Literature and Tone Poetry

We've already discussed some of the most literal ways that literature and music interact: Schubert songs with text from Goethe poetry and Prokofiev ballets with plots from Shakespeare. But there is a cross-pollination of the arts at every level, and with the “tone poem”, composers sought to capture the essence of a poem or story in music alone. ^💬

We will continue with the same approach here—look first at works that explicitly tell stories, and then see how that lens can be applied to more abstract works. I'm especially excited for this music because finally we get to the repertoire I actually play.

Ravel, Ondine, and water

Maurice Ravel begins Ondine with an epigraph of Aloysius Bertrand's poem about a soulless water sprite trying to seduce a mortal to marry her, which in some mythologies would grant her a soul. Compared to opera and ballet, even more is up to the interpretation of the performer and listener to map the parts of the poem onto the actual music (in spite of Ravel's insistence that “I don't ask for my music to be interpreted – just to be played.”). It's not even clear that Ravel meant each line to have a corresponding section in the music; he may have diverged from Bertrand's poem and not told anyone.

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 in that it's the first time that we're listening to a full length audio-only recording, but there should be plenty to focus on here. You can also use the performance drop down to select a different video and interpret for yourself what the pianist makes of the poem—how they tell the story, and how they balance the sprite's seductive shimmer with her sinister intent. ^💬

For all the differences in how individual pianists inhabit the character of Ondine, there are two moments that are always clear in their meaning: the climax, usually about 3 and a half minutes in, when Ondine implores the mortal to join her in her palace—and when all the shimmering water cuts out and the mortal speaks his refusal before Ondine vanishes in a fit.

The representation of water—the gentle splashing of the right hand that opens the piece—is unmistakeable. 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.

Still, the moment you're told that the piece is about water, you can hear it. But what if you're not told? Consider these three excerpts from Chopin. Each has a similar texture, but do they tell the same story?

Next:

And finally:

The YouTube titles might have spoiled the answer, but the first is the cryptically titled Andante Spianato (it's unclear what Chopin meant, exactly), the second is titled Barcarolle (a boat song), and the third is called simply, Nocturne (night music). All three have in common an undulating figure in the left hand accompanying an operatic right hand providing the melody. But there's also nothing wrong in thinking they all feel like a song over lapping water.

Chopin actually played the Andante Spianato for Felix 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.” I've also heard it described as a depiction of the Polish Plains or a still lake in the morning, but none of these are definitive. To 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 might, where the Barcarolle provides a more endless melody.

The Barcarolle certainly feels like it has a full story arc that carries it through -- after the rocking water cuts out for the first time, the music grows from a hand delicately touching a cheek to an ardent declamation, and it can be seen as a full-fledged tone poem akin to Ravel's Ondine, if you just supply the poem. 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). "Karol Stromenger went further still. For him, the Barcarolle combined the erotic with the messianic, evoking [Krasiński's Polish-nationalistic poem] Before the dawn, and inspired by [Chopin's] feelings for Delfina Potocka." I find this a bit much, but I hate to admit that if I listen for it, I can actually kind of hear what he's saying. It goes to show that with enough imagination, there is little limit to how one can supply the poetry to a piece of music.

If those are among our choices for how to interpret the Barcarolle, where would that leave us for a piece like the Nocturne we just heard, and whether its story is similar or different? With more questions and choices. Performances of the Nocturne could even distance themselves from the Barcarolle by minimizing the watery flow of the left hand entirely. For instance, they could ease the tempo, level out the rolling figure, or rein in the accompaniment in favor of a more present, noble melody. This is one reason why pianists emphasize the importance of the left hand in Chopin despite his reputation as a composer “for the right hand.”

All three performances convey different messages and invite 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 need to play it yourself; few interpreters will satisfy.

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” (usually, they're trying to help sell more copies of the music.) Tchaikovsky's The Seasons each begin with a poem and a descriptive title—“June,” the most widely played, is labelled “Barcarolle” (“Let us go to the shore; / there the waves will kiss our feet”). Most pianists adhere to these guidelines, but they came from the publisher, not from the composer. But Yunchan Lim published liner notes with his own program, describing The Seasons as the last year of a person's life instead. Here's June:

A woman stands by the sea ready to end her life, her gaze fixed on the countless stars across the sky. As she recalls the life she had once dreamed of and the things she had wanted, tears stream down her face. Just when she is about to make an irreversible choice, angels descend from heaven and gather around her with candlelight, singing in unison to offer her solace. Soon, however, the angels disappear, and she is again left alone, sobbing.

Rachmaninoff's Etude-tableaux (“Picture-study”) Op. 39 No. 2 falls under the tradition of pieces that began with a specific image: the sea and the seagulls. We now know the piece by that name—but only because of a private letter he wrote—he chose to publish without a name at all. Do we go by the composer's decisions and interpret the piece from the music alone? Or should we use external context to form a potentially different interpretation? The problem is that once you're told the image, you can't unhear it.

Debussy found a middle ground. He provided us titles for each of his preludes, but written at the end of the piece, with an ellipsis, like “…Ondine” following the final double barline (Yes, Debussy wrote an Ondine, too, distinct from the Ravel that we discussed earlier.) When I perform them, I prefer to play the piece and only tell the audience the title afterwards. This opens up a world of possibilities, and as Debussy said, “I live in a world of imagination.”

In that spirit, here are two excerpts from Chopin's Etudes—studies in a specific pianistic technique, arpeggios. One is the first one, in C Major, and one is the last of the set, in C Minor. Chopin provided no titles for them.

And now the second etude, in C minor:

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 think these particular performances make the case for these interpretations. 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, whereas my mental image of a waterfall places the emphasis on the continuous downward cascade rather than the upwards motion that we hear in the first etude. I also don't feel like “Waterfall” captures the melody in the etude's bass notes. I might 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?). And a 2-minute miniature “ocean” can be just as visceral as, say the “intentional,” inescapable sweep of Debussy's symphonic sketch La Mer or the raging tempest in Britten's Sea Interludes.

Schumann, E.T.A. Hoffman, and the character piece

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

The character pieces of Robert Schumann take their inspiration from the fantastical stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In the case of Kreisleriana, each movement pivots between wildly different shifts in perspective, reflecting Hoffmann's novel, “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper,” which includes both the biography of a conductor, Johannes Kreisler, 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 in most of Robert 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:

As far as I—or most audience members—would know, none of these movements are literal depictions from Hoffmann's literature. To be completely honest, I (and I'm guessing quite a few other pianists) haven't even read the books that feature Kreisler. 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.

My usual recommendation is that audiences need not understand much of a piece's context in order to appreciate it—but they should try to understand the title of a work, as this is the composer's explicit message to the audience. In this case, Schumann was aware that even audiences of his time wouldn't understand the title. “The title conveys nothing to any but Germans,” he wrote.

The eight different movements of Kreisleriana share little material with each other; no obvious theme returns for the listener to catch on to. If anything, they are 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 form 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 splits the difference, in a way, between character pieces and 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 as a whole, they constitute a tone poem.

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 feeling of a 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.

The Long Play—Journey and transformation

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 sign posts 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 “Long Play” 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. (And, as we saw in the Introduction, you run the risk of being sad at the wrong time.) 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 specially. (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—memorized—Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. Since it's memorized, I find they really have internalized exactly the meaning of every note.

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 poetry—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.

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 literary-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. W.H. Auden's Pulitzer Prize-winning poem of the same name clocks in at about 200 pages long—a bit too long for most concertgoers during their intermission perusal of the program 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 Kristian 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 are all used before any is used twice. This makes it feel ungrounded, and, for lack of a better word, anxious. Here is the same pianist, Kristian 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 they have all asked what it looks like to be happy during miserable times—and hoped, or still hope, that they find an answer.

The Rabbit Hole

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.

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 Smetena'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 coast; 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 lillies. 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 keeps 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. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Hiawatha follows Longfellow's epic poem; the overture quotes “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.” 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 with their listeners. 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: