SYMPHONIC POEM (Symphonische Dichtung, Tondich tung, Poeme symphonique, etc.). This term was first used by Liszt in his 1 2 Symphonische Dichtungen. It implies a large orchestral composition which, whatever its length and changes of tempo, is not broken up into separate movements, and which, moreover, gratuitously illustrates a train of thought external to the music and to its conditions of performance. The form of the symphonic poem is dictated by its written or unwritten pro gramme; and so it is not every piece of "programme music" that can be called a symphonic poem. Beethoven's sonata "Les Adieux" and his "Pastoral Symphony" are, for instance, works in which the poetic idea does not interfere with the normal de velopment of sonata style.
Great disturbances in musical art have always been accom panied by appeals to external ideas. New art-forms are not born mature, and in their infancy their parent arts naturally invite other arts to stand godfather. It is certain, first, that no theoriz ing can long prevent musical ideas from growing where and how they please; secondly, that musical ideas are just as likely to be inspired by literature and other arts as by any other kind of experience ; and lastly, that, as musicians gain in mastery, their music outstrips their literary analysis. Hence the frequent ability of great composers to set inferior words to music which is not only great, but evidently based upon those words. Hence the disgust of great composers at unauthorized literary interpreta tions of their works. Hence, on the other hand, the absence of any strain on the classical composer's conscience as to making his music gratuitously illustrative. Accordingly, the importance
of the symphonic poem lies, not in its illustrative capacity, but in its tendency towards a new instrumental art of to-morrow.
The symphonic poem has been described elsewhere (see Music, section 9, and PROGRAMME MUSIC) as the application of the Wagnerian time-scale to symphonic music. Liszt is successful only where he is writing on a hardly more than lyric scale, as in Orpheus, or, at the utmost, on a scale less than that of the earliest and best of all symphonic poems, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasia (op. 15). Schubert had not the slightest idea that he was writing a symphonic poem ; but in that piece he achieved everything that Liszt attempted, even to the metamorphosis of whole sections. Liszt's efforts on a larger time-scale do not even begin to solve the problem ; they achieve no sense of movement at all, and the device of deriving all their themes from a single figure is totally irrelevant. Saint-Saens and Cesar Franck are incapable of such failure, and their symphonic poems flow very convincingly, though not on a very large scale. They also illus trate their subjects amusingly enough. The first achievement of real Wagnerian symphonic art belongs to Richard Strauss. The power of composition in his Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein Helden leben, the ostentatiously but deceptively patchy Don Quixote, and the Symphonia Domestica, will carry conviction long after we have forgotten all about their programmes. (D. F. T.)