Romantic Program Music Essay

“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
-Alphonse de Lamartine

It is no small fact that during the Romantic Period emotion, sentiment, and sensation were center-stage. The people wanted freedom from the age of reason and yearned to express themselves. This newfound ideal soon drifted from everyday life into the arts. Romantic writers and painters loved to tell stories and express moods with their art, and musicians were eager to join the trend. The ideal for the Romantic composer was to reflect his own feelings and emotions in his compositions in order to instill in the listener certain preconceived moods. In order to accomplish this, new forms of music were needed. The main forms of orchestral program music
The intent of program music is to invoke emotion. It tells the audience how to feel during a movement and when to feel it. Programmatic works such as Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, and Smetana’s Moldau depict emotions, characters, and events, or the sounds and motions of nature. Sometimes when composers wrote program music, they would leave plot holes. Composers wanted to make their works open to interpretation. Both musicians and audiences in the romantic period liked to read stories into all music, whether intended by the composer or not. Program music serves as a base for the many versions that will evolve from it. Closely following program music, is concert overture. The concert overture, based on the style of overtures to romantic operas, became established in the 19th century as an independent, one-movement work, which took either the classical sonata form or the free form of a symphonic poem. Concert overtures serve to tell a story; one could consider it a narrative. Well-known concert overtures include Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Overture 1812 and Romeo and Juliet
A tone poem is a piece of orchestral concert music designed to tell a story or suggest an extramusical idea. Tone/symphonic poems only have one movement. Franz Liszt developed the symphonic poem in the late 1840s and 1850s, and it became the most important type of program music after 1860. A couple of well-known poems would be Les Préludes (1854) and Hamlet (1858). Some tone poems had ornate programs. Composers wrote extensive narratives or sometimes just one word to keep their audience involved and let them make their own interpretations. During the late nineteenth century, symphonic poems became an important means of expression for nationalism in music. Composers of the time were very proud of their origin and often expressed it in the works. A nationalistic tone poem, Bedřich Smetana’s Moldau, depicted the longest river of