unexpected music
The idea of transmitting something with music is inherent to the human being. Since the composition of the Kuhnau Biblical Sonatas in 1689, composers have oriented their inventiveness towards the description of ideas, facts, stories or characters with the use of musical resources of various kinds.
In contrast to the concept of ‘absolute music’ or ‘abstract music’ that did not transcribe anything explicitly, ‘programmatic music’ appeared as a genre, very fashionable in Romanticism, whose purpose was to express feelings, images, characters or ideas more beyond what had been written on the staves.
There are two ways to describe something through music. The most literal has the purpose of realistically imitating the object of the composition, be it a battle between two armies or the sound emitted by an animal. The second has a more poetic component by communicating emotions typical of the composer’s spirit with a less precise dimension, such as the light of sunset or the feeling of longing.
In any case, what is really important is that the extra-musical argument is something additional to the structure of the work, so that the musical content is the only support for it. In other words, that what is described with musical notes is only the icing on the cake. The classic example would be Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony ‘Pastoral’, a composition that from a musical point of view stands on its own and in which the country theme is secondary.
The symphonic poem understood as an orchestral genre of a single movement and with an extra-musical plot idea came to light in 1849 when Franz Liszt composed ‘What is heard on the mountain’, based on a poem by Victor Hugo that deals with the duality between Song of Nature and the cry of Humanity. Composers at the end of the 19th century had new musical resources that were better suited to describe these extra-musical ideas and, what is more important, to reflect how they affect the affected person, one of the premises of the romantic spirit.
After Liszt, other composers contributed famous programmatic works such as ‘The Cursed Hunter’ (1883) by César Franck, ‘The Carnival of the Animals’ (1886) by Saint Saëns, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1870) by Tchaikovsky, ‘My Homeland ‘ (1879) by Smetana or ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (1897) by Dukas, but the next important step in the history of the symphonic poem (‘Tondichtung’ in German) is taken by Richard Strauss, a bold composer who further expanded this genre. beyond the conventional.
Of the symphonic poems written by Strauss, the erotic ‘Don Juan’ (1888), the transcendent ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (1888), the agitated ‘Till Eulenspiegel’ (1895), the enigmatic ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’ (1896), stand out. the amusing ‘Don Quixote’ (1897) or the narcissistic ‘Una vida de hero’ (1899), which together expose human conflicts of various kinds through the brilliant handling of original musical resources, so complex at times, that they enter into conflict with his complete understanding of the attentive listener.
Without a doubt, we are leaving other very significant examples of programmatic music in the inkwell, such as ‘Pacific 321’ (1923) by Honneger, ‘Sinfonietta’ (1926) by Leos Janáček, or ‘Blue Cathedral’ (2000) by New Yorker Jennifer Higdon, but one of the symphonic poems that reflects a general sentiment of our times is ‘Finland’ (1899) by Jean Sibelius, the composition that described the patriotic resistance of the Finnish people under authoritarian rule by Imperial Russia. A beautiful work that was considered at the time as the unofficial anthem of the Nordic country.
#poetic #reflection