Word: tone-poem
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...Tschaikowsky, the Russian composer, was about 37, a critic told him that he was past his prime. In his mind, at these unkind words, he heard the dwindling strophe of the heart's small drum, tapping into silence up an empty street. He sat down to write his tone-poem, Francesco da Rimini. Down in Hell's gilded street, the phantoms jostle; winds squeal like demented fiddles; ghosts squeak like dismal flutes; and lonely in the company of lovers who have sinned for love and have been damned for their sin to remember forever the joy of love...
...Mary Stuart, Oliver Crom well, Robert E. Lee and other dramatic histories, has completed a libretto for an opera, based on the life of Robert Burns, eternal Scots laureate poet. This screed is now in the hands of composer Ernest Austin, an Englishman, known chiefly for his colossal organ tone-poem, Pilgrim's Progress, in twelve huge parts. In the new work, Austin plans to make use of many Scotch folk-tunes, including several of the familiar melodies now associated with Burns' popular lyrics...
...horn Concerto was written for his father, the greatest horn player of his time, who did not like it. His first important work was the tone-poem, Aus Italien, which contains a characteristic Strauss mood: "Melancholy Feelings While Basking in the Sunniest Present." Then followed his famous series of dazzling orchestral tales, path-breaking in form and harmony: Macbeth (1890), Don Juan (1888), Death and Transfiguration (1889), Till Eulenspiegels Merry Pranks (1895), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896) and Don Quixote (1898) with its notorious sheep-bleating episode...
...novelty in the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 22nd concert of its regular series was Ernest Schelling's tone-poem A Victory Ball. A peculiar enthusiasm for this work seems to have seized conductors this season. Pierre Monteux was one of the last to succumb. The Schelling opus is an interesting experiment, but scarcely a heaven-storming masterpiece. Based on a poem* by Alfred Noyes, which first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, it tells, in music, the tale of the return to earth of the spirits of soldiers slain in the late War. Instead of the solemn masses, purity, virtue...
...Also Sprach Zarathustra", for which Boston has so long waited, was very disappointing. Hauslick has said that the program (of this tone-poem at least) was put in to give the music an interest which was not there. Perhaps he was not unjust...