Symphonies By Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Symphonic Poem: Alternative and Catalyst

Symphonic Poem: Alternative and Catalyst

See also: Symphonic poem and Symphonic poems (Liszt)

While Tchaikovsky struggled with his first three symphonies, developments in Europe led to an alternative to this genre that, in a reverse twist, offered to change the scope of the symphony. Hungarian composer Franz Liszt desired a form of orchestral music that would offer greater flexibility in developing musical themes than the symphony then allowed but also preserve the overall unity of a musical composition. His objective was to expand single-movement works beyond the concert overture format. By doing so, he hoped to combine the dramatic, emotive and evocative qualities of concert overtures with the scale and musical complexity normally reserved for the opening movements of symphonies.

The fruit of Liszt's labors was what he eventually termed symphonic poems. In them, he used two alternatives to sonata form. Beethoven had used the first of these, cyclic form, to link separate movements thematically with one another. Liszt took this process one step further by combining themes into a single-movement cyclic structure. The second alternative, thematic transformation, originated with Haydn and Mozart. This process worked in a similar manner as variation but instead of a theme being changed into a related or subsidiary version of the main one, it becomes transformed into a related but separate, independent theme. Beethoven used it in the finale of his Ninth Symphony when he transformed the theme of the "Ode to Joy" into a Turkish march. Weber and Berlioz had also transformed themes. Schubert used thematic transformation to bind together the movements of his Wanderer Fantasy, a work that had a tremendous influence on Liszt. However, Liszt learned to create longer formal structures solely through thematic transformation.

Liszt's approach to musical form in his symphonic poems was also unorthodox. Instead of following a strict presentation and development of musical themes as in sonata form, he placed his themes into a loose, episodic pattern. There, recurring melodies called motifs were thematically transformed as musical and programmatic needs dictated. (Richard Wagner would make good use of this practice in his operas and music dramas.) Recapitulations, where themes are normally restated after they are combined and contrasted in development, were foreshortened. Codas, where pieces of music generally wind to a close, were greatly enlarged to a size and scope that can affect the listener's concept of the themes. Themes shuffled into new and unexpected patterns of order and three- or four-movement structures were rolled into one in a continual process of creative experimentation.

A number of composers, especially Bohemian and Russian, followed in Liszt's footsteps to develop the symphonic poem further. Added to this was the Russian love of story-telling, for which the genre seemed expressly tailored. Tchaikovsky wrote a symphonic poem, Fatum, after he had finished his First Symphony and first opera, The Voyevoda. There, he dabbled with the free form the new genre offered. However, the work did not come out well and he destroyed it after two performances. For his next programmatic work, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky reverted to sonata form, structuring it in a similar fashion to Beethoven's concert overtures. However, in a case of musical cross-pollination, the symphonic poem offered the potential to change the nature of the symphony in its merging of a wide emotional range with symphonic resources. This potential played to the conception Tchaikovsky would form of the symphony as a vehicle for personal expression and one whose details could, as he phrased it to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, "be manipulated as freely as one chooses."