In the history of Western music, program music, and in particular the symphonic poem, which is in a way the apogee of it, has played and still plays a considerable part, which the present taste tends to minimize. This is a whole aspect of the historical evolution of music that lies in the shadows, and with it, many exciting works.
Defense and illustration of a composite genre, this book tries to reconcile pure music and program music, these two branches appeared simultaneously, and have constantly confronted each other and enrich one another. It also highlights the reciprocal influences and correspondences existing between music, literature and painting, studies the pictorial and narrative processes used by composers, and illuminates the nature of the links that unite musical form and narrative.
We will of course find here a vast descriptive and analytical panorama of this corpus in which illustrated among others Liszt, Saint-Saens, Cesar Franck, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Russian and Slavic musicians, until Messiaen and Xenakis.
This is the rediscovery of this huge iceberg which emerges only a few famous pieces (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, The Moldau, Till the mischievous) that brings us this book.
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