Program music

Program music is instrumental music intended to evoke a story, scene, or idea beyond its musical structure. It often uses titles, notes, or recurring musical themes to guide interpretation.

Leitmotif: A recurring musical idea associated with a character, place, object, or concept. Recurring themes can identify figures or ideas as a program unfolds.
Symphonie fantastique: Hector Berlioz’s 1830 symphony depicting an artist’s opium-fueled visions and recurring beloved. Its recurring idée fixe links a vivid narrative to symphonic structure.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An eighteenth-century philosopher, writer, and composer who argued that music could imitate and express human passions. His ideas helped establish the aesthetic case for music’s expressive imitation.
Eduard Hanslick: A nineteenth-century music critic who argued that music’s content lies in its dynamic forms of sound. His formalist position challenged the claim that instrumental works need narratives.
Tone poem: A single-movement orchestral work inspired by a literary, pictorial, or other extramusical subject. It is a prominent orchestral form of program music.
Harold in Italy: Hector Berlioz’s viola-centered symphony inspired by Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A solo viola represents a wandering protagonist across contrasting scenes.
Ludwig van Beethoven: A German composer whose works bridged the Classical and Romantic periods. His Pastoral Symphony explicitly evokes countryside scenes while retaining symphonic form.
Franz Brendel: A German music critic and historian who championed the New German School and program music. He defended Liszt’s programmatic works against formalist criticism.
Absolute music: Instrumental music presented without an explicit narrative or extramusical subject. It marks the contrasting ideal of music understood through its own structure.
The Moldau: A symphonic poem by Bedřich Smetana tracing the course of the Vltava River through Bohemia. Its orchestral episodes depict a river’s journey from source to destination.

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