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Romantic Program Music

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•Depicts or portrays nonmusical ideas: incidents, images, objects, nature•Romantic composers planned the music around the program•Story told through recording insert or concert program•Hector Berlioz: early Romantic program music composer

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“An Episode in the Life of an Artist”

•Program Symphony in 5 movements•Based on personal experience of meeting and falling in love with Harriet Smithson•Young musician poisons himself with opium in lovesick despair• Narcotic too weak to kill him, plunges into deep slumber with strange visions• Sensations, emotions, and memories are transformed into musical thoughts and images• Loved one becomes a melody, an idée fixe (fixed idea)•The idée fixe occurs in each movement similar to the motive that unifies Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony•Berlioz changes the idée fixe in each movement, a technique known as thematic transformation•Berlioz wrote for a larger orchestra than normal to portray multiple images and emotions

Harriet Smithson

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• Roméo et Juliette (dramatic symphony) (1839)• King Lear Overture (1831)• Waverly Overture (ca. 1827)• Rob Roy Overture (1831)• Harold en Italie (1834)

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Listening excerpt from CD 1, tracks

38-40, p. 188

Program symphony

Larghetto-allegro

No major sections repeat

Orchestra

Sextuple meter

The artist and his love are dead in this movement

Listen to the eerie opening with dissonance:

Listen to the transformed idée fixe and bells tolling for the dead:

Listen to the “Dies irae” (“Day of Wrath”) chant

used in this movement:

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Franz Liszt1811-1886

Richard Strauss1864-1949

• Developed symphonic poem, or tone poem

•Ignored tradition of organizing symphonies in movements

• Avoided sonata form in first movements

•Unified works with single theme or melody

• Les Préludes (1853) single movement work based on poem

•Composed twelve symphonic poems

• Bulk of work written in nineteenth century

•Also sprach Zarathustra – philosophic program

• Till Eulenspiegels lustig Streiche

•(Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks) – comic program

•Don Quixote – comic program