Symphonic poem

“ The distinguishing quality of the Symphonic Poem is its unbroken continuity. Although objective points are reached, and while there are broad lines of demarcation with reference to the varied moods of the poem to be illustrated, there are no rigid stops—everything is fused together into a continuous whole. ”

“ There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it firmly in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned beforehand to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined mould; it can ramify, as it proceeds, in obedience to its own latent possibilities. A development here may be expanded to great length, an episode or repetition there may be abbreviated to the slightest possible compass ”

“ It is obvious that music, written for an orchestra containing some twenty or more different kinds of instruments and scores of performers, must have great variety of expression. Each instrument has its own tone color, its own range, and its own technique, and each must be given its own thing to say. In this sense symphonic music is an intricate mesh of melodies, each intent on its own purpose, each a part of the whole. In no other of its varied means of [Pg 202] expression is the symphony more strictly and more fully an evolution than in this one of complex melodic textures. ”

“ The one evident and perhaps fatal lack is of intrinsic beauty of the melodic ideas, and further, an absence of the strain of pathos that sings from the heart of a true symphony. While we are mainly impressed by the workmanship, there is no denying a special charm of constant tuneful flow. At times this complexity is almost marvellous in the clear simplicity of the concerted whole,—in one view, the main trait or trick of symphonic writing. ”

“ A symphony is like an epic poem; its salient points rather than its rounded whole appeal to the average reader or listener. The striking episodes of unfamiliar compositions in large form, are prone to come out into undue prominence, and so blind us to their true significance as phases of sequential development. The sustained effort, and experience demanded by a symphony, are the supreme tests of a composer. ”

“ The burden of the hymn heard above the symphonic struggle of the orchestra is joy, love and brotherhood for all mankind, or that charity which is the true essence of the Christian religion. Like Dante's Divine Comedy or Bach's Passion Music, the Ninth Symphony will live as one of the greatest monuments of genius. ”

“ To the uninitiated a symphony is a chaos of sound, relieved by scanty bits of 'tune'; great then is their delight when they can find a reason and a meaning in what is to them like a poem in a foreign tongue. A cuckoo or a thunderstorm assists the mind which is endeavouring to conjure up the required images. ”

“ He says that instrumental music when it is beautiful is as it were an unconscious vocal music. It is made for words, it is waiting for them, and it will be well to fit it with words. The symphonist (if he feels a real inspiration, a genuine glow) is inspired by an inherent or latent poem, which it becomes one’s duty to dig out and render explicit before the musical work can display all its brilliance, all its meaning. ”

“ The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony has had to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery of the laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We are still adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to our compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years made any essential progress even in this part of the art? ”

“ I have referred in this and in the preceding chapters to certain unities in symphonic music—in its several elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and in the whole. I have said that every object is unified in itself, and that it is a part of a greater whole. In this sense a [Pg 239] symphony is a living thing; every member of it has its own function, and contributes a necessary part to the whole. But is not this equally true if we carry the argument into life itself and say: Here is a thing of beauty created by man ”

“ Of infinite gladness and of infinite woe.
Was I long since thrust forth from Heaven's door,
Where in that music I had borne my part?
Or had this symphony its birth before
The pulse of nature turned to laws of art? ”

“ The musical thoughts of a symphonic composer meditating his first work of long breath are many; they are often yeasty in their exuberance. There is not yet in the joy of composing the ability to eliminate. ”

“ It is to be found in the strange oversight of those musicians who notice everything in the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven except one point—the nature of the fundamental ideas which are the very reason of the existence of their symphonic creations. ”

“ Just here I should like to make a digression and examine more fully the predecessor of the symphony in E minor, the fourth in F minor. In symmetry, beauty of musical ideas, suavity, indeed in general workmanship, it is not always the equal of the fifth symphonic work, but in one instance this may be qualified: The first movement is full of abounding passion, is more fluent in expression than the first allegro of the fifth symphony. ”

“ Coming to Art's two highest spheres,--music of sound and music of speech,--we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare, have written. But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as, it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt. ”

“ Symphony as everyone knows is a play of music upon given themes—it develops and varies them in a thousand ways, making them pass from one key to another, ornamenting them, combining them, and constantly reshaping their physiognomy by all the resources of harmony and counterpoint, breaking them up and embroidering on their fragments one new fancy after another, bringing them back to view in their original form and key, and after that making them run through a second and third cycle of transformations. ”

“ A symphony is a wonderful symbol. In the first place, it is music. In the second place, it is a name of praise with four syllables. Then it completes a cycle, and returns on a higher plane to the motif with which it began. It is the history of a soul, and in its last movement typifies the resurrection of the body, by means of this very return,—a return to the order and disposal in which it was created and which it now reassumes to praise its Creator for all eternity by the harmony of the original Thought. ”

“ Simple melody or harmony appeals mostly to the sensuous love of sweet sounds. The symphony does this in an enlarged and complicated sense, but is still more marked by the marvelous suggestive energy with which it unlocks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the border-lands of thought with a glory not to be found on sea or land, and paints ravishing pictures, that come and go like dreams, with colors drawn from the "twelve-tinted tone-spectrum." ”

“ Only a trained musician, one familiar with the great symphonies, can follow in detail the way in which the epic poem Jean Christophe is constructed as a symphony, an Eroica; only a musician can realize how in this work the most comprehensive type of musical composition is transposed into the world of speech. ”

“ A symphony is not merely an arrangement of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies; it is not a record of the thoughts, feelings, and deeds of men; it is not a picture of man or of nature. Rather does it launch itself from these into the unknown. It is pure imagination freed from the actual. ”

“ The first partakes of the nature of an epic in so far as it is conceived on a grand scale and is dominated throughout three of its four movements by a passionate intensity of feeling which is occupied only with the sublimities, whether of pain or of joy, and which, even after the pain has been conquered, seems to touch the joy theme itself with the pathos of a past tragedy. The second symphony is an idyll that is chiefly animated by the spirit of pure happiness and gently tender grace. ”

“ The thing done and the manner of doing it is each the result of general laws, and I venture to dwell on them here, not for expert, technical reasons, but because I wish to offer the listener to symphonies one of his most delightful opportunities. Note should finally be made of the important fact that only those symphonic themes which have a varied and vibrant rhythm serve well the purpose of counterpoint, for the essence of instrumental counterpoint lies in setting against each other two or more melodic phrases in contrasting rhythms. ”

“ We suppose, the first symphony was when "the morning stars shouted together for joy;" and the mystic world-tree, Igdrasil, with its "leaves of human existence," and myriad manifestations, maketh a symphony for ever in the ear of the Eternal. As music is sound, so perhaps all sound is music, to a higher being—even the discord of pain, and the half cadence of sorrow being justified by a soul of meaning; just as music proper, itself would not be half so sweet or complete without its profound minors and expressive dissonances. ”

“ Music is so fully suggestive; and, after all, if you abandon yourself to that you are very apt to find yourself only among corresponding images. The adagio of the Fifth Symphony reminds me in one part of majestic waves, black and crowned with creamy foam; and they swell as if the whole sound of the ocean thundered in each, and when they have almost gained a height through which the sun may shine and reveal the long-haired mermaids, and the splendid colors which hide so much, then they fall upon themselves and stream backward into the sea, the foam uppermost like a shroud. ”

“ For the hum of wheels we have the songs of birds, the music of waterfalls, the purr of mountain brooks and the harmonies of the winds playing through the thousand different species of trees, each one differing in melody, but combining in one grand symphony. Orchestras are muffled music when compared to nature’s lute. The pipes of Pan is but a poet’s struggle to embody in speech such a symphony. ”

“ I can no longer separate myself from it, but with impetuous rapture I must reproduce it in all modulations, and, in the final moment, I triumph over the musical idea—and that, you see, is a symphony! Yes, music is truly the mediator between the spiritual and the sensuous world. ”

“ The chief difference between a symphony and any other form of artistic expression—such as a novel, a play, a painting, or a piece of sculpture—is that a symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; it is itself only. And it is this quality or property of being itself that gives to all pure music its remarkable power. ”

“ That we are now precisely at the moment of seeking, before that breaking up of the large rhythms of literature, and their scattering in articulate, almost instrumental, nervous waves, an art which shall complete the transposition, into the Book, of the symphony or simply recapture our own: for, it is not in elementary sonorities of brass, strings, wood, unquestionably, but in the intellectual word at its utmost, that, fully and evidently, we should find, drawing to itself all the correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music. ”

“ Across the gauzy play, horns and wood blow a slow phrase, like a motto of Fate in the sombre harmony, with one ardent burst of pleading.
In clearer articulation sings a dual song, still softly o'ercast with sweet sadness, ever richer in the harmonies of multiple strings, tipped with the light mood,—and again the wistful cadence. Siren figures of entrancing grace that move amid the other melody, bring enchantment that has no cheer, nor escape the insistent sighing phrase. Once more come the ominous call and the passionate plea, then assurance with the returning main melody in renewed fervor. ”

“ When the prologue recurs, the phrases are in ascent, instead of descent of octaves. A climactic verse of the main dulcet melody breaks out in resonant choir of brass and is followed by a soft rhapsody on the several strains that hark back to the beginning. From the halting pace the lyric episode rises in flight of continuous song to enchanting lilt. Now in the big heroic fantasy sing the first slow phrases as to the manner born and as naturally break into a paean of the full motive, mingled with strains of the original legend of the symphony, that flows on to broad hymnal cadence. ”

“ It is a symphony
of wood-notes, where the forest-horn is sovereign,—awakening a widening world of echoes, with a murmuring maze of lesser notes. One has again the feeling that in the quiet interweaving of a tapestry of strains lies the individual quality of the composer,—that the forte blasts, the stride of big unison figures are but the interlude.
In the Andante the charm is less of tune than of the delicate changing shades of the harmony and of the colors of tone. We are ever surprised in the gentlest way by a turn of chord or by the mere entrance of a horn among the whispering strings. ”

“ And that the mere hearing of the Symphony, even accompanied by the appropriate emotion, is not sufficient, may be easily seen, if we consider what would be the state of a man, who should hear all the notes, but should not be aware of any of those melodic and harmonic relations, which are necessary to constitute the smallest beautiful elements in the Symphony. ”

“ These philosophers knew that music creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody occurs to the composer, which he certainly connects with no act of the reason, which he is probably unconscious of connecting with any movement of his feeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional mood. ”