Thread by @AntonPrince7

“The external stimulus for this piece of music came to the author from the parodistic picture, known to all children in Austria, ‘The Hunter's Funeral’ from an old book of children's fairy tales: the beasts of the forest accompany the dead hunter's coffin to the grave”

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This is part of the original programme to Mahler‘s First Symphony; last week I spoke of the humour in this movement, today I provide the picture Mahler had in mind when composing it—with the animals sarcastically solemn and gloomy, then bursting into a mood of merriment.

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Mahler originally envisioned his First Symphony as a great symphonic poem in five movements and when we speak of the pictorial in music, we must speak of programme music—a concept in which the music is used to represent extramusical stories, characters and pictures.

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Last week‘s thread on humour showed how imitation of pictorial elements can be employed to generate a humorous effect; such as the image of a bumbling pianist or of a large bird trotting along.

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What exactly constitutes a programme is not always easy to tell, and even character pieces such as Schumann‘s could be construed as connected to an extramusical, hence programatic element.

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A famous example of a piece that tries very hard not to be programmatic, and is both programmatic and non-programmatic simultaneously, is the Sixth Symphony in F by Beethoven—the famous “Pastoral symphony”.

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Beethoven himself wrote “mehr Empfindung als Tonmalerei”—more feeling than tone painting. In contrast to this direction, however, through the titles he himself wrote at the top of each movement, a distinctive succession of scenes is outlined.

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The work traces a journey into the countryside, past a bubbling brook, and a dance of merry peasants—which is interrupted by a storm—and finished by a cheerful shepherd‘s song after the storm.

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To top this, Beethoven even identified the birds he imitated at the end of the second movement in the score—Cuckoo, quail and nightingale.

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Now all these features can be explained structurally: the birdcalls as a little cadenza for woodwinds, the third movement as a scherzo and the storm movement as a transition between the third and last movements.

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But despite this, the work proved a model to many composers after Beethoven when they wrote their programmatic music, no matter how hard Beethoven tried to tell us that this work was “mehr Empfindungen”.

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Berlioz virtually copied the proportions of this work for his “Symphonie Fantastique” but devised a wholly different programme; one of secret passion, anguish and unrequited love—the work being a musical depiction of an opium trip at one point.

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In this work, the pictures do not appear with gentle freshness like those birds in Beethoven—here, the tale is painted in the most vividly graphic manner. The pictures are not pleasant but betray a troubled, romantic sensibility.

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Then after Berlioz we have Liszt, who portrayed scenes from Byron, from Victor Hugo and Shakespeare—tried to capture the character of their works.

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In this example he depicts the legendary figure of Ivan Mazeppa, who fell in love with the Polish countess Theresa—upon discovering this affair, the old count, Theresa‘s husband ties the naked Mazeppa to a great horse and sets it loose into the wilds.

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Very vividly, we can see the panting, galloping horse rush on and on—away, away!—and feel Mazeppa‘s anguish. At the end of the piece, this troubled music has given way to march music, depicting Mazeppa as triumphant survivor of the ordeal and leader of his cossack army.

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And now we come to Mussorgsky, whose most famous work ”Bilder einer Ausstellung” is literally about pictures. Here there are no words to provide the programme, no suggestion of pictures—these are literal pictures expressed in musical terms.

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Of the original pictures by Viktor Hartmann, only a few survive; in the eighth movement, for example, we find a depiction of gloomy catacombs, which was inspired by this picture:

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And in the ninth movement, Mussorgsky depicts the famous Slavic witch ”Baba Yaga”—though I doubt the extent to which the picture of a clock actually informs this savage music—I think it likely that the wild tales surrounding this figure were equally influential.

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There are countless other examples of music suggesting feelings, like in Beethoven, or the presentation of a story, as in Berlioz or Liszt and of literal pictures captured in music...

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I could name Debussy, or Strauss (who famously said he could set a teaspoon to music) and Respighi or Holst—but in terms of explaining the pictures conveyed by them, the music speaks for itself and my words would be inadequate at the very least.

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So I would like to finish with a symphonic poem by César Franck which depicts and tells the story of a count who decides to go hunting on Sunday morning and is punished to be chased forevermore himself for defying the sacred day of worship.

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