III.

19th Century

Early in the 19th century, music was greatly influenced by the literary movement known as romanticism. French composer Hector Berlioz and Hungarian composer Franz Liszt were leaders in the development of program music, as it then became known. They created works based on or inspired by literary, pictorial, and other subjects, as, for example, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony, 1830), in which a recurring melodic idea represents the woman who haunts a musician’s dreams. Berlioz composed some of his finest works on subjects taken from William Shakespeare and Virgil. The cult of the romantic hero, prevalent in these times, inspired highly charged symphonic works full of atmosphere, such as Berlioz’s symphony Harold in Italy (1834), based on an epic poem by British poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Franz Liszt based his Faust Symphony (1857) and the Dante Symphony (1857) on great works of literature. In these symphonies and in works such as Les préludes (1854), for which he devised the term symphonic poem, Liszt employed the leitmotiv, using specific melodic phrases to identify characters, actions, or symbols, an innovation developed by Liszt’s son-in-law, German composer Richard Wagner, in his music dramas.

During the course of the 19th century, the rise of nationalism was reflected in such works as Má vlast (My Country, 1874-1879), a cycle of symphonic poems describing aspects of his native country, by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, and Finlandia (1900), a passionate symphonic poem in praise of his country, by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Program music probably reached its most complex form in the symphonic poems of German composer Richard Strauss, who employed all the resources of the modern orchestra for the depiction of romantic heroes and events, as in his Don Quixote (1898) based on the novel by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. In this work a solo cello is used to represent the hero and a solo viola represents the hero’s faithful servant, while the full orchestra comments on and illustrates their adventures.