandia, are both prime examples of the symphonic poem put to explicitly patriotic use. Finlandia was so stirring that under Russian rule it was sometimes performed under other titles to avoid the censors.
Famous symphonic poems
- Liszt - Les préludes (1854).
- Smetana - Vltava ("The Moldau"), from Má vlast.
- Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre (1874).
- Strauss - Don Juan (1888), Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896).
- Dukas - The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897).
- Sibelius - Finlandia (1899) and The Swan of Tuonela.
Where to start listening: Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (inspired by Nietzsche) opens with one of the most recognizable passages in all of orchestral music; Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice tells its story just as vividly. Smetana's The Moldau is a gentler, more melodic entry point.