Symphonic poem

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in one movement in which some extra-musical programme provides a narrative or illustrative element. This programme could come from a poem, a novel, a painting or some other source. Music based on extra-musical sources is often known as programme music, while music which has no other associations is known as abstract music.

Franz Liszt largely invented the symphonic poem, in a series of single-movement orchestral works composed in the 1840s and 1850s. The immediate predecessors of Liszt's tone poem were concert overtures, theatrical, colorful and evocative orchestral movements that were created for performance independent of any opera or theater-piece: for example, Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave or Hector Berlioz' Roman Carnival Overture. Even earlier orchestral mood pieces are exemplified by the 'storm' set-pieces that were an established genre that went back to the summer storm in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and some moody entr'actes between scenes of Baroque French operas.

Other composers took up the symphonic poem: Smetana, Dvorák, with pieces such as The Golden Spinning Wheel and The Wood Dove, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Tchaikovsky, César Franck's Le Chasseur Maudit ('The Accursed Huntsman') and many less well-known composers, such as Bax with Tintagel, and The Garden of Fand..

But the best-known symphonic poems are by Richard Strauss: Don Juan, Til Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, to name three. Strauss subtitled Don Quixote 'Introduction, Theme with Variations, and Finale' and 'Fantastic Variations for Large Orchestra on a Theme of Knightly Character.' He could as easily have called the work a rhapsody (q.v.) as a tone poem.

Indeed, the name 'tone poem' appears to apply to certain pieces or types of piece somewhat arbitrarily. Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht is clearly based on extra musical themes, but is not normally considered to be a tone poem. The classification is thus partly subjective, and reflects to some extent the composer's view. In the case of the Schoenberg piece, it was originally written for a string sextet, which is one reason why it would not be classified as a symphonic poem.