1900-1949 Tone Poem

Question 1

Name 6 tone poems ca.1900-1949.

Answer 1

1. Claude Debussy: La mer for orchestra (1903–1905)2. Igor Stravinsky: Fireworks, Op. 4 (1908)3. Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (1908-9)4. Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Op. 64 (1915)5. Maurice Ravel: La valse for orchestra (1919–1920)6. Béla Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)

Question 2

Piece: tone poem by Debussy.

Answer 2

Claude Debussy: La mer for orchestra (1903–1905)

• French for The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra.
• The piece was initially not well received.
• La mer is a masterpiece of suggestion and subtlety in its rich depiction of the ocean, which combines unusual orchestration with daring impressionistic harmonies.
• While the structure of the work places it outside of both absolute music and programme music (see below on the title “Three symphonic sketches”) as those terms were understood in the early 20th century, it obviously uses descriptive devices to suggest wind, waves and the ambience of the sea. But structuring a piece around a nature subject without any literary or human element to it - neither people, nor mythology, nor ships are suggested in the piece - also was highly unusual at the time.
• As an adult composing “La mer,” he rarely visited the sea, spending most of his time far away from large bodies of water. Debussy drew inspiration from art, “preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature…” to the physical sea. This influence lends the piece its unusual nature.
• Debussy called La mer “three symphonic sketches,” avoiding the loaded term symphony. Yet the work is sometimes called a symphony; it consists of two powerful outer movements framing a lighter, faster piece which acts as a type of scherzo.
• The first work to have an “open” form - a devenir sonore or “sonorous becoming… a developmental process in which the very notions of exposition and development coexist in an uninterrupted burst.
• Debussy spurns the more obvious devices associated with the sea, wind, and concomitant storm in favor of his own, highly individual vocabulary.
• Debussy avoids monotony by using a multitude of water figurations that could be classified as musical onomatopoeia: they evoke the sensation of swaying movement of waves and suggest the pitter-patter of falling droplets of spray” (and so forth), and — significantly — avoid the arpeggiated triads used by Wagner and Schubert to evoke the movement of water.
• The formal boundaries of La mer correspond exactly to the mathematical ratios called The Golden Section, however there is no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy consciously sought such proportions.

Question 3

Piece: tone poem by Stravinsky.

Answer 3

Igor Stravinsky: Fireworks, Op. 4 (1908)

• An orchestral fantasy composed as a wedding present for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter Nadezhda and Maximilian Steinberg, who had married a few days before her father’s death.
• The work has some hints of bi-tonality but is for the most part similar in style to that of his (at the time) teacher and mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It has the form of a scherzo but is still labeled “orchestral fantasy” because of its short length. Alexander Siloti conducted the premiere in 1909. Stravinsky got the commission from Serge Diaghilev to write The Firebird (1910) in part because Diaghilev heard this piece of music, and was impressed with its orchestration.

Question 4

Piece: tone poem by Mahler.

Answer 4

Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (1908-9)

• (“The Song of the Earth”) The work was described as a symphony when published, and it comprises six songs for two singers who take turns singing the songs. The work was composed following the most painful period in Mahler’s life, and the songs address themes such as those of living, parting and salvation.
• Three personal disasters befell Mahler during the summer of 1907. Political maneuvering and anti-semitism forced him to resign his post as Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his eldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diphtheria, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. “With one stroke,” he wrote to his friend Bruno Walter, “I have lost everything I have gained in terms of who I thought I was, and have to learn my first steps again like a newborn”.
• The following year (1908) saw the publication of Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, a volume of ancient Chinese poetry rendered into German. Mahler was very taken by the vision of earthly beauty and transience expressed in these verses and chose seven of the poems to set to music as Das Lied von der Erde.
• The first work giving a complete integration of song cycle and symphony. A “song-symphony”, a hybrid of the two forms that had occupied most of Mahler’s creative life.
• the work’s publication and first performance occurred posthumously.
• Mahler was aware of the so-called “curse of the Ninth”, a superstition arising from the fact that no major composer since Beethoven had successfully completed more than nine symphonies before dying. He had already written eight symphonies before composing Das Lied von der Erde. Fearing his subsequent demise, he decided to subtitle the work A Symphony for Tenor, Alto and Large Orchestra (Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor- und eine Alt- (oder Bariton-) Stimme und Orchester), but left it unnumbered as a symphony. His next symphony, written for purely instrumental forces, was numbered his Ninth. That was indeed the last symphony he fully completed, because only the first movement of the Tenth had been fully orchestrated at the time of his death.
• The first movement is titled “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery”, continually returns to the refrain “Dark is life, is death.” Like many drinking poems by Li Bai, the original poem “Bei Ge Xing” (a pathetic song) mixes drunken exaltation with a deep sadness. The singer’s part is notoriously demanding, since the tenor has to struggle at the top of his range against the power of the full orchestra. This gives the voice its shrill, piercing quality, and is consistent with Mahler’s practice of pushing instruments, including vocal cords, to their limits.
• The second movement is titled “The lonely one in Autumn.” The lyrics are based on the first part of a Tang Dynasty era poem by Qian Qi.
• The third movement, “Of Youth”, is the most obviously pentatonic and faux-Asian. The form is ternary, the third part being a greatly abbreviated revision of the first. It is also the shortest of the six movements, and can be considered a first scherzo.
• The fourth movement is titled “Of Beauty”, and is mostly soft and legato.
• The second scherzo of the work is provided by the fifth movement, “The drunken man in Spring”. The middle section features a solo violin and solo flute, which represent the bird the singer describes.
• The final movement, “The Farewell”, is nearly as long as the previous five movements combined. This final song is notable for its text-painting, bringing in a mandolin to represent the singer’s lute, having woodwinds play bird calls when the singer discusses birds, and repeatedly switching between the major and minor modes to articulate sharp contrasts in the text. It is also worth noting that throughout the entire work there is a persistent theme that “The world remains green forever, but man must die early.” At the end of “Der Abschied,” however, Mahler adds three original lines which repeat this theme, but purposefully omits the part saying that “man must die.”
• The last movement is very difficult to conduct because of its cadenza-like writing for voice and solo instruments, which often flows over the barlines. Mahler also hesitated to put the piece before the public because of its relentless negativity, unusual even for him. “Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?” he asked.

Question 5

Piece: tone poem by Strauss.

Answer 5

Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Op. 64 (1915)

• Though labelled as a symphony by the composer, this tone poem forgoes the conventions of the traditional multi-movement symphony and consists of twenty-two continuous sections of music.[1]
• The story depicts the experiences of eleven hours (from twilight just before dawn to the following nightfall) spent climbing an Alpine mountain.
• It is one of Strauss’s largest non-operatic works in terms of performing forces: the score calls for about 125 players in total.
• The last symphonic poem written by Strauss. By the time of An Alpine Symphony’s composition, however, Strauss had turned his attention away from the genre of tone poems and had become well-established as one of the period’s greatest operatic composers.
• I shall call my alpine symphony “Der Antichrist”, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.
• Although performed as one continuous movement, An Alpine Symphony has a distinct program which describes each phase of the Alpine journey in chronological order.
• it is believed that comparisons to any kind of traditional symphonic form are secondary to the strong sense of structure created by the piece’s musical pictorialism and detailed narrative.

Question 6

Piece: tone poem by Ravel.

Answer 6

Maurice Ravel: La valse for orchestra (1919–1920)

• It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work. The work has been described as a tribute to the waltz.
• Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II.
• In Ravel’s own compositional output, a precursor to La valse was his 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales, which contains a motif that Ravel reused in the later work.
• Diaghilev said it was a “masterpiece” but rejected Ravel’s work as “not a ballet. It’s a portrait of ballet”. Ravel, hurt by the comment, ended the relationship. Subsequently, it became a popular concert work and when the two men met again during 1925, Ravel refused to shake Diaghilev’s hand. Diaghilev challenged Ravel to a duel, but friends persuaded Diaghilev to recant. The men never met again.
• preface to the score: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.”

Question 7

Piece: tone poem by Bartók.

Answer 7

Béla Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)
- Commissioned by Paul Sacher
- Bartók divides the strings into two groups which he directs should be placed antiphonally on opposite sides of the stage, and he makes use of antiphonal effects particularly in the second and fourth movements.
- The piece is in four movements, the first and third slow, the second and fourth quick.
- All movements are written without key signature.
The first movement is a slow fugue. Its time signature changes constantly. It is based around the note A, on which the movement begins and ends.
- The second movement is quick. It is marked with loud syncopic piano and percussion accents in a whirling dance, evolving in an extended pizzicato section, with a piano concerto-like conclusion.
- The third movement is slow, an example of what is often called Bartók’s “Night music”. It features timpani glissandi, which was an unusual technique at the time of the work’s composition, as well as a prominent part for the xylophone. - It is also commonly thought that the rhythm of the xylophone solo that opens the third movement is based on the Fibonacci sequence as this “written-out accelerando/ritardando” uses the rhythm 1:2:3:5:8:5:3:2:1.
- The last movement has the character of a lively folk dance.