Programme Music

dates of romantic era

1820-1910

The Romantic Orchestra

• 2 horns and tuba added to the current 2

• valve system invented 1815 allowed full range of notes

• double woodwind + keys invented

• increase in strings

• percussion could expand from just timps

• around 90 players

Types of programme music you’ve covered

• The Concert Overture

• The Symphonic Poem

• The Programme Symphony

• Solo Works

• Works Communicating an Awareness of National Identity

The Concert Overture Features

• recognisable (maybe modified) sonata form

• pictorial or national elements

• grew from opera overtures that were then played on their own in concerts to just being concert overtures in their own right

• Mendelssohn most notable early composer

Overtures you’ve studied

• Mendelssohn Fingal’s Cave - concert overture

• Tchaikovsky Romeo And Juliet - fantasy overture

• Liszt Orpheus - technically an Overture written for Orfeo ed Euridice

symphonic poems you’ve studied

• Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet

• Strauss Don Quixote (Tone Poem)

• Dukas The Sorcerers Apprentice

• Smetna Vltava

Programme Symphonies you’ve covered

• Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

• Strauss Don Quixote

Solo Works you’ve covered

• Schumann - Kinderszenen ‘Träumerei’ + ‘Kind im Einschlummern’ + ‘Von Fremden Landern und Menschen’

• Grieg - Lyric Pieces ‘Gangar’ + ‘Scherzo’ + ‘Arietta"‘

National Identity works you’ve covered

• Smetana Vltava

• Grieg Gangar

Orpheus Context

• Based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

• Originally written as a replacement overture for Gluck’s 1762 Opera

• Composed 1853-1854

• Liszt - Hungarian composer but spent time in Germany and France

• Symphonic Poem

• Lots of ideas from Wagner

Liszt Orpheus elements

• 10 mins

• symphonic poem/loose sonata form

• uses thematic transformation

• uses harp to signify orpheus’ lyre