Richard Strauss. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Two orchestral species share the concert programme, and to the ear they can sound like the same animal: the symphony and the symphonic poem. The difference lies neither in forces nor in length: it lies in the contract the music signs with the listener. The symphony promises a form; the symphonic poem promises a story.
The symphony, as we told it at the start of the month, is an architecture of movements that stands on its own: themes that present themselves, develop and return according to rules the ear knows even without being able to name them. It is about nothing, in the highest sense: it is about itself, its own materials and their fate, and the emotion comes from the architecture as it comes from a cathedral. The symphonic poem, invented in name and in fact by Liszt in the mid-nineteenth century, reverses the contract: a single movement, free form, and a subject declared in the title, a poem, a painting, a hero, an idea. Form is no longer the content: it is the vehicle for a story that lies outside the music, and that the listener is invited to follow the way one follows a film with eyes closed.
The genre found its champion in Richard Strauss, who between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five produced the most spectacular narrative gallery ever written for orchestra: Don Juan; Till Eulenspiegel, with his pranks and his instrumental hanging; Don Quixote, where the visionary is a cello and Sancho a viola; the Alpine Symphony, which is a climb complete with thunderstorm and descent. Strauss boasted that he could set even a teaspoon to music, and he was hardly joking: his descriptive virtuosity remains the summit of what an orchestra can depict. Around him, the genre became the language of the national schools, Smetana’s Moldau, which is a river from source to mouth, the poems of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, and finally, by direct budding, film music: whoever writes soundtracks writes symphonic poems with the screen switched on, and knows it.
The quarrel that divided the nineteenth century, pure music against programme music, Brahms against Liszt and Wagner, with the critics lined up like rival fans, has gone flat today, and the practical advice remains. Before a symphony, do not look for the story: follow the themes, their return is the plot. Before a symphonic poem, read the title and let yourself be guided: the composer has scattered the score with signposts. And before the hybrid case, the symphony with a secret programme, which since Berlioz has been the most frequented genre of all, enjoy the doubt: that is where music shows it can do both things at once, tell the world and tell itself. The critic who built a thirty-year war on this distinction is the one we talk about here at 1 pm.