Part III. For Your Ears Only
Tone Poems

My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words. —Maurice Ravel, about his tone poem Gaspard de la Nuit

He seems to think I imagine a yelling child and then look for the notes. It is vice versa. —Robert Schumann, responding to a critic about his piece Kinderszenen

In Part III, gone are the visuals to show us what's happening at a given moment.

In the tone poem, the words and the music remain—in which order they come will be the key question.^📖 We'll see the approach of both Ravel and Schumann where the interpretation chain may be

Words > Notes > Performer > Audience

or reversed,

Notes > Words > Performer > Audience

And does the audience see the words at all, or is that just for the benefit of composer and performer?

Ravel, Ondine, and Water

Maurice Ravel begins the score of Ondine by printing a full poem of Aloysius Bertrand. It tells the story of a soulless water sprite trying to seduce a mortal to marry her.

I created a video to overlay the lines of the poem—as I understand them—on an audio recording from my teacher, Natalie Ryshna, whose interpretation comes closest to my own. This is a bit of a milestone as the first full-length audio-only recording in the guide.

Despite Ravel's insistence that his music not be “interpreted,” just played, there are quite a few different ways to play the piece. So if you're curious, check out the first few measures of some alternatives and hear how they balance the sprite's seductive shimmer with her sinister intent.

Performance:

There are a couple structural moments that feel like they line up no matter the interpreter: the climax when Ondine implores the mortal to join her in her palace—and at the very end of the piece, when all the shimmering water cuts out. The human speaks his refusal, before Ondine vanishes into a fit.

The representation of water—the gentle splashing of the right hand that opens the piece—is also unmistakeable. But it's also far more specific than “just water”—there's the brush of watery pearls, a sprite swimming in the current, and a showery spray. And the character that it gives the story—just how evil is Ondine, really—varies from pianist to pianist, and listener to listener.

But what if you're not given the story at all? Consider these three excerpts from Chopin. Each has a similar texture, but do they all tell the same story?

Lapping water in the left hand, endless melody in the right. Yes, Chopin even titled this “Barcarolle,” a boat song.

But what happens in it? Is it even a narrative like Ondine, or is it just capturing the moment of a Venetian gondolier singing on a canal?

Like Ondine, it grows to a climax from a hand delicately touching a cheek to some sort of an ardent declamation.

The Chopin Competition's program notes provide options from a love scene in a secret gondola (Tausig) to a hushed ballade of lovers threatened by death (Szulc). Or go a step further… a combination of “the erotic with the messianic,” the erotic from Chopin's feelings for his student, and the messianic from Before the Dawn, a poem casting Poland as the Christ of Nations (Stromenger).

It's all a bit much for me, honestly, but I have to admit that if I really try to listen for it, I can actually kind of hear any of these. It goes to show that with enough imagination you can hear what you like.

Here's the next excerpt:

Undulating left hand, operatic right hand. I think plenty of people would call it a song over lapping water.

It turns out, Chopin actually played it for Mendelssohn, who popularized the Venetian boat song. Mendelssohn described it as “a vision opening up of a garden peopled by beings walking in silence amidst fountains and strange birds.” No Venetian boats in sight.

But Chopin cryptically called it an Andante Spianato, and pianists still argue about what this means. I've heard it interpreted as the Polish plains or a still lake in the morning.

For me, the main thing that distinguishes it from the Barcarolle is that the melodic phrases in the Andante Spianato seem to finish, breathe, and restart, like a singer, unlike the more endless melody of the Barcarolle or Ondine. The left-hand rhythm lilts a little less, too, and the harmonic color is a little brighter.

But Venetian gondoliers need to breathe too; sometimes the water is smooth, and it's sunny outside. So 🤷‍♂️.

And the last excerpt:

Yep, a gently lapping left hand, vocal melody in the right. But this one is just called “Nocturne,” a generic night music. Where does that leave us?

With even more freedom for the other links in the interpretation chain.

For one, pianists can distance themselves from the Barcarolle by minimizing the watery flow of the left hand.

You could ease the tempo, level out the rolling figure, or rein in the accompaniment in favor of a more present, noble melody.

Each conveys different messages and invites different interpretations. Many of these videos came from the Chopin competition—ironically a contest that crowns a single winner—underscoring how subjective these judgments are. Rubinstein's “noble” reading is often called definitive, but that label feels misplaced for such a personal piece. If you insist on a single correct interpretation, you may just have to play it yourself.

So what about our ability to take absolute music with no hint from the composer and interpret it as something like a poem about water such as Ondine?

Sometimes the piece's publisher tries to “help,” and they provide titles for us. Usually, they're just trying to help sell more copies of the music and don't trust the public to think for themselves.

So here are two excerpts from Chopin's Etudes—studies in a specific pianistic technique, arpeggios—that we'll hear first as pure music, and then discuss their nicknames afterwards.^💬

Here's Chopin Op. 10 No. 1, the first etude in his collection, in C Major:

And now Op. 25 No. 12, the final etude in his collection, in C Minor:

Performer:

So how can these pieces, written just with the name “Studies,” be viewed through the lens of a water-inspired tone-poem?

As it turns out, the former has been given the nickname, “Waterfall,” and the latter “Ocean,” neither by Chopin.

I'm usually skeptical of these nicknames that don't come from the composer, but I think these particular performances actually make the case for these nicknames. Tsujii's “Waterfall” sparkles as if lit up. Sokolov summons an intensity for the “Ocean” that would make swimmers get out of the water.

Personally, I find that the “Ocean” name fits better than “Waterfall.” Even from a literal perspective, the surging up and down of the Ocean etude captures the motion of the sea.

Just a 2-minute miniature ocean feels as massive as, say, the “intentional,” inescapable sweep of a symphonic sketch like Debussy's La Mer or the raging tempest in Britten's Sea Interludes.

On the other hand, a waterfall has a continuous downward cascade, not the upward motion we hear in the first etude. And what of the melody in the etude's bass notes? If it were up to me, I might instead imagine an eagle or an osprey dive bombing its prey.

Still, I love the parallelism of these names in the images they evoke—the gleaming majesty of a waterfall compared to the terrifying power of the same liquid in a vast ocean. It also goes to show that arpeggios in C Major vs C Minor mean more than just happy water vs sad water—but waterfall vs ocean (or is that the real difference between waterfall and ocean?).

Character Pieces: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

The short Chopin études don't tell a full story in the same way a longer tone poem might. Instead, they're closer to a character piece—a shorter piece that conveys a single idea.

Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana takes its title from E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper.

Yes, that's the story of a conductor and a cat named Murr who learned to write.

Kreisler was, as Schumann described, “wild, witty, and eccentric”—prone to rapid changes in mood. Kreisleriana—as with most of Schumann's work—also reflects Schumann's own split personality, represented in his music and writing by his alter egos, the fiery Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius.

Here's the opening:

The opening, marked 'Extremely agitated,' clearly belongs to the passionate, impulsive Florestan side of Schumann's mind.

Now a moment of dreaminess and whimsy in the eye of the storm.

The opening storm slowly regains control.

The second movement, or 'fantasy,' as Schumann called it, begins with a complete character change. Marked 'Very inwardly', we now hear the calmer Eusebius side of Schumann's personality.

As far as I—or most audience members—would know, none of these movements are literal depictions from Hoffmann's literature. How, then, are we supposed to fully appreciate the work? What if the first movement is a very literal depiction of a cat getting into a fight, and we have no idea?

To what extent is even the context about Schumann's alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, necessary? You'll find plenty of pianists who perform this piece without reading Hoffmann. But none that don't know about Florestan and Eusebius.

For audiences, my usual recommendation is that they don't need to know this—if the pianist isn't conveying these alter egos, then that's their fault. But I do think that audiences should usually try to understand the title of a work. After all, the title is the one way that the composer has to reach through the interpretation chain and speak directly to the audience, without the middleman.

In this case, it would probably be reasonable to read the title, be perplexed and give up. Schumann himself wrote, “The title conveys nothing to any but Germans.”

Piecing Together a Story

The eight different movements of Kreisleriana share little material with each other; no obvious theme returns like in a movie. If anything, they're just linked by the feeling of being off-kilter, culminating in the displaced bass notes that begin and end the final movement.

Yet somehow, this set of character pieces forms a cohesive whole without a plot to tell a story. The listener can piece the various snapshots together to create a composite portrait—more montage than narrative. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Anna Clyne's DANCE shows us that process more explicitly, splitting the difference, in a way, between character pieces and a tone poem. It is based on a 5-line poem by the 13th-century poet Rumi. Each movement represents a single character, described by that line in the poem. But together, they form a whole.

Here is the first movement of DANCE, “when you're broken open.”

The rest of the movements to DANCE follow with the next lines of the Rumi poem:

Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.

It's not a narrative poem like Bertrand's Ondine, but that doesn't mean that the lines together don't mean more than the lines individually. It would be easy for many people to glance over an inspirational poster of Rumi's poem in a college dorm room and forget it the next day. But when it's engaged with, fully, as Clyne does, a greater arc emerges. We feel a real human—maybe the cellist, a friend, or ourselves—going through these stages and choosing—or needing—to dance.

The freedom in dancing “when you're perfectly free” (the clip below) carries more poignancy and a feeling of release after being broken open, tearing the bandage off, and fighting, which are quoted.^📖 The final resolution at the very end gains meaning from the tension that precedes it.

Pocket Concert: Journey and transformationTap to expand

This brings us to longer-form works—the types of pieces that actually created the genre of the “tone poem.”

Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel of the same name. ^💬

With these longer tone poems—some, like Strauss's Alpine Symphony, can run nearly an hour—it can be easy for listeners to get lost. They are usually written in a single movement without breaks, so there are no easy signposts for the listener to latch on to something, and listeners aren't often given a prompt to come back out of their thoughts and back into the music.

Ravel's Ondine, which began the chapter, was only 6 minutes long, and had two clear events in just those 6 minutes to pull the listener back in. And there's enough to be intrigued about by the virtuosity of the piano playing and the watery texture.

Like Ondine, there is a structure to Verklärte Nacht that mirrors its poem's quite well—5 sections that correspond to the 5 stanzas of the poem.

I am recommending the full Verklärte Nacht as the “Pocket Concert” for this chapter. I could, of course, pull out one moment, like the radiant moment halfway through when night is actually “transfigured”, and show it as an excerpt. But in many ways, the whole point of these tone poems is the development of the narrative throughout time, so I think it's time that I recommend a truly long-form piece of music rather than just a movement.

The poem and the story are usually reproduced in program notes. But in a way it's a spoiler to read the program notes beforehand. And if you try to synchronize it with the music yourself, the experience becomes more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional one. So as with Ondine, I've added the text of each stanza to the beginning of where that stanza may take place in the music, but each individual line is not specifically timed. (Also, performers disagree where exactly the text lies in the music.)

So grab some headphones and turn up the volume as the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra performs—from memory—Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.

1. Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;

the Moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.

The Moon moves along above tall oak trees,

there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance

to which the black, jagged tips reach up.

2. A woman's voice speaks: I am carrying a child, and not by you.

I am walking here with you in a state of sin.

I have offended grievously against myself.

I despaired of happiness,

and yet I still felt a grievous longing

for life's fullness, for a mother's joys

and duties; and so I sinned,

and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex

to the embrace of a stranger,

and even thought myself blessed.

Now life has taken its revenge,

and I have met you, met you.

3. She walks on, stumbling.

She looks up; the Moon keeps pace.

Her dark gaze drowns in light.

4. A man's voice speaks: Do not let the child you have conceived

be a burden on your soul.

Look, how brightly the universe shines!

Splendour falls on everything around,

you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,

but there is the glow of an inner warmth

from you in me, from me in you.

That warmth will transfigure the stranger's child,

and you bear it me, begot by me.

You have transfused me with splendour,

you have made a child of me.

5. He puts an arm about her strong hips.

Their breath embraces in the air.

Two people walk on through the high, bright night.

I find that the poetry gives the listener something to hang onto for the first listen—though in this performance, the lighting cues serve a similar purpose. Knowing the story is helpful because it can help illuminate details that you might otherwise not think about—the low plodding cello in the opening, for instance, might be easy to ignore normally, but in the context of people walking, it takes on a more expressive character—there is much you can tell about someone's feelings just from their body language as they walk. The dialogue between the upper strings and lower strings that permeates the work (like at 14:30) becomes a literal dialogue between two people.

However, I find that the narrative—in which a woman's shame about her pre-marital relations is transformed by her current partner's forgiveness ^💬—impedes the more powerful, flexible message of the music to capture the listener's own, most personal, transformation, whatever it may be.

The Age of Anxiety

We haven't looked much at works titled “Symphony” yet, but I want to use the lens of this long-range narrative arc to examine a multi-movement literature-inspired work—Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, Age of Anxiety.

In this case, it's quite a bit more difficult to read the associated text than in the Schoenberg. The text from W.H. Auden, which won a Pullitzer, clocks in at about 200 pages long—a bit too long for most concertgoers during their intermission perusal of the booklet.

Bernstein, when asked about whether listeners needed to know the poem, said, “At the time I wrote it, I thought it was absolutely necessary; the poem and the Symphony were mutually integral. That's why I stuck so literally to the form of the poem. But now I don't think so. The Symphony has acquired a life of its own.” Auden, for his part, said the Symphony “really has nothing to do with me. Any connections with my book are rather distant.”

I agree with Bernstein. In fact, the name “Age of Anxiety” helps the symphony achieve a certain universality that the specifics of the poem preclude. When I first learned the piece, I chose to study it without reading Auden's source material first, and only later went back to find additional inspiration from the story. I then started to write program notes about how our time is the real Age of Anxiety, and if only Bernstein could have seen how relevant his piece had stayed. Then I looked back at the program notes that others had written since the 1949 premiere. They all claimed, essentially, the same thing.

We'll do the same thing here and listen to the piece before looking at the story. First, here's the Masque, played here by Krystian Zimerman with Simon Rattle conducting. This is where we're headed:

It's not even telling the story of a party—it just is a party. So where's the anxiety? What is the role of the party in the story?

This movement, “The Masque,” gains additional significance from following the journey to get there through seemingly unrelated material. The preceding section is called “The Dirge.” Bernstein uses a technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg called the 12-tone technique, in which each of the twelve notes used in Western music is used before any is used twice. This makes it feel ungrounded, and, for lack of a better word, anxious. Here is the same pianist, Krystian Zimerman, 32 years before, with Bernstein himself conducting.

So this is the context. After this clip we'll take a look at Auden's story for this segment, but I think as an emotional journey there is little ambiguity about what our characters are feeling at the moment. As “The Dirge” continues, it fluctuates between introspection and outburst, until it segues, suddenly, into “The Masque.”

A few observations. Whether it's because of the performance or the context, or the part of “The Masque” in the excerpt, I get far less happy-go-lucky vibes from the bit of jazz we just heard than in the first clip. It makes me wonder if the party is people telling themselves that “this is fine” while the building burns around them, or if they're celebrating because they just escaped. In other words, are they dancing because they're broken open, or dancing because they're perfectly free? I interpret the piece entirely within the realm of my own life and times. And as I've played it since 2020, I've found quite a few different ways to interpret and feel our age of anxiety.

What's Bernstein's take on The Masque? “This is all fake, of course—it's fake hilarity. Trying to be what they think might constitute happiness, or being happy during miserable times,” he says in an interview with Humphrey Burton. ^💬

But it's not really that simple—what else is one to do? The plot: it is a night in New York City during World War II, and our four characters, Malin, Quant, Emble, and Rosetta, have spent the first half of the piece (and the poem) drinking, philosophizing, and searching for meaning—something to fill the void left by faith in what they see as a broken, secularized, faithless world, abandoned by what they call “our colossal father.” It is here that Rosetta invites them back to her place for a nightcap. Bernstein calls the music of The Masque “by turns nervous, sentimental, self-satisfied, vociferous.”

I agree with this description, but I don't find this fake. I find it authentic to the search for faith felt by our four characters, Auden, Bernstein himself, and the pianist (the “autobiographical protagonist”).

When the party dissolves and the characters pass out, Bernstein asks, “what is left beyond this emptiness?” Bernstein, who revised the ending to allow the pianist-protagonist a more satisfying conclusion, says “at least one of the characters does find the core of faith… which is what I'm after in I guess every work I ever write.” In other words, “what is left, it turns out, is faith.”

Listeners may not be searching for meaning, and they may not find faith. But it is a universal experience to ask what it looks like to be happy during miserable times—and hope to find an answer.

The Rabbit HoleSample the repertoire

This rabbit hole is especially deep, and as I love and play so much of this music, sometimes I just want to stay in it. Also a quick reminder—you can use the ⓘ button on the top of each video to view more information about the piece and performer, or the bookmark button to save the link for later.

Few images in tone poems recur as persistently as water, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Western classical canon. It is, after all, something we associate with sound even in nature. We see Smetana's Moldau River, Beethoven's babbling brook, and Wagner and Schumann's Rhine; the Roman fountains through the eyes of Griffes, Liszt and Respighi; rain from a Chopin prelude, in Debussy's garden, and in a Takemitsu sketch; Mendelssohn takes us to Fingal's sea cave while Smyth and Bax take us to the Cornish cliffs; Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius paint us swans and their lakes; Debussy's Sunken Cathedral rises from the depths, Ravel's boat finds itself alone at sea, and Luther Adams's inexorable Become Ocean immerses us in the ocean world in three long waves.

Interestingly, listening to these clips, I find that there is actually more variety in the piano writing than the orchestral writing of these scenes of water. Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau (Reflections on the water) and Poissons d'or (Goldfish) bring us into the realm of character pieces that are more painting than poetry, and often compared to Monet's water lilies. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition gives us a set of character pieces that are based on Viktor Hartmann paintings, with a main theme, called the Promenade, that represents our viewer strolling through the gallery, their mood changing after each piece they see.

One might think that it might be harder to listen to character pieces than pieces with a longer arc, but in fact, it can often be easier for listeners to come up with a single association for each piece than a full-fledged story. And the constantly changing characters keep you on your toes.

Many of Robert Schumann's big piano works fall into the “character piece” genre, and while they are designed to be heard as complete works, some individual movements work by themselves. Aside from his “scenes” from childhood and from the forest, his Fantasiestücke (this movement called Dream's Confusions) mirror Kreisleriana in their inspiration from an E.T.A. Hoffmann work and their wild swings between alter-egos Florestan and Eusebius. Carnaval, representing masked revelers at the pre-Lent festival Carnival, is the most explicit about its inspiration by giving each movement a title, two of which include Eusebius and Florestan.

As far as long-form narrative poems go, I have to mention Franz Liszt, who originated the genre of the symphonic tone poem. Still, I prefer his pianistic works to his orchestral ones, particularly his poetry-inspired pieces. The first Mephisto Waltz (performance 2 minutes in) is one of Liszt's many Faust-inspired stories, capturing the devil's seductive violin playing at a village wedding. And unlike Chopin's unofficially nicknamed etudes, most of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes carry specific programs specified by the composer himself, like this snow storm played by Yunchan Lim.

But it's Richard Strauss whose works make up the core of the tone poem repertoire. On the lighter side, there's Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks. In the same spirit as Schoenberg's Transfigured Night, there's Strauss's symphonic poem, Death and Transfiguration, and Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, played here by the Norwegian Chamber Symphony.

Beyond Liszt and Strauss, there is a long tail of great tone poems from the Baroque through today. Even Vivaldi's Four Seasons were accompanied by sonnets; Baroque keyboard works like Rameau's “chicken” and Couperin's ticking clockwork have been called miniature tone poems (though I think “character pieces” would also fit), played here by Sokolov. Mel Bonis profiles seven “women of legend” from Shakespeare's Desdemona through Ophelia and Salome. Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending recreates the bird from George Meredith's poem on the violin. George Gershwin brought jazz idioms into the “homesickness” section of his tone poem, An American in Paris.

I don't have data, but looking at concert programs from the major symphony orchestras, it feels like most programmed major pieces from 21st-century composers attach extra-musical references to their pieces. I wonder if this is to give the public a shortcut to interpreting the “modern” music that they have grown to resist, or because composers are just eager to share their inspiration directly with the listener. Regardless, Jennifer Higdon's cathartic blue cathedral stands as successful storytelling with or without its program—a tribute to her late brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, where she is represented by the flute and he by the clarinet; at the end the clarinet continues on by himself. Joan Tower's Made in America uses “America the Beautiful” as the basis to explore the various faces of today's America, while Gabriela Ortiz's Yanga for percussion quartet, choir, and orchestra tells the story of Gaspar Yanga, the African prince who led Mexico's first free Black settlement in 1609.

Alexander Scriabin actually wrote the poetry himself for some of his piano sonatas, which unite the mystical and philosophical with sensuality and ecstasy. Alongside his preludes and etudes, he even wrote pieces called “Poem,” but many without a poem attached. His Poem of Ecstasy—only a mild euphemism for his original title, Poème Orgiaque (Orgiastic Poem)—shares the text he wrote for his fifth piano sonata. Some listeners may get lost during the twenty-minute trip, but the finish, played with Scriabin's indication of “a sensual pleasure becoming more and more ecstatic,” does not hold back:

Part III. For Your Ears Only Tone Poems