Symphonic Poem - Russia

Russia

The development of the symphonic poem in Russia, as in the Czech lands, stemmed from an admiration for Liszt's music and a devotion to national subjects. Added to this was the Russian love of story-telling, for which the genre seemed expressly tailored, and which led critic Vladimir Stasov to write, "Virtually all Russian music is programmatic". Macdonald writes that Stasov and the patriotic group of composers known as The Five or The Mighty Handful, went so far as to hail Mikhail Glinka's Kamarinskaya as "a prototype of Russian descriptive music"; despite the fact that Glinka himself denied the piece had any program, he called the work, which is based entirely on Russian folk music, "picturesque music." In this Glinka was influenced by French composer Hector Berlioz, whom he met in the summer of 1844.

At least three of the Five fully embraced the symphonic poem. Mily Balakirev's Tamara (1867–82) richly evokes the fairy-tale orient and, while remaining closely based on the poem by Mikhail Lermontov, remains well-paced and full of atmosphere. Balakirev's other two symphonic poems, In Bohemia (1867, 1905) and Russia (1884 version) lack the same narrative content; they are actually looser collections of national melodies and were originally written as concert overtures. Macdonald calls Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and Alexander Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia "powerful orchestral pictures, each unique in its composer's output". Titled a "musical portrait", In the Steppes of Central Asia evokes the journey of a caravan across the steppes. Night on Bald Mountain, especially its original version, contains harmony that is often striking, sometimes pungent and highly abrasive; its initial stretches especially pull the listener into a world of uncompromisingly brutal directness and energy.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote only two orchestral works that rank as symphonic poems, his "musical tableau" Sadko (1867–92) and Skazka (Legend, 1879–80), originally titled Baba-Yaga. While this may perhaps be surprising, considering his love for Russian folklore, both his symphonic suites Antar and Sheherazade are conceived in a similar manner to these works. Russian follklore also provided material for symphonic poems by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Glazunov. Glazunov's Stenka Razin and Lyadov's Baba-Yaga Kikimora and The Enchanted Lake are all based on national subjects. The Lyadov works' lack of purposeful harmonic rhythm (a absence less noticeable in Baba-Yaga and Kikimora due to a superficial but still exhilarating bustle and whirl) produces a sense of unreality and timelessness much like the telling of an oft-repeated and much loved fairy tale.

While none of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's symphonic poems has a Russian subject, they hold musical form and literary material in fine balance. (Tchaikovsky did not call Romeo and Juliet a symphonic poem but rather a "fantasy-overture", and the work may actually be closer to a concert overture in its relatively stringent use of sonata form. It was the suggestion of the work's musical mid-wife, Balakirev, to base Romeo structurally on his King Lear, a tragic overture in sonata form after the example of Beethoven's overtures.)

Among later Russian symphonic poems, Sergei Rachmaninoff's The Rock shows as much the influence of Tchaikovsky's work as Isle of the Dead (1909) does its independence from it. A similar debt to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov imbues Igor Stravinsky's The Song of the Nightingale, excerpted from his opera The Nightingale. Alexander Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy (1905–08) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1908–10), in their projection of an egocentric theosophic world unequalled in other symphonic poems, are notable for their detail and advanced harmonic idiom.

Socialist realism in the Soviet Union allowed program music to survive longer there than in western Europe, as typified by Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonic poem October (1967).