A symphonic poem or tone poem is a type of music played by an orchestra. It is usually written as one long piece without breaks and shows or describes the story of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other non-music idea. The German word Tondichtung, which means "tone poem," was first used by composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt used the term Symphonische Dichtung for his 13 works in this style, starting in 1848.
Background
Symphonic poems can be as large as symphonic movements or even as long as an entire symphony. However, they differ from traditional classical symphonic movements because their music is meant to help listeners imagine scenes, pictures, ideas, or moods, rather than follow traditional musical forms like sonata form. This focus on inspiring listeners was influenced by Romanticism, a movement that encouraged connections between music and literature, art, and drama. According to musicologist Hugh Macdonald, symphonic poems achieved three goals in the 19th century: they linked music to outside sources, combined multiple movements into one section, and raised instrumental program music to a level equal to or higher than opera. Symphonic poems were popular from the 1840s until the 1920s, when composers stopped using the genre.
Symphonic poems are believed to connect different ways of expressing ideas. Researchers have studied how these works relate to non-musical sources like art, literature, and nature. Composers used musical techniques to represent non-musical concepts. For example, Sergei Rachmaninoff used an unusual 5/8 time signature in The Isle of the Dead to suggest the rocking of a boat. In Death and Transfiguration by Richard Strauss, the orchestra mimics an irregular heartbeat and labored breathing. Other techniques capture ideas more abstractly. In Franz Liszt’s Hamlet, a somber, unresolved melody represents Hamlet, while a calm, resolved melody represents Ophelia. In Death and Transfiguration, a lively melody in a major key suggests childhood.
Some piano and chamber works, like Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, share similarities with symphonic poems in purpose and effect. However, the term "symphonic poem" usually refers to orchestral works. A symphonic poem can be a standalone piece, like those by Richard Strauss, or part of a series, such as The Swan of Tuonela from Jean Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite or Vltava (The Moldau) from Bedřich Smetana’s Má vlast.
The terms "symphonic poem" and "tone poem" are often used interchangeably, but some composers, like Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius, preferred "tone poem" for their works. The German term Tondichtung (tone poem) was first used by Carl Loewe in 1828 for his piano piece Mazeppa, based on a poem by Lord Byron. This was 12 years before Franz Liszt created an orchestral version of the same subject.
Musicologist Mark Bonds noted that by the early 19th century, the future of the symphonic genre seemed uncertain. While composers like Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Niels Gade successfully wrote symphonies in the 1820s and 1830s, there was a growing belief that their works were less impressive than those of Beethoven. Composers began exploring shorter forms like the concert overture to blend music, storytelling, and visual ideas. Examples include Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) and The Hebrides (1830).
Between 1845 and 1847, Belgian composer César Franck wrote an orchestral piece based on Victor Hugo’s poem Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne. This work shows characteristics of a symphonic poem, and some scholars, like Norman Demuth and Julien Tiersot, consider it the first of its kind, even though Franck did not publish or perform it. Franz Liszt is widely credited with inventing the symphonic poem. He aimed to create a new way to engage audiences by using a main theme that evolves through thematic transformation while maintaining musical coherence.
Liszt
Franz Liszt, a composer from Hungary, wanted to create longer musical pieces that went beyond the concert overture form. Overtures are meant to help listeners imagine scenes, images, or moods. Liszt aimed to mix these programmatic qualities with the large scale and complex musical structure usually found in the first movement of classical symphonies. The first movement, which uses sonata form to show how different themes interact, was considered the most important part of a symphony. To reach his goals, Liszt needed a more flexible way to develop musical themes than sonata form allowed, while still keeping the unity of a musical piece.
Liszt found this method through two techniques he used in his symphonic poems. The first was cyclic form, a method first used by Beethoven to connect movements so they reflected each other. Liszt improved on this by combining separate movements into one continuous, cyclic structure. Many of Liszt’s later works, such as Les préludes, follow this pattern. The second technique was thematic transformation, a type of variation where a theme is changed into something completely new and independent, rather than into a related theme. As musicologist Hugh Macdonald noted, Liszt’s goal was to show the same level of complexity in the interaction of musical themes and tonal changes as found in Romantic symphonies.
Thematic transformation was not new. Composers like Mozart and Haydn had used it before. In the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven changed the theme of the “Ode to Joy” into a Turkish march. Weber and Berlioz also used thematic transformation, and Schubert used it to connect the movements of his Wanderer Fantasy, a piece that greatly influenced Liszt. However, Liszt was the first to create much longer musical structures using only thematic transformation. He used this technique not only in his symphonic poems but also in other works, such as his Second Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata in B minor. When a piece needed to be shortened, Liszt usually removed parts of traditional musical development and kept sections with thematic transformation.
Although Liszt was inspired by Richard Wagner’s ideas about combining drama and music in symphonic poems, Wagner only gave Liszt’s concept weak support in his 1857 essay On the Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt. Later, Wagner completely disagreed with Liszt’s group in Weimar about their artistic beliefs.
Czech composers
Composers who created the symphonic poem after Franz Liszt were mostly from Bohemia, Russia, and France. The Bohemian and Russian composers showed how the form could express national pride and ideas growing in their countries. Bedřich Smetana visited Liszt in Weimar in 1857 and heard Liszt's Faust Symphony and the symphonic poem Die Ideale. Inspired by Liszt, Smetana began writing symphonic works based on stories, such as Richard III (1857–58), Wallenstein's Camp (1858–59), and Hakon Jarl (1860–61). A piano piece from the same time, Macbeth a čarodějnice (1859), shares similar themes but has a more bold style. Musicologist John Clapham noted that Smetana planned these works as "short scenes" from stories and treated them like a dramatist, not a poet or philosopher. He used musical themes to represent characters, a method closer to French composer Hector Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette than to Liszt’s style. Hugh Macdonald wrote that Smetana followed "a clear pattern of musical description."
Smetana’s six symphonic poems, published together under the title Má vlast, are his most famous works in the genre. Created between 1872 and 1879, the cycle reflects Smetana’s belief in the strength of the Czech nation and includes scenes from Czech history. Two musical themes connect all six pieces. One represents Vyšehrad, a fortress near the Vltava River, which is the subject of the second and most famous piece in the cycle. The other theme is an old Czech hymn, "Ktož jsú boží bojovníci" ("Ye who are God's warriors"), which unites the last two poems, Tábor and Blaník.
By organizing the symphonic poem into a unified cycle, Smetana created what Macdonald calls "one of the greatest achievements in Czech music." Clapham wrote that Smetana expanded the purpose of the symphonic poem beyond what later composers achieved. Clapham also noted that Smetana’s musical descriptions of landscapes helped create a new type of symphonic poem, leading eventually to Jean Sibelius’s Tapiola. Additionally, Macdonald wrote that Smetana inspired many younger composers in the Czech lands and Slovakia, including Antonín Dvořák, Zdeněk Fibich, Leoš Janáček, and Vítězslav Novák.
Dvořák wrote two groups of symphonic poems in the 1890s. The first group includes three works that form a cycle similar to Má vlast, with one musical theme shared among them. Originally planned as a trilogy titled Příroda, Život a Láska (Nature, Life and Love), the pieces were released separately as V přírodě (In Nature’s Realm), Carnival, and Othello. The score for Othello includes notes from Shakespeare’s play, showing that Dvořák intended it as a programmatic work. However, the events and characters in the music do not exactly match the notes from the play.
The second group includes five symphonic poems. Four of them—The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel, and The Wild Dove—are based on stories from Karel Jaromír Erben’s Kytice (Bouquet) collection of fairy tales. In these works, Dvořák assigned specific musical themes to important characters and events. For The Golden Spinning Wheel, he set lines from the poem to music to create these themes. He also used a technique called thematic transformation, changing the king’s theme to represent the wicked stepmother and the kind old man in the story. Macdonald wrote that while these works may seem complex, their stories define the musical events. Clapham noted that in The Noon Witch, Dvořák repeated music at the beginning to create balance, even though the story’s details are more complex. The fifth poem, Heroic Song, is the only one without a detailed story.
Russia
The development of the symphonic poem in Russia, like in the Czech lands, came from admiration for the music of Franz Liszt and an interest in national themes. This was also influenced by the Russian love of storytelling, which made the genre especially suitable for Russian composers. Critic Vladimir Stasov wrote, "Virtually all Russian music is programmatic." According to Macdonald, Stasov and a group of patriotic composers known as The Five or The Mighty Handful praised Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskaya as "a prototype of Russian descriptive music." Although Glinka denied the piece had a program, he described the work—based entirely on Russian folk music—as "picturesque music." Glinka was influenced by French composer Hector Berlioz, whom he met in 1844.
At least three members of The Five fully embraced the symphonic poem. Mily Balakirev’s Tamara (1867–82) strongly evokes the fairy-tale East and, while based on a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, is well-paced and full of atmosphere. Balakirev’s other symphonic poems, In Bohemia (1867, 1905) and Russia (1884 version), have less narrative content. These works are actually collections of national melodies and were originally written as concert overtures. Macdonald describes Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Alexander Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia as "powerful orchestral pictures, each unique in its composer’s output." In the Steppes of Central Asia, titled a "musical portrait," evokes the journey of a caravan across the steppes. Night on Bald Mountain, especially its original version, uses harmony that is often striking, sometimes harsh, and highly energetic. Its early sections pull the listener into a world of directness and intensity.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote only two orchestral works that rank as symphonic poems: his "musical tableau" Sadko (1867–92) and Skazka (Legend, 1879–80), originally titled Baba-Yaga. While this may seem surprising, considering his love for Russian folklore, his symphonic suites Antar and Scheherazade are created in a similar style. Russian folklore also inspired symphonic poems by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Anatoly Lyadov, and Alexander Glazunov. Glazunov’s Stenka Razin and Lyadov’s Baba-Yaga, Kikimora, and The Enchanted Lake are all based on national subjects. The Lyadov works lack a clear harmonic rhythm, which creates a sense of unreality and timelessness, much like the telling of a beloved fairy tale.
None of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems have Russian subjects, but they balance musical form and literary material well. Tchaikovsky did not call Romeo and Juliet a symphonic poem but rather a "fantasy-overture," and the work may be closer to a concert overture in its use of sonata form. Balakirev, who helped shape the work, suggested structuring Romeo and Juliet after his King Lear, a tragic overture in sonata form inspired by Beethoven’s overtures. R.W.S. Mendl, writing in The Musical Quarterly, stated that Tchaikovsky was naturally suited for composing symphonic poems. Even his works in other forms are structurally free and often resemble program music.
Later Russian symphonic poems, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff’s The Rock and Isle of the Dead (1909), show both influence from Tchaikovsky and independence. Igor Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale, from his opera The Nightingale, reflects a debt to his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Alexander Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy (1905–08) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1908–10) stand out for their detailed expression and advanced harmonic style, projecting a unique, egocentric theosophic world.
In the Soviet Union, Socialist realism allowed program music to survive longer than in Western Europe, as seen in Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonic poem October (1967).
France
France was less focused on nationalism than other countries, but it had a long tradition of music that told stories or painted pictures, starting with composers like Berlioz and Félicien David. Because of this, French composers were interested in the poetic style of the symphonic poem. For example, César Franck wrote an orchestral piece based on Victor Hugo’s poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne before Liszt created his first numbered symphonic poem.
The symphonic poem became popular in France during the 1870s, helped by a new group called the Société Nationale, which supported young French composers. In 1872, the year the group was founded, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote Le rouet d'Omphale, followed by three more works, the most famous of which was Danse macabre (1874). In all four pieces, Saint-Saëns explored new ways to use orchestral instruments and change musical themes to tell stories. His work La jeunesse d'Hercule (1877) was most similar in style to Liszt’s music. The other three pieces focused on physical actions—spinning, riding, and dancing—expressed through music. Saint-Saëns had earlier used changing themes in his overture Spartacus and later used this technique in his Fourth Piano Concerto and Third Symphony.
After Saint-Saëns, Vincent d'Indy wrote a trilogy called Wallenstein (1873, 1879–81), which he called "three symphonic overtures," but the set is similar in scope to Smetana’s Má vlast. Henri Duparc’s Lenore (1875) showed a warm, Wagner-style approach in its music and orchestration. Franck composed the delicate Les Éolides, followed by Le Chasseur maudit and Les Djinns, which were written in a style similar to Liszt’s Totentanz. Ernest Chausson’s Vivane reflects the interest of the Franck circle in mythological themes.
Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1892–94), originally meant to be part of a set of three pieces, was described by the composer as "a very free… sequence of scenes showing the Faun’s desires and dreams in the afternoon heat." Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice followed the storytelling style of the symphonic poem. Maurice Ravel’s La valse (1921) is sometimes seen as a humorous imitation of Viennese music, though no Viennese composer would recognize it as their own. Albert Roussel’s first symphonic poem was based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection (1903), followed by Le Poème de forêt (1904–06), which has four movements in a connected structure. Pour une fête de printemps (1920) was first planned as the slow movement of his Second Symphony. Charles Koechlin also wrote several symphonic poems, including those based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Through these works, Koechlin showed that the symphonic poem could still be meaningful even after it was no longer widely used.
Germany
Both Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss worked in Germany. Liszt may have created the symphonic poem, and Strauss developed it further, but this musical form was not as popular in Germany as in other countries. Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner were the most important composers in Germany during this time. However, neither of them wrote symphonic poems. Instead, Wagner focused on music drama, and Brahms worked on absolute music, which is music without specific stories or words. Because of this, only a few symphonic poems were written by German and Austrian composers, including Hugo Wolf's Penthesilea (1883–85), Alexander von Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau (1902–03), and Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande (1902–03). Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (1899), written for six string instruments, is sometimes called a non-orchestral "symphonic poem" because it clearly connects music to a poem.
Alexander Ritter, who wrote six symphonic poems inspired by Liszt's style, greatly influenced Richard Strauss's work in program music. Strauss composed pieces based on a wide range of topics, including literature, legends, philosophy, and his own life. Some of his famous works include Macbeth (1886–87), Don Juan (1888–89), Death and Transfiguration (1888–89), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1894–95), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), Ein Heldenleben (1897–98), Symphonia Domestica (1902–03), and An Alpine Symphony (1911–1915).
In these works, Strauss used orchestration in highly detailed ways, making program music more expressive and expanding its possibilities. He often used a large orchestra with special instruments and created vivid musical effects, such as using brass instruments to mimic the sound of sheep in Don Quixote. Strauss's use of musical form is also notable. He changed musical themes in creative ways and combined multiple themes in complex patterns. In Don Quixote, he used variation form very effectively, and in Till Eulenspiegel, he used rondo form well. As Hugh Macdonald wrote in The New Grove (1980), Strauss often used simple but descriptive musical themes, such as the three-note motif at the start of Also sprach Zarathustra. He also used rich, smooth harmonies for love themes and often returned to simple, peaceful musical patterns after complex sections, as seen in the ending of Don Quixote, where a solo cello plays a beautiful melody in the key of D major.
Other countries and decline
Jean Sibelius had a strong interest in symphonic poems, creating more than a dozen of these works along with many shorter pieces. These compositions cover his entire career, from En saga (1892) to Tapiola (1926), and clearly show his connection to Finland and its myths. The Kalevala, a collection of Finnish stories, provided Sibelius with themes and texts that were perfect for music. His natural skill in writing symphonies helped him create well-organized and connected structures in many of these works, especially Tapiola (1926). Pohjola's Daughter (1906), which Sibelius called a "symphonic fantasy," is closely tied to its story and demonstrates a clear and strong structure that few other composers achieved. Starting with his Third Symphony, Sibelius aimed to blend the traditions of symphonies and tone poems. He wanted to combine the weight and formal structure of symphonies with the creative freedom and storytelling of tone poems. However, in his later works, the differences between symphonies, "fantasies," and tone poems became less clear, as ideas from one piece often appeared in another. One of Sibelius's most important works, Finlandia, highlights Finland's fight for independence. He wrote it in 1901 and later added choral lyrics from the Finlandia Hymn by Veikko Antero Koskenniemi after Finland became independent.
Symphonic poems were not as closely linked to national identity in other countries, even though many composers wrote similar works. In Great Britain, composers included Arnold Bax and Frederick Delius. In the United States, composers such as Edward MacDowell, Howard Hanson, Ferde Grofé, and George Gershwin created these works. In Denmark, Carl Nielsen was a key figure. In Poland, Zygmunt Noskowski and Mieczysław Karłowicz wrote symphonic poems, and in Italy, Ottorino Respighi did as well. Additionally, as the 20th century progressed, many composers moved away from Romantic ideals and focused instead on abstract ideas and music's independence. This shift led to a decline in the popularity of symphonic poems.