The Symphonic Poem and Kindred Forms

Abstract IT has been remarked in an earlier chapter that perhaps the most characteristic form of Romantic orchestral music was the concert overture, and at the middle of the century, as music aspired still more ardently towards the qualities of the other arts, the programmatic concert overture began to develop new characteristics and acquired a new generic title: ‘symphonic poem’. (It was first employed by Liszt, on the occasion of a performance of his Tasso Overture at the Weimar Court on 19 April 1854.) Under its cover composers felt freer to indulge in structural licences like those taken by Mendelssohn in Meeresstille und gliickliche Fahrt and Berlioz in Le Carnaval romain, and in the devices of tone symbolism and tone painting that were still regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, by many musicians at the middle of the century. It is impossible to draw a defining line between the early symphonic poems and contemporary concert overtures; the terms were for some time almost interchangeable. It is true the scores of symphonic poems were generally prefaced by literary programmes like those to Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Spohr’s Die Weihe der Tone, but so too, occasionally, were the scores of overtures.